DailyJim: What if we saw emotional health as a public good?

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024. Today I want to talk about what if we saw emotional health as a public good.

So, what do I mean by emotional health? It can be more like a health like the current status of our body. It can be our ability to resolve conflict. It can be the well-being. It could be the love that we feel. It can be just the various levels of excitement or aliveness that we feel, the vitality that we feel compared to the lack of vitality, the almost zombie, indifferent, apathetic nature. It can be empathy. It can be so many different ways to describe it. And actually in this episode, I don't care too much how we describe it because it's more about just the overall work related to emotions and our status related to emotions and relationships and all these things. So that's one aspect. And then public good, what do I mean by public good? And maybe not a pure public good, but maybe something that is more of a public good. So something that they say is like a public good. There's many different definitions, but one of them is that it is collectively decided, collectively funded, and I think benefits all or most people. It can bring benefit to them. And maybe that definition can be debated. But so the idea is, what if we looked at this as something that was a collective good? Um i think a lot of times in my work people have told me oh you should just charge for your classes so i ran a class today emotional combat class online um had four people show up i was excited to have them people from kenya from uh and someone in france and um.

One of the participants told me, you know, that the exercise that we did really helped them reflect on a relationship that they're in right now and start to see the situation from the other person's perspective. And I was like, wow. Because here's the thing. If this person takes the class, they learn skills that, yes, help them directly, help them in a very private sense. But if this person learns these skills, has these realizations about the other person in their life, how can that transform the other person? Maybe this helps the other person a lot. So it's not private specifically to one individual. Maybe it's private to two individuals. But what if that person is also running an organization? Now this person is better at imagining how other people might be feeling and realizing that other people are going through lots of conflicts at the same time. This person, just the one person by taking the class, may impact the person that they are romantic with. It may impact the people that they are managing in their business. It could impact the people in their family. It could impact the people in their church or their religious affiliation. It could impact a lot of people just by that one person changing. So is it really, is it a private good? Is it a private service that I'm delivering living to a private individual? Or is it a service that is being delivered to a local public or a regional or national public, depending on who the person is? So is the benefit only going to the private individual? I doubt it. I rarely, rarely doubt that if someone gets better at these skills, If someone gets better, feels more vitality in their life, that it stops with them.

Just like if we look at public health as a public good or a public need, right? So we can, you have public services or goods and maybe you have public needs and wants. So if you look at a public need of COVID, when so many people were dying, a public good or a public service was vaccination. And the idea was to go out and vaccinate people, even if people couldn't afford it, or if they could. So even if they could afford it, so like here in the US, I think COVID vaccinations were free for almost everyone. I can't remember people paying for a COVID vaccination. Maybe that's just from my blessed situation, but I don't think so. I think the government was giving them out for free. I think I got one, yeah, in COVID tests as well. I remember getting a test at the county. I didn't have to pay for it. I had to drive out there, but they gave the test for free. And then thinking about smallpox, I remember reading yesterday about smallpox and how that That was considered a public need, that the eradication of smallpox was a public goal, a public service, a public good, public need, whatever we want to call it, because the existence of smallpox anywhere was a threat for anyone to get smallpox. And so the idea was we need to eradicate it. And to the extent that, I can't remember the country, but there's some country, maybe somewhere in Asia or in Africa, where many organizations and richer countries paid and came in and vaccinated tons of people to make sure that smallpox was gone. Because there is a collective benefit in getting rid of smallpox everywhere. I would argue there's a collective benefit in reducing depression or whatever you want to call it, increasing the vitality of human beings, increasing the connectedness that we have, increasing the cooperation, increasing the desire to live, increasing the courage to dream, increasing the unity that we have across the planet. I believe that is a huge collective goal. The huge public need, a huge public dream in a way that.

It's not a private service. It's not a private good. It's not a private dream. It's not a private benefit. And so when people look or ask me, well, why don't you just be a therapist? Or why don't you just, because I don't believe so much in the model of this being a private good. Yes, there are therapists who may get paid by the government to deliver services for free, but there sure are not that many. The model has not really evolved to that. And even if it did, that's not the only way to help people with emotions and conflict resolution is to have one-on-one therapy sessions now there's group therapy there's other ways but we can innovate we can come up with new ways to approach this public need, and i think i was reading it said and i think i talked about it yesterday that governments often and fulfill these public needs. And if they don't, then nonprofits jump in to try to fill the gap and address the unaddressed public needs. But if they don't, who jumps in? If we have a huge emotional health crisis, if we have a huge polarization, apathy, drug addiction.

War crisis happening around this planet, disconnection from nature, and therefore for all these problems that we're having because we're overlooking and becoming apathetic to nature. If we have all of these public needs that are not currently being addressed by government and not currently being addressed by nonprofits, who jumps in to do it? That's why I really like this idea of crowd employment. People can jump in and other people can support them and say, hey, I think what you're working on is really important. I think it's a very important public service that needs to be done because we have a huge public need that's not being addressed. Here, I'm going to collectively help you, not just with money, but with many resources so that we can try to collectively solve this problem. And I believe you have an innovative approach to try to take this on. So, I think I have very often seen the work that I do as a public service, as a public need, as a public good. And so many people have told me, but why don't you just do it as a private good? You know, a lot of people would pay a lot of good money for that. There are a lot of rich people who really, I'm like, yes, I know. But even somebody who is rich, who can afford to pay a lot of money, if they pay for it directly, it becomes more of a private good. If they don't pay for it, then I can just give it to them because I realize giving it to them is so important, not just for them, but for their family, for their neighbors, their community, and the much larger community in general, that I want to give it to them. I want to help so that I can help so many people. I don't want to just help a handful of people. I want to help in an expansive way. And often the way to resolve these public needs is to either give services for free or is to give services at a highly discounted rate. And then have those services collectively funded elsewhere, or even by the same people, but not funded directly for it. And um so i'm really excited to start classifying the work that i do to start classifying the need with regards to emotions with regards to emotional health with regards to emotional literacy with regards to however we want to call it emotional skills conflict resolution love to see that work as a public need and to try to address it with a public service, an innovative way to address some of these things and to come up with new ways to address these public needs. So I hope that makes sense for you. I feel a lot more motivated and clear in how I'm going to describe this. And so it's not about me going off and making a lot of money. It's about me addressing a public, making a lot of money from private individuals. It's about me addressing a public need and asking individuals to collectively come together and support me and support us in addressing this public need. So, all right. Talk to you all tomorrow.