#95 - Death by 1,000 Cuts
“Our lives are the sum total of the choices we have made.” - Dr. Wayne Dyer
We often look back on our lives and see how our big decisions have greatly shaped our current state and situation. But when we finally realize that the small choices we are making can affect our lives and shape our future, we become more careful about choosing what’s the best decision to make.
Even in terms of sexual integrity, a lot of people look at the results in their life without realizing that that one decision was influenced and even triggered by one small action in the past.
Your simple habits or routines can create a vibrant spiritual life. Think about the food that you're eating, the thoughts you're having, or even the music that you listen to because all these add up to you being radiant and bringing life or death to the different areas of your day-to-day life.
All these great moments in our lives are a result of all the sound decisions we have made in the past.
In this episode, we will be unpacking the concept of death by 1,000 cuts. It’s a concept about how our small decisions can add up and shape who we are as an individual. How our routines, habits, and decisions can affect us long-term and how these small decisions lead to that one big domino effect.
Learn more about this concept, take control, assess your life and see where you're cutting yourself down and change your habits to preserve healthy relationships and maintain sexual integrity in Episode 95!
The concept of death by 1,000 cuts
How every single decision leads you to a good or miserable life
The gratitude habit
Creating a routine and good habits
Shifting our perspective in life
Stimulating wonderful emotions to do something productive
How these small decisions create a huge effect
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love
Welcome back to Love, Life, and Legacy, a podcast dedicated to helping you navigate these hypersexualized times of ours. And in today's episode, Benjy and I are unpacking this concept of death by 1000 cuts. You see, when we make big decisions in our life, we're not just coming in with zero momentum. We have the momentum of all these small decisions that led up to that moment where we're faced with a big decision. And so, a lot of people, when they look at their sexual integrity, when they look at the results in their life, look at these key moments without realizing that they wouldn't have made the decisions that they made, they wouldn't have done the actions that they did without many small decisions on the way. And so death by 1000 cuts is how we undermine our potential by doing a lot of lazy things, or how we undermine intimacy by making a lot of small judgments of the other person. So conversely, the opposite would be true as well. You can uplift somebody with many small positive comments. You can create a vibrant spiritual life by putting down your phone throughout the day and praying, or doing many small deeds to feel closer to God. So it's all within your power. And if you want to learn more about this topic, and basically, take control of your life, then please join us in today's podcast.
Andrew Love
Welcome back, everybody, to the podcast. My name is Andrew Theodore Roosevelt Love I. And I'm with...
Benjy Uyama
Benjamin Kosuke Youngshin Uyama.
Andrew Love
I respect you so much more when you say your name like that. You got to be monotone like that. It's just really like you're a samurai. We are here today, as always, to wrap our heads around something that we know will help your journey in building sexual integrity and building heavenly intimacy. And one thing that I've been observing like crazy is this idea of death by 1000 cuts. Because I know that so many of you out there, end up in situations that you don't understand. You end up watching porn. You wake up, I'm not gonna watch porn today. And then you watch porn, and like, how did that happen? You think it's one thing that happened that led you to this event when in fact it was hundreds, if not 1000s of micro-decisions that added up to an overall experience. And that happens to us all the time. Not just with porn, but with all varieties of things like our body image is a series of choices of how we sit, what we eat, how much we do or don't exercise, or all this. But also, to the positive. All the great moments in our life are a byproduct of a bunch of good decision-making. So we wanted to get into that and unpack that so that you can see that life is not trying to get it all right like it's a test. Like you're cramming for a test, and if you do well on the test, then you pass and you can be okay. And if you fail, then you're dead. No, it's like every single moment is an opportunity to either lead yourself towards some ultimate good life or some miserable life. So Benjy, do you have any of these death by 1000 cuts? Things that you do either judging people or what's your poison?
Benjy Uyama
What's my poison? This is a good thing for me, personally, for getting personal. And maybe we'll talk about helping other guys in my groups. But for me, it's a challenge, honestly, because I am not a maintenance kind of guy. Maybe, Andrew, you're more like, you can do the daily discipline. You can do the routines. I have to change things up, I really do have to do something for a few weeks, and then try to change up my schedule, my habits. It's something I'm not really proud of, honestly. I tend to feel like if I just change my mindset, if I just have this change of environment, or have a new thing or a new car or not, or move to a new house, or maybe when it's my birthday. When I turn this age, and maybe the new year and then next month, and then I'll just change. Everything will be hunky-dory. But I often find that I personally do need those disciplines. Something I do try my best to keep up is a daily gratitude every morning of just writing it down as soon as the instant I wake up. And that's, I guess, an example of something that's really small. It takes maybe five seconds, or five to ten seconds honestly to whip out my phone and just jot down what I am grateful for right now. Personally, that sets me up for a really good morning. That sets my mood up to be not about how I didn't sleep well last night or the kids, or this or that. But it's more about, okay, even if I didn't sleep well, what am I grateful for? I'm grateful that I did sleep, that I do have a functional body. I have functioning lungs. And that the sun comes up every morning. I think it's incredible. It still blows my mind. You know, things like that. And it's a small example, but it definitely affects me in the long term for sure.
Andrew Love
Well, I guess that's a good point. We can elaborate on that point because it sounds like there's a lot of little things and then there are bigger things. So let's say this gratitude habit that you have in the morning is like you orienting yourself in the morning. So you're like, I want to be grateful. And you start the process of being grateful by writing it down. And then that helps you be more grateful throughout the day. When you have the opportunity to complain, you're probably less likely to complain if you've started today in gratitude. So it's like a big domino. We can call it big dominoes, little dominoes. So you're talking about restlessness. In the beginning, you were talking about, you'd like to switch things up all the time. I was thinking the whole time that you're saying that, I hope Benjy never becomes a multi-hundred of a millionaire. Benjy just got a baseball glove implanted to his face. So there's a restlessness in you. I'm talking more about, that could be the result of you ending up switching things a lot. But even what leads up to that, those are like bigger slashes. I'm talking about little teeny tiny cuts that undermine you from being happy. What are small things that you do that undermine your happiness?
Benjy Uyama
I would say limiting mindsets about myself. I think that's where the snowball starts.
Andrew Love
Got it.
Benjy Uyama
And we've talked about this before, Andrew is that I tend to be really hard on myself especially when I make mistakes in my eyes or judge myself for being upset or angry or impatient with my kids, especially with my wife. Outside of my family, I'm generally pretty civil. But the people that are closest to me that I invest a lot of time and energy into, when I do get frustrated or upset or lash out at someone, I take it really hard on myself. And then I just spiral into like, I'm just a terrible person. And when I do that, I tend to take that frustration on myself onto other people. And I do tend to spiral in starting like, oh, I need to change stuff up, or I need to be different. I need to do a new routine or something instead of just accepting that that's how I am sometimes, and just working on it. But living with it at the same time, if that makes sense. So that's it. A very small thing I do, that slight thought I have after I get frustrated at, okay, so I'm really energetic with my kids. We'll go wrestle or go on the trampoline of a boy and a girl, and we go to the park with my wife. l like to hug her and just squeeze her in the morning. And then if I'll get hit in the face or something, and I just get like, oh, Jesus Christ or like a curse or whatever, this final thing comes out at me. Or like when I'm really tired in the morning, and a kid jumps on me or something. And chuck my son and finger cross a bit. Things like that. And then in those instances, it's like, I'm a terrible person. I can't believe I did that. I'm really ruining it. So I'm putting a lot of hypothetical meaning into what I'm doing. Like, oh, this is ruining my life. This is ruining my kids and our future. But it's not really based on anything that's current or present.
Andrew Love
So being very critical of yourself and other people, and putting a lot on them. It sounds like you're giving a lot of your energy and attention, but maybe borderline too much to where it's not healthy. And maybe you need somebody to go arm wrestle with or something. Get some of that energy out. Yes, that's interesting. Okay, so this is important to know if this idea of death by 1000 cuts, that could be the death of a relationship. It could be the death of your inspiration. Death of, I don't know, any number of things that you care about. It's like a metaphor. So for me, for sure, death by 1000 cuts is represented by my criticisms as well. I can be very critical of the people, especially my wife, the people closest to me, I'll observe audibly. I'll say it out loud. Like, oh, so you wearing that today? What am I doing? Why am I doing this right now? And I'm just criticizing her fashion. And like, who am I? And this totally kills intimacy. Those are bigger ones, obviously, if I were to say that it's because I'm completely out of line. But there's a lot of even looks that you can give to somebody else, or the lack of warmth. These are all small jabs, and small cuts that will kill the feeling of closeness with somebody else. And it happens a lot more easily than we can imagine. So for me, for sure, it's criticism with my wife. And I guess criticism with myself as well. It's like, it kills the mojo when I'm criticizing myself for not being somewhere I feel I should be in life, and I'm just focusing on that. Count my motivation dead, because if I've already failed, then what's the point in going forward? But I can observe that in myself. So I wanted to bring up some examples from other people too. I want everybody to really get this point, and to try to assess your own life and see where you're cutting yourself down.
Andrew Love
This one guy that is in one of my groups, was talking about how he acts out, always in the middle of the night. It's never during the day. It's always when he’s supposed to be sleeping but can't sleep. And so this issue of sleep popped up, and I realized how important a really proper sleep routine is. You're talking about routines, but for your whole life. And how having a bad erratic, sporadic sleep schedule can screw you up in so many different ways. And just think about that. That's a big domino. It's like, I always look at my phone until too late at night. I don't get enough sleep, and the quality of my sleep is bad, so I'm not very functional when I wake up. I'm cranky, then I'm not really functional during the day and are a lot less functional. So just that one thing of like, okay, well, why don't you go to bed when you say you want to go to bed? And why do you watch videos right before bed? There's a lot of little things in that one big thing. I'm saying this because guys and gals, everybody's listening, if you can look at an area of your life and you find these big dominoes, that big dominoes made up of many small dominoes. So if it's sleep or if it's criticism, like I go back to myself. If it's me criticizing my wife, there are many different reasons why I would be critical of my wife because I'm not happy. It's because I didn't exercise that day. It's because I didn't eat the right foods that day. It's because I didn't pray enough that day. There are many possible reasons why that led to this big domino of me saying something stupid, that is thus killing intimacy in my marriage.
Andrew Love
So in your building of an ideal, if you're working on a North Star goal and there's something that's preventing you, first of all, I think most people honestly don't know what's preventing them until they start investigating. But then it starts to become more obvious. Oh my God, I keep on making similar mistakes. And that becomes your big domino, negative domino. And then you're like, well, if that's true then what's that big domino made up of? All these little habits, thoughts, patterns that are inside that big resulting habit.
Benjy Uyama
Yes. We're talking about tiny minute examples and habits people have. One is like, people who really struggle with going down the rabbit hole of sexual content. Instagram is a big trigger for a lot of people. This is an example. And of the guys that I work with, many of them are on Instagram. And I asked him, why? Why on God's green earth do you need to be on a platform that is not causing you any productivity? It's just causing you harm and self-doubt. And some people are like, oh, because I need it for work. But if you really ask them, why do you spend time doing things in your free time that are unhealthy for you? It's because of a lack of priority, a lack of honesty with yourself, and a lack of just motivation to stop and do something different and more productive. I think it really clears up how in line someone is with their integrity. What do you do when you have free time? You know, we're talking about looking at phones at night. When you have downtime after work or after school or whatever, what's the first thing that you do after you close your computer at night? Is it to go directly to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram? Or is it to watch your favorite show? Or is it to do something that you really care about? And I think this is where the North Star really comes into play.
Benjy Uyama
If your North Star really is true, if it's really something that you are striving for and are excited for, then it would be the first thing that you do. It's on the top of your mind. This is really like on top of your mind, top of your priorities throughout your day is investing in that. And it's hard. The reality is that a lot of us are in situations where work or school take priority, or family obligations take priority, and we don't have a lot of energy or time at the end of the day to do things that are important or productive. And so, the natural thing to do is try to escape that fatigue and escape that difficulty, and just go to some platform to help escape and use it as a crutch. Oftentimes, pornography itself. But if we try to shift the perspective on life to realize that there are things that we can do with the time that is exciting and good for us, that is good for us and healthy, and we enjoy doing it. I think that's the ultimate combination. It's like with diet and food. If you can find a food that is so good and so healthy, and you could just eat it all day and never get bored of it, you found gold. You struck gold. For me, that's like peanut butter on an oatmeal cookie that my wife makes. Oatmeal cookies, that's my safe haven right there, with a little glass of almond milk. I can eat that all day every day, and never get bored of it. And it's good for me. So that kind of thing.
Andrew Love
Yes, it's true. Because we were talking that we haven't figured out an exact antithesis, but we're thinking that, what would the opposite of death by 1000 cuts be? It'd be loved by 1000 kisses or 1000 hugs, something like that. So then how do you go throughout your day and make 1000 right decisions so that your day can add up to this ultimate crescendo, this kind of APEX where you have new experiences, you have new thoughts, you have a new motivation? That's super available to anybody. But in reality, if you were to assess your day, if you were to scrape through it with a fine-tooth comb, and you look at every thought you had in the day, and you're like, was it productive or unproductive? I would say, most of us most of the time have unproductive thoughts, pretty low-hanging emotions, pretty numb spiritual experience, and our body's pretty sedentary. It's not very active, not very healthy. So then how do you up the ratio? If most of your day, let's say, 85% to 90% of your days you have useless thoughts, barely any emotions, your spirits are pretty much asleep and your body hasn't moved, then how do you up that scale and start having better thoughts? That stimulates wonderful emotion that makes you want to stand up and do something about it, that moves your spirit into action that causes your body to want to become a vehicle for something good. How can you start to up that ratio from say, 90% bad to 20% good? Do you go from 10% to 20% to 30%, and then half and half. And then half of your day is spent on fire, and the other half is suffering. But it's still better than most of the days of suffering, and you need to just up the ratio until you have just one whole day where you've lifted yourself up. You fought that battle of redirecting your mind every time like a little dog that's trying to eat garbage. I don't know if you guys haven't had a dog. My sister had a dog, and she was feeding it organic chicken throats. It's so expensive. It's like a treat for him. And then he would race to the park and eat poo off the ground, or whatever. She kept on telling like, no, you stop that. That's our mind. It's like we have all these amazing scriptures and all these cool things that we want to feed our mind, and it just wants to go to Instagram. And so to redirect it to bring it back again and again. You're training it. And the more that you do it, the easier it becomes. And then one by one, you'll start having an amazing whole day that goes flawlessly.
Andrew Love
I swear to you, it happens. I tried this about a year ago, Benjy. And my goal, I set the intention to have one perfect day. Not perfect when everything goes my way, but I just feel high all day. I'm just so happy, and it happened. And then for the next week, I actually had a headache. I'm so not used to it. I was like, oh my god, what happens next? What happens is you try to have two days, and three days. You try to have a whole week like that where your situation, your circumstances might change a lot. But that you are the same, you are committed to keeping your thoughts and your emotions in line with this ultimate idea. And if you do that, it's just a thousand small decisions that you have to make. Not one big decision, but many, many small decisions that lead to that one big domino.
Benjy Uyama
So what is it for you? What are your thousand kisses?
Andrew Love
So for me, I've really been constructing it. I've figured out a perfect morning. As much as I don't want to admit it because it's like a commitment. I have to get up at 5:35 in the morning. It's pretty specific. Earlier than that, if it's 5:30, it feels too early. If it's 5:45, I feel like I've slept in. And what I do is I'll experiment with it, I'll do that for five days in a row. And then I'll sleep in. I'll sleep until seven, or whenever my kids wake up. And I guarantee, every single time I do that I feel like crap. Even though I'm sleeping more, I don't feel good. So I get up and I go to the gym fasted. I didn't eat anything at this time, and then I go to the gym and I come back. And then I have a black coffee sitting on a chair looking out into the world by myself together with God. So having coffee with God. And I do all this before my kids wake up. And by that time my body feels like, I don't know how to describe it. You know when somebody really loves hugs you and you just feel like the cells in your body feel stimulated. All of them, like your whole body, feel amazing. That's how I feel now when I'm sitting on that chair having a coffee with God.
Andrew Love
So I figured out my morning. But the problem is now, depending on when I start to eat in the morning, my energy dips. So now I'm trying to figure out mornings, and then afternoons. I'm trying to really construct this day. When to go to bed, and all this stuff, and how many times to pray. I realize I don't pray enough and I don't meditate enough throughout the day. I only do it in the morning and at night. But during the day, I'm like a star. So I'm working on it, and because that impacts how I talk to my wife. I swear to you. This morning, I made all the kids' lunches. I got them all dressed. I was like a super dad, and then I sent them off. They all went to school together. And then I came and just meditated, and it was perfect. I have so much clarity, so much energy because I've found the morning routine that works for me at this point in my life. It took me a long time to figure that out and took me even longer just to do it. That's the other thing, you guys. You'll sometimes realize something like, I knew I should get up at that time but then it took me a couple of months to admit it like, fine. Because I kept on trying to do it another way, and there's no other way. That's the way that I'm supposed to do.
Benjy Uyama
What time do you go to sleep?
Andrew Love
I'm working on that. My sleep is all over the place because I have a little kid who’s still sneaking into our bed and wakes me up in the middle of the night. So I've experimented with that. I go to bed at 10 pm, you know what happened? I woke up at 1 am, and I was wide awake. I was like, oh, this sucks.
Benjy Uyama
Like a nap?
Andrew Love
Yes.
Benjy Uyama
Midnight nap.
Andrew Love
It's terrible. So I really have to go to bed at 11 pm or so, six and a half hours of sleep. So all this stuff, this sounds very external but it's putting yourself in a state to be like a lightning rod for God. And when the lightning strikes, you can do so much with that energy. And I want to do this so that I'm in an optimal state for the people who need me, my mind and energy, and everything's available to them. So please think about this, guys. Think about the food that you're eating. Think about the thoughts that you're having, the music that you listen to. All these add up to you being radiant, that's a huge thing here at High Noon, to be a radiant individual, to form a radiant couple, to form a radiant family. None of that's possible if you're mentally stagnant, or if you're spiritually stuck, or if you're emotionally just rotting away, or if your body's sick, you have to be really in an optimal peak form. So we challenge you, and that's all thousands of decisions throughout the day, thousands of kisses from God.
Benjy Uyama
Yes, I'll just add kisses from God. For me, my North Star recently has been pretty specific, I would say. I want to be someone that is comfortable being myself everywhere I go. Something that I never really identified is something I struggled with. But I always felt like it was a gift that I had, it's useful to be able to mold to the scenario, situation, or people. But it's also very limiting because I find myself when I'm with people that are a lot older than me, for example, or I'm with people with a different perspective on things, I try to play with my cards close to my chest. And it's really limiting, I think, in terms of the conversations that are able to happen. And also, it's very uncomfortable. It's very exhausting. After meeting somebody new that's really different from me, that was great, but man, I'm so tired.
Benjy Uyama
After meeting my neighbor, it's just like, the world perspective is so different. But I do want to be someone that can learn how to adapt, and how to have conversations with people from all over. And I know it's exhausting, I'm not saying that I can't hold a conversation, but it's tiring. And I just don't feel comfortable. But I want to be comfortable, and I want to be able to be like that. And even Uncle David told me, we're having a conversation and he said, Benjy, you've got a lot of great things going for you. I'm talking about David Wolfenberger, and he's like, but you're very uptight a lot of the time. And I was like, really? I don't think I'm uptight at all. My perspective of myself is like, I'm pretty laid back and just goofy. But his perception of me, which is really eye-opening, is that I'm really uptight because I am around Uncle Dave. I really am really tensed, really not myself, I feel. And I really don't like that, honestly. And it's like, I feel some people don't get to know the true me or the God-given me. And so anyway, that's my North Star. The little kisses of life that I'm giving myself are, I'm sure still trying to figure it out. But for me, I need to, actually, I'm the opposite of you, Andrew. I was going to call you uncle, Uncle Andrew. But I need to sleep eight hours at night regardless of what time I go to bed. So I just let myself sleep however much I need. I do try to wake myself up early. And every time I do that, I haven't figured it out yet, maybe when I'm a little older like you, I'll figure that out.
Andrew Love
I might be old but all the people think...
Benjy Uyama
You're not. You're not old, don't worry. But at some point, I will want to have a, yes, I'll try that 5:35 and go to the gym, come back and drink coffee with God. That sounds awesome. Right now, I feel a lot more clear and intentional when I do sleep well. And I just let my kids. Sometimes in the morning, they're needy or they're fighting, or I can hear them getting up and going about their day. And I feel really guilty like, oh, I should go help. But then sometimes I just let them go and be like, alright, I'm just going to sleep and let them figure it out. And when I do that, I just feel a lot better. I feel a lot less stressed. And that works for me, personally. So that's like a little thing. But yes, I have a lot of North Star, a few North Stars. One of them is related to my wife, it's just having a really consistent intimate life with her. You were talking about the climax, like what is the apex? Literally, it's just having sex with my wife at night. And it's like my daily mission is to just play my cards right and try not just to have sex, but have a really intimate lovemaking experience with her. And what that looks like is really doing the small things, like you said, throughout the day. Not criticizing, giving her a hug in the morning even if she doesn't want it. Sleeping next door like we tend to sleep, we have this bed and sometimes we sleep on opposite sides of the bed. And then a few weeks ago, I just started sleeping, touching her, literally sleeping right next to her like actually feeling each other all night. And that's actually really changed a lot. Our mood in the morning and our vibe, it's like we feel a lot more connected with each other just by sleeping while touching each other. Things like that.
Andrew Love
Interesting. I don't know if I told you but when we first got married, my wife wanted to sleep face-to-face. And I lasted 13 seconds before I was like, this is the worst thing I've ever experienced. You're way too close to me. No, but that sounds really cool. I like that. When you're with somebody for a long time, you realize that death by 1000 cuts or that love by 1000 kisses is so true based on how you feel about that person that you live with at the end of the day, because life takes you all over the place. And if you do play your cards right and you invest in the right thoughts and right emotions, then you're more in love with that person at the end of the day than you were at the beginning of the day. And if not, you just want to sleep in a different universe than them. You're just investing in killing this intimacy.
Andrew Love
Everybody, we hope this is helpful. It's clearly a metaphor, but it's a very useful one because it's basically, you're either bringing life or death to the different areas of your day-to-day life based on the thousands of decisions that you make from moment to moment. So even if you make a bad decision, don't worry, it's not the end of the world. Just keep on training that dog to stop eating garbage and to go for the organic chicken necks as the metaphor goes. To stop choosing the garbage thoughts and garbage emotions and lazy spirit, and to go for the good stuff, the stuff that you deserve. So good luck with that. That's our assignment for the week for you. Enjoy. And if you have any questions, and if you try this stuff out, please let us know. Reach out to us. We'd love to tell your story on this podcast. We'd love to tell you your testimony. So please reach out to us, go to our website. Thank you guys so much. Talk to you next time.
Andrew Love
I hope you found that episode was enjoyable. And before we go, I wanted to challenge you to take your life on. To take your life to the next level. And if you're struggling in any way with pornography, with masturbation, with issues of sexuality that just are not helping you at all. If you want to reclaim your life, reclaim your eyes and ears, your time, your energy, then take our free 15-Day Challenge. If you go to highnoon.org, you can find our 15-Day Challenge right there on the front page. Take it. It's absolutely free. No strings attached. We've designed it to help you gain some level of momentum in your journey of sexual integrity so that you can take the next step, whatever that may be. It could be to go to our deeper ascend program, which is a 90-day program we have. It could be to reach out to that accountability partner. It could be to just take whatever steps you need to take in your journey to build the life of heavenly sexuality that you deserve. So go to highnoon.org, right now. If you want to break up with porn and start to get engaged with the life of your dreams, and eventually marry it. Doesn't it sound nice? So go to highnoon.org to find all of those resources and more. It's been a slice.