In fact, it is a known phenomenon that when you approach new people you can often experience “approach anxiety” as it is called in the world of social arts and science. Approach anxiety is where you experience a sense of panic, worry, hesitance, and other states that are associated with approaching a group of strangers (or even a single stranger). Unfortunately for some, approach anxiety is something that will not simply go away.

Anxiety’s effect on social networks has a whole is actually quite measurable, I believe, and it has been effectively demonstrated through sociological study that the more emotional tension is present in a dense space among a high number of people the more outbursts of crime and maladaptive behavior will emerge. People are all better off if they can relax but if they cannot relax then they are at least better off overcoming their anxiety and taking the first step forward to make a friend.

Consider for a moment what social interaction can do for the potential of new romantic encounters, as well, if you are looking to find a new partner. If you stay boxed in everyday then chances are that new romantic partner is simply not going to show up. The more people you interact with, the more likely it will be that one of those people will become a compatible match for you.

Some people stick to online dating only, for example, because of their own in-person insecurities when it comes to interacting with people out there in the “real world” but online dating is another form of social interaction all the same. The unfortunate difference with online dating is that the results happen slower and the things you should fear are actually all the same, the only difference is that the effect is softened by words on screen rather than speech in front of your own physical space.

For this semester, I am spending my first time ever living on campus. The first few days of school were all very interesting and even here proceeding into the second week I notice the same sorts of social situations happening all over the place; everyone is in the same social position. Yet, even as everyone finds themselves in the same sort of predicament, most people are afraid to open their mouths to other people and say anything about it. Even the other day when I was going to get dinner in the residential dining hall (basically a cafeteria) I went to ask one of the staff who was eating at a small table alone if I could sit down.

He was a young teen who inquired “could you not find a table?”

Well, my answer was that I could not, of course, but I expect I’d get a slightly different reaction if I would have just said “Actually, there were tables everywhere but I just thought I’d come join you.” Some people will even get slightly defensive to this reaction. Especially in certain societies, it seems to be a bash to the ego to admit that you have limited social value, even if it is only at a certain time and place. It also implies that there is something wrong with either wanting to sit by yourself or settling to sit by yourself without having any other option (and not being upset by that fact).

There are essentially two things you can do if you find yourself in a strange place with no familiar faces but you should be focusing on the first one more than the second. 1) You should attempt to make contact with as many new people as you can stand to. 2) You should become comfortable and accepting of being alone. The second piece of advice sounds sort of depressing in a way, doesn’t it? But it certainly is more comforting and uplifting than deciding that others’ acceptance of you is entirely in your control. You can attempt to get to know others as much as you want but it is their choice, in the end, as to whether or not they accept you.

Of course, there is indeed a right and a wrong way to approach new groups of people or people who find themselves alone and depending on the size of the group you approach there is a different sort of fashion you attempt these connections in each case. When it comes to large groups, you will need much more energy, assertiveness, and enthusiasm. When it comes to people alone: chances are they are either not actually alone or if they are alone: they will be a little more standoffish in some cases due to being on guard and in “protective” mode.

Still, one of the most important things you can do in approaching new groups is to not hesitate and hold as much confidence with yourself as possible. Be assertive and be straightforward. Try to find ways to avoiding typical, meaningless chitchat and attempt to start a conversation that is far more significant than what most people probably think to.

Do NOT open new groups with talking about the weather, politics, or religion. It is bad news and chances are high that whoever is next to you probably will not argue with your viewpoint anyway and you have immediately lost common ground, and likeness, with which you can build a good friendship or even just make a fine acquaintance. The easiest way to open a group is to let them know, usually nonverbally, you do not have to stay and that you are seeking their input on something that is highly relatable. Save the obscure stuff and inside jokes, obviously, for later on…

Example:
Good Opener: [To a group.] Quick question, guys. This might sound weird but do any of you believe there’s actually aliens out there? [Response with either yes or no.] Why is that? [Sit down.]
Bad Opener: [To a group.] Can I sit here?

When it comes to anxiety, it is best to focus on elements that you can control. For one thing, it should soothe you somewhat to know that most anxiety is the result of something that has not actually happened yet. Much of the time, anxiety is also irrational. You can also control your rate of breathing, which can slow down your heartrate and minimize your galvanic skin response (sweating). Try visualizing, as you breathe, waves of relaxation going through you and imagine feeling the sensation of that relaxation move through you in slow, steady waves which each breath.

If you do end up hesitating about approaching new people, remember that most of the time it is probably best to go ahead and get some practice in – approach anyway and work with what you’ve got! The people that are most worth your time are those who will be able to understand the important elements of where you are coming from and will accept the presentation you put forward without negative judgment. After all, if people are going to reject you for doing your best to connect with them then they probably aren’t worth your time anyway, are they?

Presenting yourself well also comes from being well developed as a person. Know what you believe as much as possible and take the time to explore your inner self. Take care of your health, exercise, and eat healthy foods (which means all kinds of things – see my other articles like How I Lost an Inch Off My Waist From Eating Alone). If you’re facing stresses in other areas of your life, chances are high that that stress can overflow into your social interactions, especially if those interactions are with brand new people.

If you liked this article, I’d highly recommend signing up to my mailing list, where you will get an 84 page eBook I wrote a while back entitled Principles of Social Attraction, a great starter guide for making some positive changes in your social life! To those on my mailing list, I also tackle a variety of topics in all areas of personal development. You can unsubscribe at any time and I never share your information with any third party.

Video Transcript:

How do we determine how much stress will cause a problem or at what point someone enters into a mental disorder? And, how do we determine how susceptible someone is to mental illness or even just mental deficiency? What creates a problem in someone’s life where they begin to have difficulty functioning in the real world?

One of the things that we have to demonstrate this is something called the diathesis-stress model. This is something that behavioral science sort of derived in one sense from the medical field. So, here I have an ordinary glass and I have a bottle of water. Now this is something that all of my instructors in my psychology classes have always used to demonstrate the diathesis-stress model because it’s a very good little visualization.

So, let’s imagine… that this glass here represents your susceptibility to schizophrenia, for example. And let’s say that right now, the glass is empty, so this would be no susceptibility. Let’s say that you [then] have genetics that fill up the glass just a little bit and that makes you just a little bit more susceptible. Now let’s say you have a ridiculously stressful environment and you can’t really cope with the stress…

Well, maybe if your susceptibility is low enough you still won’t get schizophrenia but we can imagine what would happen if the problem keeps going, alright? Maybe your genetic susceptibility is a little higher, maybe the stress is a little higher. At some point, the glass will overflow and that is when you get schizophrenia.

The same thing could be looked at for all kinds of maladaptive traits and everyone is different so another example might be: if someone comes to me, they’re overweight, and they say “I really want to lose 50 pounds, what’s the fastest way to do that?” Well a few of the answers I would give them right away is I would say: there’s two things.

1) You should probably go with a low-carb diet because that is what has been scientifically proven to allow people to lose weight faster than any other diet plan and,

2) You should combine that with high intensity, short burst interval training. So you should do small 12 to 15 minute workouts where you’re kind of giving it your all… you arrange it by jump starting your heart, allowing it to slow down, and then doing that again. And you do that several times per workout session. That’s the form of cardiovascular exercise that you would do to do this.

Well, it’s really simple to tell someone this advice and even to get them to believe it but in order to get someone to engage in the kind of self control and initiative that it takes for them to actually pursue that goal it’s a whole other matter entirely. In order to get someone to change their diet, you’re having to tell someone to gain control over very complex chemical processes in the brain whenever it comes to self control.

And there’s a lot of different studies that have been done on self control which say that, in fact, in certain cases, if you don’t have a developed pathology for having a certain kind of resolve, you actually have limited self control.

You might think to yourself after watching this video: what are your susceptibilities and what are your weaknesses? What are the things that you can work on? What did your family have problems with? What did your parents and your grandparents and the parents before that have problems with?

Do research on your family tree to determine any sort of genetic or hereditary susceptibilities that you might have to both physical disease and mental illness and you might also ask yourself questions in just terms of general functionality and general real world adjustment.

You know, maybe you have an anger problem or maybe you are overweight as I gave an example for, maybe you want to exercise more but you don’t (I’m in that category at the moment). Maybe you want to make some other drastic change, maybe you want to quit smoking, the change goes on and on…

Any change you have, every person is different and what worked for one person may not necessarily work for you because of your given susceptibilities and the environmental conditions that you’ve found yourself in that may cause you to actually experience the problem when someone else who has almost identical conditions, maybe lacking environmental influence, they didn’t end up in the same position as you.

It’s a good thing to consider, it’s a good place to start in terms of especially figuring out more of your foundations for: how did the problem develop and why is it there? Not just “what do I do about it now that it’s here?”

Figure out why it’s there, and how it got there in the first place. Thanks for watching.

If you’re curious about what I have said about the Law of Attraction in the past, here are some of my entries on the subject. At one point, I was even doing a “public experiment” in the same sort of spirit as personal development blogger Steve Pavlina (who I also used to be a big fan of).

• First Experiences on the Law of Attraction
• Parallel Between Lucid Dreams and the Law of Attraction
• Results of the Law of Attraction in Action?
• Law of Attraction Refocusing Exercise – Your Life Story
• Two Kinds of Reality and the Law of Attraction
• Why “The Secret” is Mistrusted
• Setting Goals and Achieving Goals With the Right Mindset
• Design Your Life, Like a Paintbrush

As you can probably tell purely from the sheer number of different articles I have written on this blog in the past, I took this whole Law of Attraction thing seriously. Since the release of the entire idea, which was already actually being taught by speakers like Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar (though they did not always call it the Law of Attraction) for decades and indeed possibly hundreds of years going back and back. The question is, did these ideas always belong in the “personal development industry” as we might call it? Or have they actually been taught by truly legitimate teachers of philosophy? No matter what the answer to that question is, I honestly do not care!

The reason? Science is providing you and I with far more answers than an idea like the Law of Attraction ever could. One guy who never really got behind this craze in quite the same way so many other self-help authors and “gurus” did is Tony Robbins, who repeats over and over again that instead of being a motivational speaker, he refers to himself as a strategist. He loves the idea of being positive but he also has to balance that with “being intelligent.” And being intelligent means being rational, logical, and scientific.

Being scientific means relying on valid and reliable experimentation in the form of hypothesis testing and finding empirical evidence to support a particular idea. So if you have gone bankrupt, do not sit there and try to visualize a bunch of money. Chances are probably there that those who go bankrupt may have actually ended up that way by visualizing money in the first place anyway! Instead, admit that you are bankrupt and begin taking the proper actions to get out of that particular situation by moving on methods that have been proven to be highly reliable and that you know will work with full certainty. Do not take risks, do not gamble, do not start your own business yet, do not make further investments – just start earning income again and make a highly conscious effort to save.

What gets measured gets done – do not waste time trying to “feel” your way through “the universe.” You will land flat on your face. A huge problem with the entire crowd that follows the Law of Attraction is of course the notorious sorts of golden prospect images such as owning a sports car, moving into a giant house, and ‘receiving checks in the mail.’ In my most difficulty learned experience, you will of course not have a sports car show up on your driveway, move into a giant house, or receive any checks in the mail unless you DO SOMETHING to make all of that happen. The Secret is a movie that mentions extremely briefly the entire idea of “Inspired Action” when it comes to the Law of Attraction and Inspired Action is essentially the entire process of going about making decisions and taking action with some sort of plan to make a visualization ‘manifest.’

The biggest problem with this, however, is that we simply do not NEED the Law of Attraction or anything presented in The Secret for us to know that this is how we should accomplish both our goals and our dreams. On the other hand, the film makes an extraordinary presentation for optimism and the human spirit by letting everyone know a very real truth that has been scientifically proven a variety of different ways: you are capable of far more than you think, no matter what you believe you are capable of. The vastness of human potential is usually completely untapped in any given lifetime. This is a wonderful thing to teach people and I think that the film does an absolutely incredible job of bringing that entire spirit to the public. Yet another problem arises, of course, in that those spirits will quickly sink when people learn that this generic rubbish is not really going to get them anywhere specific.

To make things very simplistic, you might say that at best, the Law of Attraction and most of the major industry “experts” who are preaching it does send one very specific message that everyone should have already known: you are capable of just about anything you put your mind to if you are willing to work for it through a plan of action and then following through with that plan of action. The only problem in terms of marketing an idea like that is that it is something that should be entirely obvious and at the end of the day is utterly boring (unless you are someone who can present an idea in the way say Jack Canfield or Bob Proctor does).

So instead of following the Law of Attraction, what are some better examples of methodologies and ideologies that can get us to a higher place in life that do NOT involve a bunch of crazy showmanship and nonsensical pop psychology? You can design your own experiments for your own goals using an idea as simple as the scientific method, of course, or you can take a look at data from a variety of different sources. Find good information about what works and what does not in places like peer reviewed scientific journals, many of which are accessible through your local public library. If you are a college student, countless scientific journals are more than likely available for you to access them at no additional cost other than your current tuition.

Books that you find at Barnes & Noble can be good sources of information on certain topics but the main problem is that every single one of those shiny new books is going to be subject to the popular culture trends of the present. Some of the best information is stuff that was discovered decades ago and simply has not changed since. Charles Darwin came up with his theory of evolution in 1859 or Abraham Maslow with the famous Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs which was first published in 1943, a theory of human motivation. Many thinkers have had amazing breakthrough concepts and the public seem to be ignoring them, mostly because the slew of media that is being released intends to cater to their whims for a quick and easy fix to their life problems.

Some examples of great modern thinkers on a variety of topics who use a more rational approach…

• On love, relationships, and sex education weekly columnist Dan Savage. See his YouTube Channel.
• For general personal development, leadership training, managing money, and having great relationships: strategist Anthony Robbins.
• For emotional freedom and management: Patricia Carrington PhD. See her on YouTube.
• For therapy and counseling, Albert Ellis and his method of REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy).
• Laurie Helgoe PhD for the personality trait of introversion.
• Robert J. Sternberg and Philip Zimbardo for cognitive psychology and human behavior.
• Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene for physics and string theory.
• Thomas J. Stanley for personal finance.

And that brings to mind the question that so many people are asking me “why are you going to tell anyone you believe in polyamory while you’re single?” They ask the question under the presumption that my telling new girls such a thing about myself is going to give them a bad impression and essentially send them running for the hills. To be honest, most of the time I don’t tell new girls I meet that I am polyamorous. In a lot of ways, it is sort of like talking about religion and politics with anyone you have just met – it is probably just not a good idea unless you can know for certain that the two of you are very like minded. The same holds true for a number of other ideologies and in my experience: that also holds true for polyamory.

Not too long ago before writing this, I got into a lengthy Facebook discussion regarding polyamory and about how moral or immoral the ideas of monogamy and non-monogamy both were, no matter what shape or form they might take. In the case of monogamy people are facing issues of cohabitation versus marriage, homosexuals face the issue of gay rights and the right for gay marriage, and couples tend to face varying degrees of commitment levels within their relationships. Non-monogamy related people face a hefty number of decisions, especially as to what community (or communities, plural) they may end up falling into whether it be polyamory, swinging, open relationships, being single, or whether they will become involved in some sort of kink related community. In any one particular case, there are certainly rational arguments for and against the different relationship possibilities.

Relationships and what we want in relationships rarely boil down to pure reason, however, and as scientific as I love to be I am also someone who agrees with many who say that relationships are really not so much about reason as they are about ‘needs’ or really – wants that take on a meaning of high significance for the people in the relationship. Everyone has emotional needs, physical needs, intellectual needs, and so on. Whether they satisfy that need with one romantic partner or several is all well and good but what matters is getting a YES to the question: Are you getting what you want?

For a little while now as I’ve been single and have found ways to rearrange my life accordingly and find things to do, I have found that I am fairly happy living the life of a single person. Consistently, I have been dating girls, having flings, and I openly admit even sexual experiences with different girls that, while I am not “falling in love with them,” are certainly appreciated company. Even if I have consistent partners, however, who are always around much of the time and whom I share a great deal with in terms of intimacy, most people are still going to say I am “doing the right thing” by being single and ‘promiscuous’ than by being in a relationship with the same two girls simultaneously for years or months at a time.

In other words, society seems to make the statement that you are doing less wrong by fooling around while single than by being serious while being polyamorous. And going back to speaking of decisions and thoughts coming from reason – this is utter retardation! Society, and majority rule, has it wrong in this particular case. The safe and healthy option for most people is not to bounce between people while single but is instead to have long term relationships. Still, I would make the case that many people also do not fall into any one of the mainstream categories and what is right for them is not to ever settle down into a long term arrangement of any kind. Yes, I am going to say it: some people I have met just need to be swingers, even single swingers who just have sex all over the place. People love to cite the risk of STD’s in those particular cases but for the sake of this article: I am going to give that mantra a rest.

What a person is cognitively, emotionally oriented to naturally do is something entirely different than what society might demand. The numbers of those who do not fall in line with the traditional societal model of monogamy are indeed staggering and as the data continues to be collected, the numbers of these people openly admitting they are the way they are seems to consistently grow. This is because sexuality exists on a spectrum and where someone falls at one point in time can also shift different directions and on those different directions it can shift to varying degrees. Sitting in my Human Sexuality class in college, this is indeed one of the first topics we talked about in regard to homosexuality, for instance.

Oddly enough, the monogamous and the homosexual will both be getting their societal rights before the polyamorous and non-monogamous in general will, it seems, as even many in the homosexual community (one of the single largest minority groups fighting for their civil rights) will often point a bad finger to those who prefer a non-monogamous lifestyle. Indeed, gay marriage will arrive long before plural or polyamorous marriage ever will in the American legal system.

My experience with past relationships was a tad painful, I must admit, mostly due to the fact that the girls I was with in the past were in complete denial over what it is they really wanted… they wanted monogamy! Instead of telling me they wanted monogamy, they instead told me, “I want you!” It made me feel warm and fuzzy inside but in the process it was sabotaging what little positive relationship energy we actually had. The sad part about someone who MUST be monogamous getting together with someone who MUST be poly is that those two people will probably never meet in the middle.

And now that I am single, I must be very careful with my words when meeting and connecting with new women. I have had some girls that I have dated in recent time ditch me purely on the basis that they assume I must love other girls “more” than I love them and have had girls leave me under the assumption that they would not be able to handle all of the “jealousy.” Though I have never really been able to pinpoint all of the things that really affect whether or not I am jealous, the truth is that I never really seem to experience jealousy in the same way that many others do! Of course, my lack of jealousy is a trait that allows me to experience poly oriented love that much more easily.

The truth of the matter is that even though I have a “polyamorous relationship orientation” as I call it, I would be perfectly happy with having ANY relationship, monogamous or not, that’s a great relationship, period. If, through the process of exchange that relationships consist of, another girl and I can both get what we want then I can easily see happiness in that. The dilemma of polyamory and those who pursue it is that it often happens with those who are already with someone and wish to open their relationship to new horizons and possibilities. In my case, I am with no one and already want to open myself to new horizons and possibilities, where ever they may lie, whether that be in an emotional connection or a physical one.

If you are new to polyamory or the idea of it, I highly suggest reading The Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton, and Opening Up by Tristan Taormino as well as checking out my old article on this subject entitled The Ups and Downs of Polyamory. YouTube also has an increasing number of videos on the subject as time goes on and the wealth of material available through a simple Google search has become incredible.

My being a rationalist, however, has left me in recent time to admit a small part of the evidence regarding beauty. Beauty, to some degree, is something that has a default setting. Part of the reason so many people are being conditioned to find some things beautiful appears to be, from the evidence I have seen, truly that some things genuinely are naturally beautiful! However, most of the time beauty is something that we are tumbling toward during our daily lives when it has been mixed up in a state that lies somewhere between natural and conditioned beauty. One site that probably demonstrates this remarkably well, is the dating site BeautifulPeople.com. It is a dating site that allows people to filter through their potential matches purely on the basis of their appearance and get this: you have to be voted in in order to even stay on the site!

I am a big fan of a book called Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy Etcoff. I found it sitting on a bookshelf of my dad’s years ago. Etcoff describes in meticulous detail the various universal concepts of human beauty and what we will find attractive outside of any sort of conditioned factors and the number one item she cites, along with many other authors at this point, is symmetry. That is, how much one side of your face and body match the characteristics of the other side. That is interesting, however, because I have often been a fan of very slight asymmetry myself and perfect symmetry is damned difficult to obtain! Heck, every single female I will end up staring at has one breast larger than the other and a hair style that no doubt demonstrates a degree of asymmetry.

Forget about all of this for a moment because I want to talk about something that should really be the overall message being spread throughout society today. I have dated a number of girls at the time of this writing: some “ugly” some “skinny” some “fat” and so on. I have dated a couch potato, a hot dancer, an slender actress, a chubby smoker, an almost stick thin smoker, and the list goes on in combinations. The most interesting and indeed painful thing that I experienced during any of it is the social stigma that goes along with being together with a girl who was “unattractive” by societal standards or expectations.

Much of the time, my “friends” at one time or another (though obviously they were not that great of friends at all), were making judgments about what value the girl I was dating at the time based on whether or not she was physical attractive. For the girls that were stunningly gorgeous, I was rewarded with praise and their saying “good going, Scott, you better not screw things up with this one!” One of the sweetest and nicest girls I ever dated was considered overweight but some people I introduced her to appeared to make a judgment call based upon nothing more than her appearance to them. Maybe I am imagining this but here is what I know for sure – I was never bothered by any of the girls’ appearances I dated. If I was bothered, I never would have dated them, much less had sex with them!

And one thing always happened but before I mention it, I should first mention a series of experiments that have been done in the field of psychology. They have found that by simply making a facial expression that is associated with a specific emotion, you can then trigger the actual emotion. So if you smile and hold that smile, you may end up feeling just a little bit happier. If you make an angry scowl, you may end up feeling more anger. It is simply because of associations that have been constructed over time in your brain’s pathology related to physical actions or stimuli and the emotions those things have been paired with. An interesting exercise I would encourage any supposedly “romantic” guy to try is the following.

Find a girl you deem ugly, or mediocre at best who is crazy about you. You do not have to be a fan of her appearance but you probably need to be a fan of her personality. Maybe she is someone you put in the ‘friend zone’ for all those years but she has been orbiting you, remaining loyal, during all that time. I guarantee you that the day you throw away all of your old presumptions about her and actually just work up the courage to look her deep in the eyes for several seconds and then move in for a kiss, your opinion of her will change. You will almost instantly feel more attracted to her after the fact. Or, try just hugging and holding that hug for a long time (and no patting the back, friends don’t pat). Relax and feel the warmth of her body and match her breathing. Close your eyes if it helps.

Physically intimate experiences, under the evidence I know, can be induced. Attraction can also occur after you have purposefully shifted the context and you will literally no longer see that person as ugly or even unattractive in many, many different cases. Your mind and brain have the ability to drastically shift the overall energy and color of an experience to reflect something far more deeper and far more positive than any sort of disgust or contempt you may have for their appearance. It might sound crazy but I am literally encouraging people to second guess their opinion of “ugly” people when it comes to dating. Yes, guys, kiss the “ugly” girls sometimes!

Having said that, though, I should also make another important point that is also equally worthy of recognition. Girls that typically have a good body and a stunning appearance instantly when you see them are generally more competent about their health and well being than ones who are not. That assumes, of course, that your perceptions of body image are not drastically distorted (and with both men and women this has been found to happen). It is more difficult to stay skinny and muscular or skinny and toned than it is to remain fat and unkempt and for that reason the more motivated are generally, genuinely, more attractive than the unmotivated and incompetent.

Along with this, it is also true that the girls you find horrendously beautiful beyond your controlling the feeling are those that generally have a better genetic match for you than ones who do not (and this applies to both genders, so girls: that applies to you when attracted to guys too). Scent is another big one, particularly for girls, if a guy smells strangely wonderful to you without any cologne then chances are he is an okay pick for a mate (at least physically). Given how much I work on my appearance and my general social image, I probably am going to be most compatible with a girl who does the same.

But it would be terribly foolish for you to turn away someone who could be a part of your life as a lover just because you or your “friends” thought to them to be physically ugly. Just as we are taught in almost cheesy movies like Shallow Hal, it is best if we do away with our presumptions and choose to connect with a person’s soul. The soul, after all, is more at someone’s core than their outer shell and their core is what we should love and care about.

For many people, no matter what the issue is, communicating to them that they should change is a lot easier than communicating to them to change. In other words, it is easy to highlight a problem to someone and to get them to agree with you but difficult to demonstrate why it would be worth it for them to go through the energy and effort required to change it. I call this whole idea relating to having motivation to advance and progress The Worth of Advancement. The Worth of Advancement basically states that 1) If something has worth, then we desire it, 2) If we desire it, then we are motivated to pursue it, and 3) Therefore, if something has worth, then we are motivated to pursue it.

Or, put another way: if someone sees why something has worth then they will want to obtain it and will work toward doing so. Without seeing why money has worth, you may be broke. Without seeing why love has worth, you may be antisocial. Without seeing why exercise has worth, you may be something like physically lazy.

So, the question of beginning to create a change starts with what we are doing to cause that change to begin with, and why we are going after that particular change. When you think about it, this is the same way that negative changes happen too, not just positive ones! Or rather, this is the same way that disadvantageous changes happen instead of advantageous and beneficial ones. Someone will take up smoking cigarettes because they perceive the bad health effects to be worth the sense of relaxation and control they get from lighting up.

Worth ties into beliefs. When we believe something to be true, our beliefs are generally constructed from our thoughts, feelings, and the actions we take upon our environment. Of course, the environment is constantly sending stimuli our way to try and convince us that we should act one way or another but the entire time we have to make choices and decisions regarding how we go about responding to our environment. Perhaps one of the first places you should always start for change is knowing what you can or cannot control. This is the truth: you can control your response to the environment but not the environment itself.

Robert J. Stanley, for example, in his book Stop Acting Rich: …And Start Living Like A Real Millionaire, remarks upon the fact that a huge percentage of modern millionaires avoid the stock market like the plague. My own grandmother has given me the advice that if you want a reliable return on your stock investments that you should never purchase a stock without a paying dividend. Still, some millionaires have avoided the stock market together for the reason that they have no control over what shifts the market takes; you can control your business as a business owner and how that business is run but you may not be able to control economic conditions and the actions of your competitors. From a certain perspective it makes total sense!

Now, am I saying specifically that you should avoid the stock market all together? Well no, not necessarily. In fact, one of my favorite coaches, the ever popular Tony Robbins remarked that while things have taken a drastic economic turn there is still tremendous opportunity for the right investors. I agree with him, he is right – when stock prices have plummeted and the economic conditions begin to recover you may just see the prices rise an amazing high at an exponential rate for a while. If you buy stock at $5 a share when the economy has hit either rock bottom or near rock bottom it is possible you could see that stock rise to around $12 to $14 or even more once the economy recovers. That’s more than a 100% increase and a huge return! Of course, I do not recommend that you gamble away all your savings on such an idea.

Another portion of change that is a huge element: some of the things that you believe are true and some of the things that are true you do not believe. Back in early 2006, I pitched the idea of my old t-shirt side business to my production company, Barton Ct. Productions Inc., so that we could have a source of income outside of the indie/amateur film industry (which in terms of money is basically non-existent). Later on in April of that same year, after they had shot down the idea saying it would be, basically, a waste of time if it did not work and something we “weren’t ready for” I decided to launch that side business myself and ended up coming out of it with over $15,000 in profit by the end of the business’s run. Not bad for a guy who had not even turned 21 and had only been through a couple semesters of college, running that operation part time!

Aside from just money, the lack of belief in what may be the truth constantly happens in other areas as well. Relationships can tend to suffer (or never even happen at all) because someone does not believe that they can grow being in a relationship with you or sometimes when you open your mouth to a stranger they will automatically assume, because of past experience or some other perception, that you have nothing to offer them. In many cases, rejection of a friendship or a romantic relationship can result from a belief in something that simply is not true.

So how do you tell the difference? How do you decipher the truth? To begin with, it certainly is not easy. Of course, there are right and wrong ways of going about it and the one thing you should probably rely on as little as possible is your emotional guidance, or intuition. The most fail proof way we have is engaging in the scientific method. I will not get too deep into the scientific method for this particular article but essentially it involves forming something you believe to be true in the first place, a hypothesis, and then setting up a rational process in which you can validly and reliably test that hypothesis. Many people probably already know about the scientific method because fortunately: it is taught as young as elementary school.

Under my conclusions, everything also relates back to Long Term Survival Theory, which essentially says that we should always be following this general process:

• Survive – physical longevity, staying alive, being healthy.
• Replication – reproducing aspects of ourselves but outside of our own mind and body.
  • Mimetic Replication – the expansion and reproduction of our ideas and non-material traits.
  • Genetic Replication – the biological reproduction of our physical body, our DNA, sexual reproduction.
• Empower – enable the other people in the population around you to do the first two main portions of the process.

The last part can be a bit confusing to some but the reasoning behind it comes from findings demonstrable in the field of social network analysis, sociology, and psychology. If we exert effort on making sure the others around us are doing well it has been proven that it will aid us as well! If your family is happy, you are more likely to be happy. If your friends are all in a great mood then that great mood can be contagious and chances are pretty soon you might be in a great mood as well. Human beings have a remarkable ability for empathy due in part to our own ability for cognitive (or thought) constructs and something in our brains known as mirror neurons – where the brain will literally fire off some of the same connections that other people are firing off when those people express certain emotions that you see.

To sum everything up, it is really essential that you understand these basics regarding creating any life transformation, or change, from your core foundations. You need to:
1) Understand what your beliefs are, why you have them, and ask whether or not they can be known to be absolutely true.
2) Figure out what you feel has worth and consider why you want to work toward it. Make a list of other things that might have worth and another list of things that you feel are entirely worthless.
3) Begin to test and experiment with what you feel has worth, what you believe, and begin to learn and understand what is true. Remember that emotion should have little influence on this process. Be scientific and measure, measure, measure!

If you perform this exercise on a continuous basis you will quickly find that it opens up more and more questions which become more and more challenging to answer. For someone who has never really conducted this process on their life, it could prove to be challenging to simply write down the beliefs in which they have because there are many people who do not even know what it is they actually believe!

A general example of what this process might look like would be:
1) I believe that if I advertise for my business, I will receive more customers – is this true?
2) It is worth it to receive more customers for my business because I will receive more money and money is good – is this true?
3) Assuming that both things are true, let me begin conducting experiments to see if this entire concept is true.

Then you proceed to attempt different kinds of advertising and marketing strategies and so on and so forth. The interesting thing is that, in this example, sometimes not all businesses will receive more customers from advertising. Sometimes “money being good” might be true but maybe the fact that the money being good being your motivation actually presents a problem in your action plan. This is not an absolutely concrete process, it is an abstract one that is designed to get you thinking about all kinds of different angles on one single concept, which will then turn into endless concepts.

Remember that creating a change should happen from first understanding the foundations of where that change, and the desire for that change, are coming from. You must understand why it is you believe what it is you believe before you decide whether or not it is worth changing the belief in the first place. Sometimes being entrenched in a single belief without truly looking to outside sources with an open mind can be remarkably damaging and will only cause you to become further entrenched in a harmful, useless, or just plain false belief. Forming a hypothesis and testing it through rationally oriented experimentation is the best way to finding reliable and valid solutions to any problem that you may face whether those problems relate to relationships, money, or any aspect of health and beyond.

Of course, that is not to say that the right girl could not come along and change everything. Certainly, there are a few different types of girls out there that are still making me smile on a daily basis. I have also noticed that during the time I have been single is when the most women are stepping up to take charge. It is nice, for once, to finally be pursued.

I do not think my being ‘pursued’ is a coincidence at all, though, and there are a few reasons for that. For one, I have worked tirelessly on myself for years now, especially since getting out of high school. The clothes I wear look nicer, I am almost always well groomed, I have been made significant headway toward graduating with my degree, and I have completed a number of other side projects that make me feel very accomplished for a 22 year old.

As a part of working on myself, I have discovered that there are particular things that really do attract women as well as make me feel happier about just being me. Here are the top ten things to do while being single that have worked very well for me.

1. Make all of the extra dirty, filthy money you can. Yes, it is true. Women cost money. And during the time you are single is one of the best opportunities you have to rake in the extra doe. No dinner to pay for, no anniversary gifts, DEFINITELY no shiny ring, not even extra groceries. And hey, if you find other ways to pass the time, there’s not even a Netflix membership fee. Hooray! So that’s savings, and then there’s all that extra time you have to work extra hours on your business or at your hourly rate job.

2. Work on your body and the women will follow. I have begun to lose track of how many times I have run into old female friends and they all remark “wow, Scott, you’ve lost a LOT of weight!” I was not even fat to begin with but now I am super skinny from eating low carb and doing high intensity, short burst interval training. Of course, my body still lacks perfection. But that is okay – the girls are noticing the effort nonetheless.

3. Make lots of new friends. Truthfully, this may just be one of the most important things you can possibly do and may just belong at #1 on the list. But since money helps you eat and friends do not (all the time, at least), I’ll place it a little lower. Friends are the lifeblood of your social life while you are single and by extension are probably part of the lifeblood of your overall happiness as well. Find people that are just like you who can give you support in all areas of your life. Use sites like Meetup.com to find people with similar interests and find a good spot in your city’s local night life to frequent. Be a familiar face in an unfamiliar crowd and overcome any level of shyness you may have.

4. Take up a hobby or give to charity with your time. Especially if you are just coming out of a break up, it is essential to spend your time in a meaningful way besides lounging around the house, picking your nose, or watching movies. Do something that you enjoy and that brings you fulfillment.

5. Get educated in a new subject. Sometimes your opportunity to learn new things goes hand in hand with some of the other items on this list. Tackle different areas of your social skills or learn a new technical trade. I know that for me, following break ups, it is one of the best things that will push me right back to this blog or into working on a new book. For others, it might be learning a new language, taking up a self defense class, or learning how to sky dive. There are a wide range of things to do, get out into the world and experience it!

6. Cut ties with your addictions and vices. If you have an addiction to smoking, cigarettes, sex, alcohol, or anything else – now is a good time to focus on getting your health back together. This could even mean making a new goal and commitment to do away with junk food. Something within your routines is probably messed up. Figure out what it is and work on it. If it takes doing so, start seeing a therapist with cognitive-behavior therapy background and who is a licensed professional counselor (LPC).

7. Give yourself a style makeover. I know it might sound very girlish of me to say but here I am, a guy, and telling other guys here to get style makeovers. Head out to the store and pick up a brand new suit if you are a professional person, buy some new casual clothes for a night out on the town, and use them. Try out and experiment with different looks and test to see what others’ responses are.

8. Work on your career and getting to a place you want to be. This might, in some sense, resemble item #1, but it is a bit different. It is sometimes possible to make a horrendous amount of money without enjoying yourself so be sure you are also working on either getting that next promotion at work or are working on making a new impact in your business or field of study.

9. Figure out what went wrong with past relationships and exactly what you want in the next partner. If you do not yet know what you want, then get everything together and get back to trying again. If you do know then remember not to bother settling for less than what you deserve. Sometimes, figuring out what you want can be as simple as doing a little meditation or sitting down for several minutes to write down what you like and dislike on a sheet of paper. It might seem like common sense or things that are “universal” but believe it or not you may desire things that are remarkably unique in relationships. Single is one of the times to determine what those things are.

10. Flirt. A lot. And create options. Part of being single means that you hold obligations to no one. For this reason, it only makes sense that you should be able to test the waters a bit. Where you can, open the opportunity for shifting the context of different relationships and see how the various candidates respond! For some people this is not fun, but I admit it is one of the best parts of being single for me.

For each one of these categories there are literally countless different books that could be written regarding the different points but all of these have one thing in common – they all have to do with improving yourself and working to become more attractive for that next relationship. I can also understand, following a breakup, needing some time off from relationships. Maybe I am in that category and do not realize it but chances are more likely that I am really just taking more time off from girls because the right one (or ones) has not popped up.

In the mean time, I will enjoy the increased productivity, financial savings, peace of mind, and quiet that goes with the single life. Cheers.

One of the primary websites that still supports the Christian apologetics viewpoint is GodAndScience.Org. My own brother and his wife have even consistently linked it to me as a primary source for their arguments in support of Christianity. Since the website is actually beautifully written (while still not really sound in its arguments), I think it will be perfect to use it as a template for how I can spell out different examples of dispelling the entire view.

Let me also first say that in writing this article, it is not my intention to offend anyone. I am writing this article for those who are actually interested in understanding the scientific and philosophic evidence that is in opposition of intelligent design, or, more importantly: Christianity. Because when it comes to intelligent design, we are really talking about a model for creation (originally and not creatively titled creationism) that is exclusive to the Christian tradition. I will not spend time in this particular article discussing why this is so but it should be fairly obvious once you begin to do your own research.

One of the most intricate and beautifully written historical works which I just had the pleasure of reading through in my Introduction to Philosophy class, Dr. Greg Brown at the University of Houston went through each point made by David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and showed that, even before many of the pieces of modern scientific evidence, Hume managed to perfectly, on the basis of rationality and logic alone, pick apart each aspect of the intelligent design argument and show its ugly flaws. I highly recommend the book, available for a cheap price on Amazon.com as an excellent starting point for your studies in this topic area.

Below you will find a series of different questions which are oriented from the perspective of Christian apologetics and similar to how GodAndScience.Org does it with many of their articles.

If atheists need evidence for God but no evidence shows that God does not exist, how can they make any claim to disprove God?

This question, while mildly incoherent, can be answered very simply. Science does not have an official opinion about God and it should be common knowledge that the atheistic view is the scientific viewpoint because that is where the overwhelming majority of evidence points – toward an atheistic universe. The problem with supposing the possibility of any sort of a God hypothesis is that you do not need it to explain away universal phenomena, origins of species, origin of galaxies, planets, or universes, or to explain characteristics of human beings.

While we cannot completely rule out the possibility of a Diety or supernatural being with 100% certainty, we can simply conclude that the universe operates exactly as it would if there was no supernatural being, or especially Christian God, in existence to govern any portion of reality. The laws of gravity and other physical laws never waver, ‘miracles’ do not occur in any quantity that would oppose the simple mathematics of probability, and most importantly: we see absolutely zero evidence of any sort of divine intervention taking place under empirical observation.

The probability that a God would exist under the universe we continually observe throughout scientific studies, or rather: a Christian God as described by Christians and in the Bible, is VERY nearly 100% unlikely. The number of agnostics, or those unsure about the existence of a divine being or beings, outnumber the atheists by a wide margin. The only difference with atheists is that they often consider themselves to have examined the evidence far enough so that they can reach a safe conclusion on the God hypothesis – and that is to reject it.

One of the primary thinkers behind modern physics is the legendary Isaac Newton. What is interesting to note about Isaac Newton that Christians would love about him is that in his Principia Matematica’s 2^nd edition, published in 1713, he included a proof for God. What is ironic is that this proof, which violated his own rule of scientific reasoning known as the Law of Parsimony, simply pointed to the existence of God on the basis that he could not explain the motion and origins of the planetary bodies in our solar system.

No modern scientist, I am sure, would postulate a proof for God purely on the basis that something could not be explained, though it has been done repeatedly as a temporary metaphor by some such as our yet more modern legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, or Albert Einstein.

Isaac Newton also would not have had a chance to serve in a Cambridge chair, however, unless he had some way of publicly professing his religious beliefs toward the Christian tradition. The same chair that Isaac Newton held at Cambridge is now held by Stephen Hawking today, and at the time it was the only chair which did not require a full on declaration of Christian belief.That sure is an interesting little historical side note and most importantly: the first edition of Newton’s Principia did NOT include a proof for God and made no declaration of any sort in this area.

“A skeptic or atheist is governed by two main principles: 1) all beliefs must be supported by observational evidence, and 2) beliefs that contradict observational evidence cannot be tolerated. However, strong atheism states that there is no god, even though observational evidence indicates that the universe has a cause that cannot be detected observationally. So despite the lack of observational evidence for a naturalistic cause for the universe, the strong atheist believes that the universe has a naturalistic cause and that there is no god, contradicting the tenet that all beliefs should be based upon observational evidence.”
–Rich Deem, General Introduction for Non-Believers: Part 1, Are Your Beliefs Consistent With Your Worldview?
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/atheismintro.html#1HTyEWNPVWwr

Stated in one of the articles on GodAndScience.Org is the explanation that atheists have no reason to believe what it is they believe because there is no way to observe the naturalistic causes of the universe…

The only problem is that there is a way to observe these causes. While scientists at the time of this writing still have not figured out all of the answers, there is nothing that points to any sort of divine entity. We have also figured out through microwave signatures the age of the universe, seen nothing but continuous evidence for the big bang, and have made vast strides in determining more and more about our universe’s origins. Personally, I do not think the question of origins will be quite so important at some point down the line as the question of where it is we are going. There are a number of different hypotheses that are beginning to be tested which can explain universal origins.

I am not an expert in physics so I will not claim to know each one of the intricacies of each one of these theories but it does not take an expert in physics to see that creating the possibility of God is just flat out unnecessary.

There is also the classic problem that arises of infinite regression – if God created the universe then what created God? This leads to our next point of interest.

If God created the universe, then what created God?

Christians have a bizarre tendency, as Rich Deem does on his website, to ask who created God instead of what created God. That is just curious and I thought I’d highlight it before I discuss this point. Rich Deem’s conclusion in his article reads as follows:

God has no need to have been created, since He exists either outside time (where cause and effect do not operate) or within multiple dimensions of time (such that there is no beginning of God’s plane of time). Hence God is eternal, having never been created. Although it is possible that the universe itself is eternal, eliminating the need for its creation, observational evidence contradicts this hypothesis, since the universe began to exist a finite ~13.7 billion years ago. The only possible escape for the atheist is the invention of a kind of super universe, which can never be confirmed experimentally (hence it is metaphysical in nature, and not scientific).

–Rich Deem, If God Created Everything, Who Created God?
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/who_created_god.html#HG31hQuxKrBw

There is a reason I mentioned David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion at the beginning of this article. Hume gives an elegant and gorgeous explanation of this sort of reasoning and where to go from it. Essentially, this conclusion supposes that we have two different things to deal with: a physical, material universe and a God that created it. Hume asks the question through the character Philo, who most closely resembles his own view, basically of: why should we suppose that God is self ordering any more than to suppose that the material universe is self ordering?

We see order in the material universe under the laws of physics and how molecules combine to form objects and various universal phenomena. The character Demea makes a claim that this order was created by God, but this is just creating an extra layer; what created the order of God? The point of importance is that minds are self ordering and therefore the mind of God must order itself.

But Philo rejects this idea, stating that there is no reason to believe that a) there is a God at all and that b) there is a reason this God would be self ordering any more than: a) there is a material universe and b) that material universe can order itself. Rationally, it makes more sense to suppose that the material universe can order itself because we have actually empirically observed the universe. We can see the universe but we CANNOT see God. Therefore, it only makes sense that we would postulate the more likely possibility that the material universe is self ordering.

So the better question is the one that scientists have been asking forever: what created the universe? Because we know that, right now, there is no good reason to suppose there is a God or that if there is that God has anything to do with the universe.

A classic one: if we cannot get morality from God then where are we supposed to get morality?

This is a bit simplistic in comparison to some of the other questions presented here but it is nonetheless highly important for a lot of people who have not given the possible answers serious thought. My morality stems from scientific understanding and the direction I have chosen in accordance with my Long Term Survival Model. This is enough and not only is it enough, we can immediately reach a lot of the same principles that many people would agree Christian tradition mandates are good ideas.

The very first thing thought of, for me, when thinking about Christian morality are the Ten Commandments. Things like not murdering people, not stealing, not harming children, are all easily explained by science: it is maladaptive to the survival of our species to harm other members of our species. Or, if we are going to advance in technological terms then we cannot expect society to function well when we are permitting murder, suicide, theft, and lots of other commonly supposed immoral actions.

…I thought I had more to say on this one but honestly I think that is about all the explanation I really need to give. Sam Harris probably said it about as well as anyone could say it in his TEDTalk on the subject of deriving morality from science.

I could go on for several books worth of writing with this article but unfortunately I have to stop at some point. Essentially, it does not take a lot to really illustrate why the Christian apologetics view fails in comparison with the atheistic one: a lot of the logic and reasoning behind establishing a view relating to the existence of God as described in the Christian tradition or to suppose the validity of an intelligent designer in creating the universe is utterly incoherent. Instead of examining a large amount of information and then reaching a conclusion the theist perspective chooses instead to decide on a conclusion and then gather whatever information it can to support its position.

Atheists are the scientists. While authors like ‘scientist’ Francis Collins (who led the Human Genome Project) are becoming advocates for intelligent design and the Christian tradition, the most respectable names in science do not ever profess a major belief in God short of the physical consequences presented to them throughout history. It is a tragic truth that the non-belief in any divine entity can shatter and destroy the relationships of friends, family, and loved ones. The consequences of non-belief can be severe on both a social level and then once that social level elevates to a physical one, it can endanger lives, which is the entire emphasis given to the Christopher Hitchens viewpoint, author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Even Francis Collins and the other intelligent design advocates of the modern era fail to present anything new. Instead, they are forced to repackage the same content into new labels and names, such as the progression of creationism to intelligent design. The argument for intelligent design has failed on a rational level – it is merely those who wish to believe with all their hearts attempting to, without true success, rationalize their actions.

Ironically, Christians attempt to claim the same things about atheists or non-believers who do not follow what they believe to be correct moral actions. Again, Rich Deem says this in his conclusion for Atheism Doesn’t Lead to Immoral Behavior – Or Does It?

“As a result, the differences in morality between atheists and evangelicals is striking, with atheists being much more prone to viewing pornography, using profanity in public, gossiping, and drunkenness… So, even though atheists can lead a moral life, on average, they don’t measure up. Although it is possible that atheism is not the cause of moral failure, it seems unlikely that there are genetic or other demographic factors that account for the differences in behavior.”

This is of course results derived from a study from the Barna Group, an organization devoted to the study of “faith” and its intersection with “culture.” On their About page they also give this description: “The company provides primary research; printed resources; leadership development; spiritual training; and church facilitation and enhancement.”

Interesting that a religious organization would derive such results – this proves nothing to me and it should prove nothing to you. Real science shows us that morality functions, for anyone, off of many of the same principles – classical conditioning (see Hebb’s Organization of Behavior and experiments of Ivan Pavlov), hindsight bias (see such studies as Fischhoff, Wasserman, Lempert, Hastie, and others), pragmatic reasoning schemas (Evans and Feeney), deductive and inductive reasoning, groupthink (Janis, 1971), and the list goes on and on. Religious belief can hinder moral development in terms of how a particular belief can interplay with the various factors involved in human reasoning. There are outstanding examples everywhere of true principles in neuroscience and psychology that can describe how morality develops and how it is applied.

Ask yourself this question: what creates a morality that makes sense – a morality based off of evidence where conclusions are reached after evidence has been collected or a morality based upon conclusions in which evidence is hastily gathered to support the position regardless of contradictions? I phrase the question this way because I must – religious reasoning, especially in the Christian tradition, is loaded with contradictions, false conclusions, illogical reasoning, and irrationality. Intelligent design (or Christianity at all) is NOT scientific. It never has been, never will be and frankly: never can be.

Many of the examples cited here come from Robert J. Sternberg’s textbook: Cognitive Psychology and books read during my own time including Hitchens and Hume.

I also considered the possibility that when it comes to wealth of any kind, it might be impossible to give a really sound rational argument for anyone deserving anything. Why does the man who was born into a middle class family deserve the middle class money over that of one born into poverty? After all, not everything that we receive is earned, or deserved.

But does that mean that whether or not you “deserve” something matter as to whether or not you will end up receiving it? Unfortunately, even if we could develop a logical system for determining whether or not something could lay claim to riches over one person or another, I fear that the world would never be able to accurately follow it; all anyone deserves is dependent upon social perceptions and norms.

For instance, one of the first points at which we give, even at an unconscious level, deservingness of anything is the idea of personhood. If a being cannot be considered a person then by that notion they are probably not entitled to the same things that a person would be. But how can we define a person? People have been trying to do this for centuries and yet the legal system is consistently creating new laws and regulations throughout the years that make judgments off some sort of intuitively felt definition that the entire population can never fully agree on.

Even as society at large slowly gathers more empirical evidence and draws rational conclusions over time it can be extremely difficult to determine whether or not a full definition will be reached in the foreseeable future. Recently I was sitting in an Intro to Philosophy class and the concept of defining personal identity was being discussed. I found myself getting extremely confused over the different ideas: If you were to transfer the brain of one person to another’s body is it still the same person? Does sameness of brain mean sameness of person?

Many of us are intuitively inclined to answer that a brain can define identity all on its own but some situations could easily arise to alter this notion. The methodology for how we determine who receives what, even right down to a person’s very core, matters.

One of the very first areas in which we might start figuring this whole concept out is in relation to our own lives and our material possessions. For example, does any corporate CEO really deserve something like a ten million dollar per year salary? I began asking myself a question very similar because of my eventual dream of being entirely and completely financially comfortable.

Question 1: Do I, Scott Lee, deserve to have one million dollars per year?

At first impulse, most people would replace my name and consider the question for themselves and then would proceed to give arguments based on a number of premises, all mostly based off emotional compulsion.

Premise 1 – If I work extremely hard, then I deserve X amount of dollars.
Premise 2 – If I have been through an extreme amount of pain, I deserve Y amount of dollars.
Therefore: I deserve X + Y amount of dollars.

You could claim that there might be a way to devise a method of quantifying, or giving numerical value to the values of X and Y, or X+Y being the total amount of money you actually deserve. If anyone could give me an even remotely valid way to do this, let me know, but the entire thing wreaks of emotionally driven and flawed rationalization to me.

To really get anywhere with the above question and its combination of answers we really have to examine things more carefully. A new question I immediately followed with was this:

Question 2: How does anyone come to deserve anything of material value?

Some possible answers:
Premise 1 – They must, by some means and on a quantitative scale, earn the right to obtain those material things.
Premise 2 – Society must accept through social means and by majority rule their earnings.
Premise 3 – Then the first premise is true, then the second invariably regulates the quantities of deserving.
Therefore: Deserving anything of material value comes from the quantity through which you earn it and the approval of societal social norms as they interact and relate to each other.

Now I think I am actually getting somewhere with this second question and its proposed premises for providing a sufficient answer. Of course, we are still dealing with the troubling proposition of quantifying a means to deserving anything. Not to mention the truth value of premise 3 – if the relationship does exist between the first two premises then how do we calculate the intricacies of that relationship?

Question 3: Assuming anyone does deserve anything they receive, does their deserving it make a difference as to whether or not they receive it?
The more I explore the idea of deserving the more I realize that the thing that matters most is social convention, if we are only exploring an answer through logic. The entire concept actually turns out to be pretty vague unless we come up with a much more clear definition of just what “deserving” really is.

So what lies ahead as an answer for our own lives? Do we turn to some sort of folk wisdom like: nothing new under the sun or nothing lasts forever? How do we know where to turn? What is to say that there is such a thing as deserving and if there is: do we even deserve anything at all? Nevermind material possessions – do we even deserve to be alive?

In struggling to find answers to these questions in a rational manner, it has created a tremendous sense of gratitude in me. Maybe even at the age of 21 as I write this article I am incredibly lucky to even be here at all, and thus comes a powerful feeling of giving thanks.

So maybe you can answer the questions better for me: what is deserving? Assuming we know what it is, how do we know what we deserve? Assuming we know how to determine what we deserve – what do you deserve and why?

Not only have I learned a lot in the past two and a half years at the time of this writing but I have actually managed to create what I would consider my first real contribution to the field of psychology, or perhaps many other fields as well. It is called the Long Term Survival Model. And it is the reason why we are alive on this planet.

This is a bold claim to make but let me first point out that what I am really talking about is why we are here in terms of Darwinian evolution. It is obvious to first say that we are actually here for just about any reason we would like to pick. Some theists (or those who are religious believers) have told me that they do not believe there would be a point to our existence if evolution were true. Of course, this will not be a post debating the existence of evolution because as far as I am concerned there is nothing there to debate anyway. This entire model assumes that evolution is true and is constantly in motion.

The two driving forces to Darwinian evolution are 1) natural selection and 2) mutation. Natural selection is the process by where survival of the fittest allows the organisms with the best traits suited to their environment to survive while mutation keeps the traits changing every once and a while. When a mutation is beneficial we could say that it is ‘adaptive.’ Adaptation is the very name for the process in which organisms continue to grow, evolve, and exist throughout time.

Under the assumption of these main two mechanisms it would be safe to assume that we are actually here for more of a reason than just to survive; we are not only here to survive but to replicate. And here in lies a bit of the problem that is sort of philosophical.

If we are only here to survive and replicate then that means that whatever we do to get there does not really matter. Under a traditional viewpoint in much of modern society, there lies a view that evolution is taking place on a wholly individualistic sort of scale. This is actually not the case because everything exists on an entirely interconnected network.

In fact, not only are all people on the planet connected to all other people on the planet but all organisms to organisms and even people to all other environmental factors. On enough of a scaled breakdown we could actually say that on a molecular level everything is fundamentally connected. This is part of the basis for what is known as “chaos theory.”

Chaos theory is irrelevant to the Long Term Survival Model but I will go ahead and just explain briefly what chaos theory states. Chaos theory assumes a number of different properties about the universe but one of its main points, or benefits that is, is to be able to predict very complex events and occurrences such as the flow of water or the stock market trends. Many scientists agree that certain patterns are taking place among seemingly totally unpredictable events but the only reason they cannot make accurate predictions is that the formulae for predicting the events are changing at every moment.

The stock market, for example, creates a brand new set of conditions every single time someone makes a trade. When you change the market, even by a little, it changes the state of what predictions will be made about the future regarding the entire market. The amount of data that you have to put your hands on and interpret all at once is horrendously large.

The entire universe functions this way and we are not living in a state of exception.

At any moment, the constantly shifting state of the universe could cause a giant, deadly meteor to come hurling in the direction of our planet or some cosmic event could destroy us in the blink of an eye that we theoretically would not be able to predict. Our entire existence continues on in this fashion. When we consider how each and every one of us, along with the very way in which everything we say and do affects other conditions on both our planet and inevitably the rest of the universe – we realize that survival and replication is not the only thing we should be doing.

When considering the rest of the big picture, we actually have three goals for the survival of each of ourselves as individuals and it lies with ensuring the survival of our entire species. We must:

1. Survive. And when I say survive, I am referring to it in the traditional sense of the word because by the end of this article I will change the definition of the word ‘survive’ to mean how we survive in the long term over millions, billions, or trillions of years.

2. Replicate. We should replicate but replication lies in more than our DNA. One of the primary driving factors behind DNA replication, or human reproduction, is our ideologies and behaviors. Biologist Richar Dawkins coined a term for these known as “memes” similar to the genetic term “genes.” Replication lies not just in our biology but in our memetics as well.

3. Empower. Empowerment is the third and final step in the basics of the Long Term Survival Model. Essentially, empowerment is the ability to enable others in the population to perform the same tasks in steps 1 and 2 – to survive and replicate. In its most common form, empowerment is teaching.

Empowerment is where things get complicated. Not only must we figure out what empowerment really is but we also have to have a vehicle for getting there. Empowerment, just like surviving and replicating, takes time, energy, and resources. This third step operates under the principle that if we aid the rest of the population then we will increase our chances for long term survival. Without taking into account how we are connected to everything else – we literally have no hope of prevailing as a species.

Take a moment to consider how lucky we are. Not only have 98% or more of the biological organisms that have ever existed on this planet gone extinct, we happen to be among the lucky few that have not. On a broader scale, we also happen to be lucky enough that our planet is tipped at just the right scale and distanced just the right length away from the sun that human life is able to exist at all, for any period of time, on this planet. At our most basic level, we are the universe growing some form of consciousness and asking itself questions like where it came from, where is it going, and where does it lie now?

At the same time, we are doing dumb things every single day. We are flushing toilets that use 10 gallons of water per flush. We are eating fast food that kills us. We have countries constantly going to war over religion and resources. We are killing off species after species with our relentless expansion. In every possible way, countless different members of the homo sapien species are ignoring the first and most important fundamental truth of our being connected to absolutely everything (and by that truth: affecting everything else in existence).

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