Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I had some deep reflections on happiness, peace, and equanimity. I corresponded with a very famous psychologist, probably over 100 emails. He got me thinking that you have to find it yourself. If troublesome people are in your past, they’re in your periphery. They’re going to be that way anyway, so why bother? That was a very deep reflection for me. It took me a couple of days to process it. I realized that once I felt that, I felt a sense of peace—a strange feeling. So yes, the psychologist is a very wise person. And I very much appreciate our conversation. Of course, the ones that we have.

Rick Rosner: Are you talking about your peace, equanimity, and happiness?

Jacobsen: I am. I don’t do this too much but will indulge in this session. This one’s for me. So yes, talk. You can talk about that. I can talk. 

Rosner: I’ve had a different situation where I had a chaotic family that I was shielded from because it was my dad and stepmom. I thought they were fun because I only saw them for one month a year for child-of-divorce visitation. So, I had yet to learn what it was like to live in that family full-time. My brother in that family found it so chaotic that he asked to be sent to military school.

And military school is hell. So it had to have been hard on him for him to subject himself to fricking New Mexico Military Institute. But you go ahead and talk about your family’s chaoticness. I know that your dad was tough. It’s not tough on you but tough to be around. 

Jacobsen: When I had known him, a decent amount of the last event was him coming in and out, creating much chaos. Also, there were a lot of traumatic and abusive people who have come across my path, including maybe a couple in the higher-IQ communities and the general population. Their actions define them, not me. Everyone experiences that to some degree, however. I learn from it.

Rosner: Yes, you’ve had some run-ins with lunatics.

Jacobsen: Yes, I would say lunatics or the abusive. The best method is to leave the situation without contact with those people. But what I’ve developed over a long time and in those different areas of life is an increasing peace and happiness with life, accepting life as it is–as it comes. And that conversation with that psychologist in email correspondence, someone listening and being very wise, was like talking to my old friends when I would sit down at the old restaurant in town who were in their ’60s and ’70s. It set me at ease. It was the last area of my life. Some journalistic work was a feeling of a need to rush as if I had to do something with the time. That’s gone.

Rosner: Yes, happiness seems connected to making something out of yourself. You’re sending yourself off to report from Ukraine for the second time, but most people would never do that, even once. You’ve taken it upon yourself to interview hundreds of people from all walks of life and explore different philosophies. So, has the chaos in your past motivated you to achieve?

Jacobsen: I think. Many of these original drivers evolved quickly. At some point in the middle, it stopped proving a point and became more about making good in the world. That’s become increasingly apparent as I have sacrificed so much for the Commons and the general good with free labour. That is important. So now, it’s at the point where all these different areas, like journalism, for instance, or simply writing. It’s simply taking on things and enjoying the process, taking them as they are, working with the material elements of life that are brought to me, and working with them within their limitations. Whether I’m interviewing small-town people in my old hometown to learn about the town’s history or people with a little more notoriety, any notoriety is fleeting, as I have yet to learn firsthand–and may never–and you have learned. It lasts for a ‘season.’ How long does it last for you? 

Rosner: I’ve never achieved any durable notoriety. I get recognized once a year. That’s not notoriety. I got recognized in the parking lot of my gym by somebody who follows me on Twitter. That happens once a year. So that’s not true fame. 

Jacobsen: There is no lasting fame. So, at some point, the way you were in your childhood and adolescence, for the most part, is how most of your life is for you. I think you have to develop a psychology around that. I think it was the last notch. Yes, we can encounter abusive people; we can encounter crazy people. And I’m making this distinction between mental health problems and mental illness, who need treatment, and crazy people who are unstable and violent and quite problematic. People who have the intent to harm, as opposed to somebody who’s dealing with depression or anxiety and needs treatment. It’s accepting that, too. They’re going to be as they are going to be. 

Rosner: You’ve talked to a lot of people and studied a lot of different philosophies. Do you have an overriding philosophy now?

Jacobsen: I don’t think any particular philosophy monopolizes, at least, moral good. This moral philosophy has yet to be figured out in totality for all possible moral events, even ones that purport a whole life system. For example, religion is built around examples of a person, holy text, and other aspects.

Rosner: That sounds like a kind of empiricism, taking life and concepts of life as they come and having a toolbox of points of view. 

Jacobsen: Yes, it’s essentially a feminine approach to ethics. 

Rosner: If you said a feminine approach, guys are rule-bound and system-bound, and women take life as it comes and apply common sense to situations.

Jacobsen: Women are wiser due to the amount of shit they go through generally compared to many men, in my experience. So it’s the hard-won experience of life. It has to be experienced. 

Rosner: I’ve had a chaos hobby, where I bounced bars, but not in dangerous bars for the most part. So, the violence I encountered, I was surrounded by people who were better at violence than I was—coworkers. So, I never encounteredserious violence, or it was always more fun than disturbing to deal with drunken idiots who might have attacked me if I got punched by a customer. We got, at a particular chain of bars I worked at, 25 bucks. We got fired if we punched back so often. It was fun. But the chaos is more threatening for most people, less like an amusement park.

In my other family, I believe depression was there, which led to issues for my other brother and me, but maybe didn’t do the damage that living with people with substance abuse issues and borderline personality, where you’ve got kind of a whole smorgasbord of issues that make you a pain to deal with. Anyway, I was spared that. Depression, at least the flavour that we had, was less threatening.

Jacobsen: Borderline personality disorder. It’s upsies, downsies. 

Rosner: It’s like a Chinese menu of fricking everything. You encountered more of that. As I found out more about the chaotic side of my family over the decades, I was like, holy shit. It was not fun at all for them. And, nor was it for you.

Jacobsen: Well, I’m on the other side. It’s a lot better. It took much work. I’m the happiest and most peaceful person I’ve been in a long time. It’s generalized. 

Rosner: That’s good. 

Jacobsen: But I’m in a good place.

Rosner: But it isn’t at any cost to your motivation. You still want to do stuff. 

Jacobsen: It’s weird. It’s a relaxed motivation. It’s very interesting. All the negativity and negative anxiety are gone. How else to describe it?

Rosner: It sounds like a good place to be. I’ve had tough work environments. They’ve been fun but sometimes brutal, like working on a nightly show and the demands. You could probably argue that I’m burnt out even ten years later. I still think I will achieve stuff, but the rate at which I’m achieving stuff is very low. Achievement per day is not very much. But I did feel pretty good, except that I’m getting older. I had a slight return of cancer with a 12-millimetre tumour in my kidney that has been obliterated by cryogenic ablation, where they stab a needle into the tumour and then run liquid nitrogen into it.

This drops the needle’s temperature to minus 185 centigrade. As long as the tumour, in my case, was small, less than half an inch, it’s done as long as it drops to under 20 degrees centigrade. So I’ll get scanned in a month. To see if the whole thing got obliterated. But the whole thing has bummed me out. But I still need to buckle down and start cranking out more stuff. I crank out more stuff with you than I do in any other way. We’ve done a ton, a ton of words.

Rosner: And I admire that your equanimity involves you getting up and asking yourself: What can I do today to move?

Jacobsen: My output forward. Yes, that’s not even the thought that happens. That’s not even the thought. It’s–I do it–and then it is produced. 

Rosner: Yes, I’ve had periods of my life where I’ve been productive like that, but not lately, and I have to get back into it. All right, can we move on to the next topic?

Jacobsen: Sure.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.

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