Night one opens with a totally new philosophical approach, or really a new field of psychology: Adlerian psychology. It is associated with teleology, which is the opposite of etiology.
The conversation starts with the youth bringing up a person who had something "traumatizing" happen in their life. Because of that, they don't go out and have closed themselves off forever in their room. They just stay in the house. The cause is attributed to this person's past: the trauma they have been through, which now defines who they are and what their present life looks like.
The philosopher immediately pushes back. The person going through this has made it his goal to close himself off from the world, and the trauma is acting as a tool to attain that goal of not going out. The philosopher adamantly believes the world does not work the way the youth describes, where who you are now (the effect) is determined by the occurrences of the past (the causes). If the world worked that way, we'd all be in shambles right now.
Essentially, his point of view is that the past doesn't matter. All that matters is the present and today. In the friend's case, he just doesn't want to go out, so he is creating this state of anxiety and using his past trauma as an excuse to live in it.
The next major claim of the conversation is that trauma does not exist. This is what Adlerian psychology is largely about: trauma is definitively and fully denied. That stands in direct opposition to the Freudian view, where your psychic wounds, your trauma, cause your present and your happiness. That is what you delve into in therapy: you dive deeper into your past so that you can lead a happier present life.
The opposing perspective is that we don't have to be determined by the experiences we go through. Instead, the meaning we give those experiences determines what happens. We make of them whatever suits our purpose. In the friend's case, the purpose was to be closed off.
There is a strong theme here: you are in control of your life. Your life is not something being calculated and handed to you without any say in it. You, as an independent person, have full control over what you choose to be, what you choose to do, and who you are in the present.
There is a very interesting perspective on anger when the youth brings up something that happened to him the night before. A waitress spilled coffee on his new jacket, one he loved a lot. He suddenly became really angry and started shouting at her. The youth thinks this was a totally spontaneous eruption and that he had no control over it. If you keep thinking that way, you fall into the fallacy of not being accountable for your actions. What if you had a knife on you? Would you have stabbed this person and then attributed it to something beyond your control, something unavoidable?
People use anger as a tool to assert dominance over others and get what they want. Another example: a mother and daughter are having an argument, and the mother is really angry. She suddenly gets a call from someone important. Immediately, her tone changes and she becomes a sweet, nice person on the phone. As soon as the call ends, she goes back to being angry and asserting dominance over her daughter. This clearly reflects that she is choosing when to be angry, who to show the anger to, and who to be angry with. She is doing it as a means to an end: overpower her daughter with a loud voice and thereby assert her opinion.
The philosopher argues that it is important to make this distinction. He is not denying that emotions exist. Emotions do exist, and they are an important part of what makes us human. At the same time, humans are not beings who cannot resist emotions. We are not controlled by our emotions, and we are not controlled by our past.
We cannot go back to the past, and if you stay in etiology, you will be bound by the past and never find happiness in the present. If our life, our future, and our present really were predetermined by the events of the past, that would mean something bleak. If you truly believe that we cannot change the past, and that's why life is hard, and that we cannot change our present or our future, you end up in a nihilism and pessimism that loses hope in the world and gives up on life. What's the point of life if everything is predetermined and you are no longer in control of your own story?
Compare that with assuming that humans are beings who can change, and letting teleology dominate as a perspective. The youth brings up another friend he admires a lot because he is charming and extroverted, while the youth is more introverted. He wishes he could be like him, but believes he can never change and never be like him.
The philosopher asks: why do you so badly want to be like him? If there is a need to feel that way, it probably means you are not happy with yourself. You think you would be happier if you were him, but you need to accept and understand that you are who you are. You will never be reborn as someone else, and you can never be like someone else. You need to come to accept that you have to be happy with who you are. And if you are not happy with who you are, that just means you need to change the way you live your life.
A really important point that comes up is that the important thing is not what one is born with, but what use one makes of that equipment. Put that in perspective: give the exact same constraints you have in your life to a person you admire a lot, and see how they would deal with the situation. You would be surprised at how far they would go, versus how much you aren't doing with your life that you could be doing. There is so much potential, so you have to focus on what you can do with the equipment you have.
There is also a brief conversation where the philosopher claims there are no evil people in this world. I have had that perspective myself for a while. It is the behavior that is evil, and even for that behavior, the person who did it probably has a justification. The word "good" sounds moral, but here it just means beneficial, and "evil" just means non-beneficial. This ties into being unhappy and how you have chosen it for yourself: somewhere down the line, you judged that being unhappy was good for you, or beneficial for you.
The philosopher reframes personality and the way you live your life as simply a lifestyle. It is less about how you are something and more about how you see the world, what your view of the world is. The issue isn't that something is someone's personality, deeply ingrained within them. It is their view of the world, how they see it. It is just a way of living. It is a lifestyle, and you chose this lifestyle at some point in your life.
If this lifestyle and this personality were not given to you and you chose them, then surely you are able to choose a new lifestyle or a new personality all over again. The only reason you are unable to choose or change is that you are making the decision not to, because it is easier to leave things as they are.
If you stay just as you are, the experience you have gained from staying the same helps you respond properly to the same mundane events that keep occurring. You can predict things. It is like driving your old, familiar car. You know it might rattle a bit, it might have issues, but you are already anticipating them.
On the other hand, if you choose a new lifestyle, your brain stops being able to predict what might happen to this new self, because you have no experience from the past to draw on. You have no idea how to deal with events as they arise, and your life fills with anxiety. It is possible that a more painful and unhappy life lies ahead.
So people decide it is easier and more secure to stay the way they are. Mostly, it is that you lack the courage to be happy. The first step to changing is to make a conscious decision to stop your current lifestyle. Saying "if only such and such were the case" or "if only I could be like XYZ" is an excuse and a pass to never change. It is an impossible scenario that will never happen.
The philosopher gives the example of a friend who wants to be a writer but never does it. He makes excuses like "my job keeps me too busy" or "I never have enough time to work on it." Those are not the real reasons. The real reason is that he wants to leave the possibility of "I could do it if I tried" open. He doesn't want to put his work out there, expose it to criticism, or face rejection in case he produced something that was total slop and totally inferior.
These excuses will take different forms over time: "I'm not young anymore, I'm too old" as the years pass, or "I've got a family" once he has one. Rather than architecting and crafting all these excuses, you should just do the thing you want to do and see what happens. That is what changing your current lifestyle means. You will not get anywhere by not doing anything.
If you have a dream to become a novelist, as in the case of the philosopher's friend, it is clearly the self that is making life complicated and too difficult to live happily. If he were a novelist, he'd be happier, and he isn't happy right now because he wishes he were one. The only thing stopping him from putting a novel out there is his own self, coming up with all these excuses rather than just going and doing the thing.
It all boils down to this: no matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have absolutely no bearing on how you live your life from now on.