Podbit · The School of Greatness
Gary John Bishop didn't tell his mother he loved her from age 12 to age 40 — 28 years. At some point as a boy he took too many knocks and stepped off the field of his own family, becoming a spectator and judge instead of a participant. When he finally called her and said 'I love you,' he realised he had been carrying that same emotional wall straight into his marriage.
Where this was said
At 15:05 · chapter starts 14:15
At some point in childhood, Gary John Bishop describes stepping off the field of his own family — withdrawing from active participation into passive, critical observation. He stopped holding his mother's hand, stopped telling her he loved her, and instead began judging her parenting from a distance. For the next 28 years, their weekly phone calls were perfunctory check-ins: the neighbour's dog, the weather, never anything real. [1] — Gary John Bishop "Gary John Bishop didn't tell his mother he loved her from age 12 to age 40 — 28 years. At some point as a boy he took too many knocks and s…" 15:05 When he finally called her — fifteen years before this recording, at age 40 — and said 'I judged you for the way you raised me... I never knew what it was like for you... I love you,' he heard a silence, then her voice: 'I love you too, baby.' He describes his lips trembling as the words came out. In that moment, he saw clearly that he was not a loving man — not in the way his wife needed, not in the way his family needed. That realisation was the beginning of everything that followed.
Gary John Bishop credits his stereotypically stoic, independent Scottish cultural identity as a direct barrier to emotional vulnerability with his wife for much of their marriage.
Gary John Bishop did not tell his mother he loved her from age 12 until age 40 — a 28-year emotional wall that he says shaped his inability to be a loving husband.
After telling his mother he loved her for the first time in 28 years, Gary John Bishop called each of his three sisters. Some resisted, one stopped answering his calls. He tracked down a neighbour to get a message through and told his sister: 'You have no say in whether I love you or not.' Eventually it spread. Saying 'I love you' became a regular occurrence in a family where it had been absent for decades.
More freedom doesn't produce more happiness — it produces more anxiety. Kierkegaard identified this 180 years ago: the more options you have, the more you feel the 'dizziness of freedom,' a paralytic unease at having to choose any single one. The freest generation in history is, by his prediction, exactly the most anxious.
Every person lives in constant tension between infinite possible selves and the finite, limited self they actually are. Tipping too far toward infinite possibility produces a loss of identity; too much confinement in the finite produces stagnation. Kierkegaard argued that this tension is never solved — only managed.
Standing outside a cold pool imagining reasons not to jump is the exact experience of pre-commitment anxiety. Once you jump, the shock passes and you wonder why you ever hesitated. The same mechanism governs every significant commitment in life — the dread is always on the outside, the relief on the inside.
Traditional societies had rites of passage that closed off childhood and opened adulthood. Modern society kept the in-between liminal phase but eliminated the ritual that resolved it. The result is 'emerging adulthood' — a decade or more stuck in the transition — engineered by rising education requirements, women entering the workforce, and delayed marriage.
When Mark Manson proposed to his wife, software he didn't know was running — the low-level assessment of sexual market value and other options — suddenly shut down. Commitment doesn't take freedom away. It trades optionality (freedom to do many things) for focus (freedom from distraction). John Dewey called these positive and negative freedom, and the latter is more powerful.
Mark Manson spent years as a location-independent digital nomad — always a new country, a new woman, a new venture. Then the diminishing returns kicked in: countries started feeling the same, dates felt identical, businesses all frustrated him. The cure wasn't more novelty. It was narrowing: one place, one person, one career.
Every meaningful commitment has a dip — an initial peak of excitement, a brutal trough of difficulty, and a second higher peak for those who push through. Institutions once kept people in the dip long enough to reach the other side. With infinite optionality and no institutions, everyone bails at the bottom and restarts the cycle of shallow first peaks.
Stage one — the aesthetic — is the default: chasing sensation, novelty, and keeping every door open. Stage two — the ethical — is learning to choose with eyes wide open, accepting the trade-offs. Stage three — the religious — is when a commitment becomes so total that it no longer feels like a choice. It just feels like who you are.
The ethical stage is rational commitment — you can explain your choices. The religious stage is when your commitment exceeds rational justification. You can't explain why. It just feels like it chose you. Kierkegaard called this the 'virtue of the absurd' — and it's represented not just in faith but in the entrepreneurs, artists, and athletes who can't imagine doing anything else.
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