The Desert After Egyptian Enslavement

Things have to get worse before they can get better.

So what if you decide to leave your job? I won't lie. It's pretty scary. At first, you'll feel like you are so much worse than you were at your job. And that's perfectly normal. It's actually expected. This is where yet another story may make things clearer: The story of Moses and his people leaving Egyptian tyranny for the desert. Once again, I found the best guidance in Prof. Jordan Peterson's words. I highly recommend the following video.

Here's my excerpt of the most relevant ideas from it:

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Moses heeds this call and convinces the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. And so they leave tyranny. You might think: "once you get out of the tyranny, problem solved, right?"
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And that's not what happens in the story at all. What happens is that the Israelites go from the tyranny into the desert. And it's not obvious at all that the desert is an improvement over the Tyranny.
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It's also a very strange story...if you think about the story geographically, the desert that the Israelites were hypothetically wandering through isn't that big. And they're there for like 45 years.
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So you might think: "well we're better off in the bloody tyranny"...Because maybe knowing exactly what you should be doing all the time is preferable to not knowing what the hell is going on... ever
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The Israelites are wandering around there for like decades. And they fight amongst themselves.... they also become faithless... they lose their faith in the god that called them out of Egypt. And so you could say they lose faith in the principle of freedom.
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So the Israelites are worshiping all these false idols. And God's getting upset about this. And he sends a bunch of poisonous snakes...to bite them... Which seems kind of heavy-handed. Because the poor Israelites, they're thinking: tyranny, desert, snakes, you know? Enough.
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Seems like too much. But doesn't matter because you'll find yourself in your life at times when you've gone out of the Tyranny into the desert and you're suffering plenty and then the snakes come and you're suffering even more.
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The Israelites get together, go to Moses and say: "Look, we get it. Can you have a chat with God? Get him to call off the snakes?"... Moses says: "I'll see what I can do."... he goes and has a chat with God... God has a perfect opportunity there to just get rid of the snakes. But that isn't what happens. And that's...extremely strange... God...says something almost incomprehensible instead.

God tells Moses: "Take the staff and... cast a snake in bronze (so make a sculpture)... put the staff in the ground... and have the Israelites go look at the snake. And if they do that, then they won't be poisoned when they get bitten.". The Israelites go and look at...the snake. And then they're not poisoned anymore.

It's not obvious at all what to do with that story. But here's what you do with it if you're a clinical psychologist... We've learned a couple of things as clinicians...

One, honest speech cures people...the truth sets you free... That's one thing that clinicians have all converged on regardless of their school...

And here's another: If you voluntarily confront what you're afraid of... you don't get less afraid... you get braver. And that's better than less afraid... if it's just less afraid, you'd have to expose yourself to every single thing you were ever afraid of... But if you got braver... you'd be better off in facing all of the things you're afraid of.

Well that's what happens in the desert: God could have just called off the snakes. But he seems to have made a decision that: "No. The snakes are there and there's nothing that can be done about them. But you can make people a hell of a lot better than they are. And one of the ways you do that is by encouraging them to voluntarily confront the things they're afraid of."

Here are a couple of analogies that I've found useful to see things clearer and gather the courage to take the jump while having the right expectations:

• Muscles literally break before they become bigger and stronger.
• Some forests must burn to spread the seeds of new trees.
• The Israelites had to wander in the desert for decades after leaving Egypt and before getting a better life.

Improvement requires sacrifice, usually of that which is not sufficient. Improving yourself means sacrificing the part of yourself that just isn't cutting it. Improvement is painful. Depending on how much you've improved, you'll feel like you are not the same person. In some ways that's true: you will have let the insufficient part of you die. There's no other way around it. There's no fooling life.

Now that we've talked about what you may be moving away from and what you should expect after taking the jump, I'll give my advice on what to aim for.