Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Why I am Hopelessly Depressed (Self-efficacy)

1. 00:02 The title of this video is a bit misleading. I’m not exactly depressed. I think I’m
2. 00:11 more disenchanted or disillusioned, unhedonic to some extent, unable to experience pleasure and a bit listless
3. 00:23 and inertial, depleted, exhausted, no energy. None of
4. 00:29 these things put together even amount to depression. Depression is a clinical
5. 00:36 condition. But I use the word depress in the title to as a kind of shorthand to
6. 00:43 describe my state of mind. I think my problem is that looking back at my life, I’m 65 years old almost. Looking back at my life, I realize that it has been an uninterrupted string of failures and defeats, most of them self-inflicted.
7. 01:01 I’m beginning, therefore, to accept, however painfully, that I’m not self-efficacious.
8. 01:09 What is self-efficacy? Let’s have a look at the dictionary of the American Psychological Association.
9. 01:17 Self-efficacy is an individual’s subjective perception of their capability to perform in a given setting or to attain desired
10. 01:28 results. It was proposed by Albert Bandura as a primary determinant of emotional and motivational states and behavioral change. It’s also called, by
11. 01:39 the way, perceived self-efficacy. I think there’s a problem with this definition and with Bandura’s approach
12. 01:47 to self-efficacy. I think self-efficacy is to a large extent subjective but I think it can be
13. 01:55 determined from the outside. I think the environment matters. I think context is
14. 02:01 crucial. Self-efficacy can be impacted by a an environment in
15. 02:10 change by a transformation or a transforming um set of circumstances.
16. 02:17 Self-efficacy is influenced by external factors as much as by internal factors. Constant
17. 02:25 failure in all spheres of life sometimes is the outcome of rapidly changing
18. 02:35 circumstances, environments, mores, conventions, norms, behavioral
19. 02:43 patterns and cataclysmic changes in gender
20. 02:49 relations, in immigration, in war and peace and so on so forth. I think in short Bura was a bit shortsighted. I think self-efficacy is determined both
21. 03:02 internally and externally. And these external changes, these
22. 03:08 external fluctuations, this external volatility, these vicissitudes,
23. 03:14 they cause depression, anxiety, addictions and substance use.
24. 03:21 Look for example at the past four five years since the pandemic.
25. 03:28 I think the pandemic has accelerated a general trend of loss of self-efficacy.
26. 03:34 People perceive themselves as more and more helpless and hopeless and they
27. 03:40 react with aggression. The consumption of horror movies has quadrupled because
28. 03:46 people perceive reality as a kind of horror movie. They wish to learn about their
29. 03:52 circumstances by observing horror flicks. And so I think self-efficacy diminishes
30. 04:01 when the environment is uncertain, unstable, unpredictable, indeterminate or when the environment is such that it
31. 04:13 presents challenges to one’s values, beliefs, upbringing
32. 04:19 and uh behavioral patterns which are inculcated
33. 04:26 And so when an individual finds himself or
34. 04:33 herself in a country, in a state, in a society, in a culture,
35. 04:41 in a collective, as a member of a group, or having to to interact with the above.
36. 04:48 and they contradict or they undermine the
37. 04:54 individual’s perception of reality. In other words, there’s a form of collective gaslighting. The individual
38. 05:01 reacts with diminished self-efficacy. So self-efficacy, the concept of self efficacy must be expanded dramatically.
39. 05:12 And coming back to myself, of course, the reason I perceive myself as failure
40. 05:19 and loser, the reason I exercise autoplastic defenses, the reason I blame myself, the reason I feel ashamed and guilty for whatever has transpired in my life
41. 05:30 is because of Bandura’s definition of self-efficacy, which emphasizes a totally subjective experience. It’s as
42. 05:37 if my ability to extract favorable outcomes from my environment, from people around
43. 05:45 me, from cir changing circumstances, my ability totally depends on me. I’m 100%
44. 05:51 responsible for my choices and decisions and the outcomes and consequences of those these
45. 05:58 choices and decisions. And while this is largely true, there are many things out there which
46. 06:06 are not under our control. Our lives are increasingly
47. 06:13 determined and channeled and shaped by forces which are gigantic and impersonal
48. 06:21 and even random. forces which are can easily be perceived as malevolent even
49. 06:28 though they’re not. And so the environmental contribution, the environmental component in self-efficacy has grown exponentially over the past few years. And if I want to maintain or to create
50. 06:45 an account of my failures and defeats and mishaps and bad decisions and wrong
51. 06:51 choices and and misbehavior, if I want to create a proper scientific so to
52. 06:57 speak, objective view of my conduct or misconduct,
53. 07:03 I think it would have to do to some extent with the way the world has changed on me. As I said, I’m 65. I was born and I grew up in another
54. 07:16 world, literally another planet. The way the world is today is perceived
55. 07:24 by my generation as dystopia. we or at least I find it very difficult
56. 07:31 to adopt and very difficult to act
57. 07:37 and definitely very difficult to secure the outcomes um that are conducive to self-rowth and self-development and happiness.
58. 07:48 I think stranded time travelers and extraterrestrials
59. 07:55 are likely to develop reactive incapacitating mental illness when they land on earth or in another period of history. I think if in the future there would be
60. 08:06 time travel and there would be a glitch in the machine and people would get stuck uh in another period of history they would feel depressed. They would be highly um inefficacious.
61. 08:20 They wouldn’t know what to do. They would make all the wrong choices and decisions.
62. 08:26 They would secure negative outcomes. And they would gradually descend into a
63. 08:33 masttorm of of depression and anxiety and self-rrimation and self-hatred and
64. 08:39 self-loathing and self-rejection and self-destruction and self-rashing and self harm.
65. 08:45 This is stranded time travelers. Similarly, I think if extraterrestrials were to land on Earth and then get
66. 08:53 stranded because their spaceship went went haywire or whatever, I think these
67. 08:59 aliens would react identically if they have a psyche similar to humans.
68. 09:05 They would definitely in any case be a lot less self-efficacious than on their home planet.
69. 09:13 And the thing is that the world has changed or reality has changed to such an extent that people my
70. 09:22 age do feel as if we were time travelers as we if we are we were aliens as if we were extraterrestrials. We do feel that
71. 09:34 alienated that estranged. The world does feel so bizarre, so
72. 09:42 outlandish, so inane, and very often so insane to us.
73. 09:48 Then of course we are not quite sure what are the proper codes of conduct,
74. 09:54 what scripts to follow, how to work with people, even how to manipulate people,
75. 10:00 how to how to secure the outcomes that you know that we need.
76. 10:07 In short, we don’t have access to this reality. My age group, my peer
77. 10:14 group, we don’t have access to this reality. It’s gone too far. The changes have been too extreme and too accelerated. The elacrity with which
78. 10:25 reality has transformed feels so realistic. It’s as if we are stuck in some dreamscape or some nightmare.
79. 10:34 You see, I’m a throwback. I’m a throwback to rationalism and 18th century enlightenment.
80. 10:41 I believe in the scientific method in facts in evidence and in the procedures
81. 10:48 in place to obtain these facts and evidence and to verify to ascertain their veracity often by falsifying.
82. 10:59 And so this is the way I look at the world. This is the way I subsist and survive. This is the way I think and
83. 11:05 this to a large extent is the way I emote on the rare occasion that I emote.
84. 11:11 There’s no denying that I’m mentally ill, that I’m a narcissist and a psychopath. That’s not what I’m saying.
85. 11:18 Of course I am. But this has more to do with interpersonal relationships and the
86. 11:24 ability to function in society. I’m talking about something completely different. I’m talking about the
87. 11:31 apparatus, the machinery that I have at my disposal to make sense of the world
88. 11:37 and of reality. I’m talking about doxastic and axiological elements, values, and
89. 11:44 beliefs that emanate from the method that I’ve chosen to
90. 11:51 decipher the the universe to imbue it with meaning and direction and purpose.
91. 11:58 I’m therefore not talking about my interactions with other people. I’m talking about my interactions with the world, my interactions with reality, my interactions with the universe. And these interactions are structured using rationality, using the scientific method, using facts
92. 12:16 and evidence as organizing principles. And this is why I am in essence the
93. 12:22 quintessence of the 18th 18th century intellectual.
94. 12:30 And everything in today’s world conspires against this. Everything in
95. 12:36 today’s world makes me feel a stranger in a strange land. Everything in today’s world is against rationality, against science, against
96. 12:48 logic, against procedure, against rules. Everything in today’s
97. 12:55 world is ahazard and pretty chaotic and founded essentially on aggression and on
98. 13:04 grandio grandiosity. So I’m having serious difficulty to
99. 13:11 adapt to this new world. Not so brave but new. I’m having difficulties.
100. 13:19 I experience mal adaptations. I come up with
101. 13:25 dysfunctional solutions because I don’t know the ropes and it feels out of my comfort zone.
102. 13:34 Alien territory, a planet far away at the very end of the galaxy. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know who I’m who I’m talking to.
103. 13:45 Obviously, this has a massive impact on my self-efficacy and I keep failing all the
104. 13:52 time. Let it be clear, I am not implying
105. 13:59 that I’m not responsible for my failures and defeats. That is not what I’m saying. On the very
106. 14:06 contrary, I’ve spent a lifetime castigating and chastising and blaming myself.
107. 14:13 I pointed a finger at a finger at myself long before narcissism was a word.
108. 14:21 I was the first narcissist to out himself in the 19 in the mid 1990s.
109. 14:28 And so I do take responsibility. I am guilty for many of the things that have happened to me and are happening to me.
110. 14:39 I have made knowingly and unknowingly the wrong decisions and adopted the wrong choices. I’m I’m not disclaiming this. I’m not claiming otherwise. I’m not I’m not I’m not shifting the blame
111. 14:52 to the world. I this is not um this is not an essay on aloplastic defenses.
112. 15:00 But I’m I do say what I what I am saying is that
113. 15:06 my mental illness, my dysfunction, my
114. 15:12 malaise, my aological structures,
115. 15:18 mental structures, psychological structures were still
116. 15:24 premised on some understanding of the world. They came into play
117. 15:31 in a reality which I thought I understood perfectly.
118. 15:37 And then the ground shifted, fell from under me and from under my generation
119. 15:45 and suddenly we woke up into a reality which was unrecognizable,
120. 15:53 unsettling, upsetting, dangerous, terrifying.
121. 15:59 And this estrangement or this alienation reduced our self-efficacy or my
122. 16:05 self-efficacy further. What are these changes that I cannot cope with? What are these changes that
123. 16:14 discombobulated me? What are these changes that rendered me inefficacious, paralyzed, debilitated, incapacitated?
124. 16:23 What are these changes in reality and in the world and in society and in culture,
125. 16:30 contemporary culture and in this period in history? What are the transformations that have rendered me essentially an invalid? Someone who is unable to operate in and
126. 16:44 on his environment to act in a way which would lead to favorable desired outcomes
127. 16:51 or avoid at least adverse consequences. What in the world has caused me
128. 17:01 essentially to freeze? I think there are several developments
129. 17:07 which I truly truly cannot cope with and which have reduced my self-efficacy to
130. 17:13 the point of self-sabotage, self undermining and ultimately self-destructiveness. The first one is the collapse in
131. 17:24 intelligence. There is objectively a decline in average population cohortwide IQ. That’s a fact. IQ is declining precipitously.
132. 17:37 By the way, the capacity for analytical thinking is
133. 17:43 um has almost vanished. Critical thinking is nowhere to be found.
134. 17:51 It is a takeover by the dumb and the stupid. And modern technologies are sterile. They are developed by the mentally ill for the consumption of the
135. 18:02 stupid. The mentally ill are empowering this the stupid
136. 18:08 because the stupid support the fantasies and the bank accounts of the mentally ill. This is the collusion of mo of the
137. 18:16 modern world of contemporary civilization. The mentally ill and the stupid have taken over.
138. 18:22 The rational, the intelligent, the educated, they are considered to be the enemy. They are reminders of the masses stupidity and the insanity
139. 18:38 of tycoons and billionaires and and everyone who is associated with modern
140. 18:44 technologies. And so they are the enemy. They’re the enemy. And there is a backlash
141. 18:50 against 18th century enlightenment rationalists such as myself, against
142. 18:57 scientists such as myself. I’m a physicist and against intellectuals such
143. 19:04 as myself. We are being hounded
144. 19:11 and hunted down like so many beasts of prey.
145. 19:18 The second development is what I call malignant egalitarianism. It’s a rejection, a vehement rejection,
146. 19:24 a proud rejection of knowledge as distinct from information. Raw
147. 19:30 information is a commodity nowadays. But raw information is not the same as
148. 19:36 knowledge. It’s nonstructured. It’s chaotic. So there’s a rejection of knowledge.
149. 19:43 There is a hatred of education. There is a disdain for expertise.
150. 19:51 Experts, scientists, intellectuals, professors,
151. 19:57 they are considered to be scum. They are suspected of corruption of the
152. 20:03 mind or of the pocket. They are fired, hounded, cancelled,
153. 20:09 hated on. It’s a very bad time to be me.
154. 20:16 And it’s a very bad time to espouse rationality and logic
155. 20:22 and to fight back against prejudice and bias and superstition and delusion and
156. 20:29 fantasy. It’s a very bad time because anecdote and opinion rule the day rather
157. 20:35 than the scientific method and facts. There’s a rise of pseudociences,
158. 20:42 of the so-called occult, of the esoteric, of conspiracies,
159. 20:48 of religion, which is a form of mass delusion and of fantasy. There’s a
160. 20:54 counterfactual revolution. There is a rejection of evidence. There’s a hatred
161. 21:02 of the propagators of all these sciences decrieded, expertise is molested, authorities trampled on. It’s a second
162. 21:15 cultural revolution. China was the first.
163. 21:22 And all this is coupled with another trend which undermines and hinders self-efficacy in people like me.
164. 21:33 Nihilism, negative affectivity, a celebration of hatred and envy and
165. 21:40 rage and grievances and aggression. The legitimization and normalization
166. 21:48 of the criminal, the unethical, the immoral.
167. 21:55 Take a small example. My work has been plagiarized by hundreds of people
168. 22:01 shamelessly. And that’s only one example, not even the most egregious by far. So it’s difficult to act in an environment where the rules are gone, norms are dead.
169. 22:18 This is these are known as anomic societies or anomic environments
170. 22:24 and environments where the only mores are the mores of self-
171. 22:31 advancement self agrandisement and definitely entitlement at the expense of others. Ironically
172. 22:39 I am not thriving. I keep failing and I keep being defeated because everyone became a narcissist.
173. 22:48 And so it’s a it’s very difficult for um for me to survive and to flourish
174. 22:57 not because I’m a narcissist because but because I’m a narcissist committed to
175. 23:03 intellectual non-narcissism. I am an elitist
176. 23:09 in the sense that I recognize the supremacy of knowledge and education.
177. 23:15 But I’m intellectually very humble. I learn from everyone everywhere all the
178. 23:21 time. I accept that my uh constant state is a state of
179. 23:28 ignorance that I don’t know what I don’t know and that there’s a lot that I know that is wrong. And so I’m intellectually
180. 23:36 humble in a society which is intellectually arrogant and haughty, intellectually delusional, intellectually absent
181. 23:48 actually and that is very difficult on me. My tribe, let’s call them 18th century rationalists.
182. 23:59 My tribe is wandering the planet, bewildered, frightened, lost.
183. 24:07 My tribe is not self-efficacious. We are all failures. We are all losers.
184. 24:14 We are all defeated because we haven’t adapted to these new
185. 24:21 realities. When you’re confronted with the dumb and with the stupid,
186. 24:27 there are three ways to cope with them. You become as dumb as and stupid as they are. That pleases them no end and they
187. 24:35 elect you to office. So they reward you financially. That’s one strategy which someone like
188. 24:41 me can never adopt. And
189. 24:48 this kind of strategy dumbing down um is a huge sacrifice in in many ways.
190. 24:56 It’s an inversion of the value system. It’s like saying making money and becoming famous and
191. 25:03 getting elected to to office matters to me more than who I am. I’m willing to deny myself in order to become all these things, in order to attain all these things. And I think that’s a price
192. 25:14 that’s too high, too high to pay. And uh very few of my type of people are
193. 25:24 willing to pay this price. They instead withdraw. They avoid.
194. 25:30 They shut shut off. They become schizoid.
195. 25:36 And of course they react with depression and anxiety because they’re isolated. Of course they abuse substances. Of
196. 25:43 course they try to escape one way or another. My escape is books and movies. But there are people whose escape is is
197. 25:50 you know drugs or alcohol. And of course this is an impact on on
198. 25:56 one’s private life. Of course marriages are destroyed. Of course relationships are ruined. Of course you know social
199. 26:03 isolation is rampant. It has a price. What could you do with the dumb and the
200. 26:10 stupid when they’re in charge when they’re shaping the world in the past?
201. 26:16 In my past, I could have easily avoided them. They cannot be avoided anymore.
202. 26:22 They’re everywhere. They’re all pervasive. They’re all permeated. It’s an invasion. These are the barbarians. They’re not at the gate. They’re way beyond the gates. They they are empowered by technologies
203. 26:34 like social media and artificial intelligence which is another form of crowd sourcing and Wikipedia and so on.
204. 26:43 And there’s no avoiding them. They shape the environment within which you have to operate. The condition is
205. 26:50 that you sacrifice your identity and your values and your beliefs and the way you see the world and the scientific
206. 26:56 method and rationality and logic. And then you’re welcome to the club. The club of the inane, the club of the
207. 27:04 elite, the club of the stupid, the club of the dumb. And this is of course one solution when
208. 27:11 you are confront confronted with the hordes and herds of the great unwashed. Yes, I
209. 27:19 that’s the way I see them. And that’s the second solution. When you’re confronted with these people, hold them in disdain. Hold them in contempt.
210. 27:27 communicate it to them so that they back off and stay away. The thing is that
211. 27:33 when you communicate your contempt and disdain as I am doing habitually, this triggers a backlash. It infuriates
212. 27:44 the masses. It infuriates the stupid. The dumb can’t tolerate it. And so they become vengeful. There’s payback and backlash. They try to make you pay for not respecting them,
213. 27:59 for holding them in the contempt and disdain that they deserve. And
214. 28:05 that’s therefore a solution that requires the sacrifice of self-efficacy. are likely to pay a heavy price for
215. 28:12 exposing the stupidity of others, for labeling them for who they are, dumb,
216. 28:19 incapable of thinking, and
217. 28:25 for exposing all kinds of pseudociences and and idiotic uh beliefs such as
218. 28:32 astrology or homeopathy or or to be frank, religion. the sup supreme beings
219. 28:39 and angels and other such idiotic infantile nonsense or the paranormal
220. 28:45 so-called. So there’s a price to pay for that an a high price
221. 28:52 because they are more numerous and they control the livers of power and they defund the universities and they punish
222. 28:59 and chase away intellectuals. There’s a huge migration of intellectuals nowadays
223. 29:05 roaming the globe trying to find a foothold. There’s nowhere which is nowhere to be head. My predicament is
224. 29:11 not unique. It’s not individual. I know that I’m um just one of of tens of
225. 29:19 millions, possibly hundreds of millions. We can find a place in this reality and
226. 29:26 in in this world. It’s it’s very reminiscent of the 1930s.
227. 29:32 The 1930s where numerous intellectuals committed suicide and or were or were
228. 29:38 killed, assassinated in concentration camps or or lost their jobs at a minimum, the lucky ones.
229. 29:46 And this is the world we we live in. And
230. 29:53 when an 18th century rationalist such as myself
231. 29:59 realizes that these are the dark a the second dark ages that it’s the medievalism of the 21st century and that
232. 30:06 this is not going to go away for probably a hundred years if not longer.
233. 30:12 This is the world for future generations. When we realized it, when we realized
234. 30:18 that everything we held dear, everything we’ve invested in, everything we’ve committed ourselves to
235. 30:24 that includes science and education and learning and erudition and the scientific method and critical thinking
236. 30:31 and analytical thinking. And so when we realize that all this is dead and gunned and buried, it’s nothing much left to live for honestly.
237. 30:42 And there is even the question of why should I be self-efficacious? Why should I why should I I attempt to
238. 30:50 try to be successful to accomplish things for what for whom?
239. 30:56 For I mean it’s not only a question of who would value it but like
240. 31:02 it’s it appears to be very soypistic. The pursuit of education
241. 31:09 other accomplishments they appear to be soypistic. They appear to be delusional, selfdeceiving because the world is not built like that anymore. What to an intellectual like me is an accomplishment to the vast
242. 31:21 majority of humanity is reasonable and and and considered to be even
243. 31:28 contemptable. Academic degrees nowadays are contemptable.
244. 31:34 People hate on intellectuals publicly. People hate on people with academic degrees openly.
245. 31:43 And so everything we valued, everything we worked for, everything that structured our lives and gave gave it
246. 31:50 meaning, gave them meaning, all of these things have gone down in the world to
247. 31:56 the point of vanishing and left us with an enormous lacuna, enormous vacuum,
248. 32:02 which is which we find increasingly more impossible to fill fill in.
249. 32:08 And so the incident of depression and anxiety among the learned and the educated
250. 32:14 and the professionals and the experts and the on and the authorities professional authorities and the incidence and prevalence of a dep
251. 32:25 depression and anxiety and substance abuse among these people is much higher than in the general population. General population is is triumphant is
252. 32:34 victorious. The stupid have won. The dumb have created their idiocracy. It is we who are not stupid are not dumb
253. 32:45 are educated. We who are paying the price
254. 32:51 and of course we we have been miseducated or misindoctrinated to believe that it’s all our fault. Well, to a large extent it is. One contributes to one’s fate and destiny.
255. 33:04 But there is a contribution by the dystopian horrible world that we have created
256. 33:15 that the world has changed so much for the worse as far as I’m concerned makes
257. 33:21 it very difficult for me to accomplish things to try to work and to be
258. 33:28 enthusiastic and energetic about what I do. very difficult for me because
259. 33:35 I don’t think there is anyone left in effect.
260. 33:44 I think humanity has already committed a collective intellectual suicide.
261. 33:51 The body will follow. It’s a question of time. The mind is already gone.