Since reading Ray Peat's work and drastically improving my wellbeing—something that had been declining for years—I've been thinking more and more often about the phenomenon of learned helplessness and its relevance in my own life. Sometimes, looking back to past times can be useful to help reorient yourself in the present. In doing so, you can be better equipped to aim towards a more desirable future. Sometimes, a new perspective or experience might instantly obliterate previous behaviour without any concerted mental or physical gruntwork to eradicate it.

On the flipside, I have sometimes hopelessly tried to forcefully change my behaviour, employing all the en vogue self-help tricks to form long-term habits, only to lose them just as quickly as they formed in the months that followed. These kinds of experiences remind me of those hypnosis advertisements that claim they'll have you give up smoking after just a few sessions; sometimes it's even after just one visit. There's no short supply of miracle cure stories or reports of sudden, permanent breaks in addiction. Cold-turkey clean cuts that seem to arise with no obvious effort on the part of the addict, no signs of worn willpower.

When I was sixteen I spent six weeks abroad in a small town called Marburg in Hesse, Germany. I spent that time living with a new family along with my exchange student, Arne, who had been staying with my own family in Melbourne for the same period of time just prior. Those were six exciting weeks of school, new acquaintances, a new language (albeit one I had been "studying" in the Australian school system) and unfamiliar cultural quirks.

It was a barrage of stimulation, I came home every day from school and would collapse, totally exhausted, onto my exchange student's bed, which had been graciously given to me to use for the duration of my stay. Even tough I was utterly kaputt it's not like I was actually expected to learn anything or do any homework whilst I was at school here—I was basically on holidays and could really have just treated it as such. Plenty of my own classmates who had also been on a very similar trip certainly did. I'm not sure many of them learnt or used much German beyond "Wo ist McDonalds?" Thanks to a romantic summer fling, I had been gradually becoming more fascinated with the structure of German before arriving. Once there, the Deutsch on the blackboard looked more like a sophisticated puzzle game than a complete drag of a memorisation task, presumably aided by my younger, more language sensitive age at the time. Each day was a new game of detective guesswork, and better still, I got to play with new ideas about how the language works each day in the schoolyard with the new friends I was making. New ways to describe how things are situated in space, adverbs for how they move in relation to one another, mysterious new prefixes and other quaint linguistic quirks, like the insane backwards word order of German&em;unlimited entertainment to see if I was up to the challenge. I practically spent all my time in class ogling the immaculate chalk handwriting of the various teachers, I remember biology and German class in particular, and trying to work out what on Earth was going on. For some strange reason, it was a kind of bliss.

On top of this, I was in the grade just above mine back home in Australia. Whilst that really shouldn't have made much difference, the amount of responsibility and independence these kids were allowed to exercise at sixteen or seventeen was nothing short of amazing to me at that age. I had never seen anything like it. Some of my classmates would stand out the front of school during lunchtime and smoke a couple of cigarettes with their own teachers, something I find kind of insane still to this day; it certainly would never have been acceptable back at home. Starting in the senior school, you were allowed to just leave and go home if you didn't have anywhere to be, so long as you were back in time for class. And we did. School uniforms simply weren't part of the culture either. For everyone else this perhaps just meant stressful decision making, another way to play the oft cruel status games of teenagerhood, but for me it was like every day was casual dress day back home. To top it all off, the legal drinking age in Germany is sixteen, at least for wine, beer, and other weaker drinks.

These classmates of mine were running their own meetings headed by the Klassensprecher, the class representatives, and much unlike similar candidates back home, they actually seemed cool, they seemed like people I might like to hang out with and befriend. Alongside decision making regarding general classroom organisation, they would organise class bus trips: we saw a local band comprised of kids from the local schools, and for the first time in my life I drank alcohol along with everybody else there, just hanging out and left to our own devices. It was a sense of freedom and self-responsibility that wasn't afforded to me by the school system back home. Increasingly Australia, and especially Victoria, from which I hail, is branded as a "nanny state", and my experiences in Germany reinforce that.

I really felt like I was in the midst of some sort of Hollywood production, an atmosphere that didn't quite seem tangible in Australia. The intersection in the Venn diagram of taking on responsibility and having free reign was vanishingly small amongst teenagers. Either you wagged class and maybe did drugs, or you obediently followed the rules. As the years went by, the fine line between the two seemed to vanish further and further, at least that's how it looked from where I was standing.

Back in Australia, a routine had begun to solidify itself leading up to this trip. I would come home, maybe do homework, and then browse Reddit and play hours of Team Fortress 2. I had racked up an impressive 2000 hours in-game. It seemed fairly inconsequential to me, and my high school friends, unlike primary school, were mostly fragmented, and so on weeknights I didn't find myself hanging out with many people regularly. I did try to get Team Fortress working on the old computer my host family had in Germany, just for fun, but to no avail. However, even whilst attempting to get it set up, something about it began to seem like an entirely futile endeavour.

When I arrived back in Australia, it was as if a switch had been flipped. I all but stopped playing Team Fortress, a regular staple of my free time. Practically overnight it seemed to have turned from being an incredibly seductive way to pass the time to being a colossal waste of it. I just stopped playing cold turkey, and as far as I could tell, no effort went in to the dissolution of that habit whatsoever.

I'm not exactly sure what facet of my overseas trip pushed me to change my behaviour so effortlessly, but I think it was the culmination of all my experiences in that incredibly enriched environment. As I have looked back on those times over the past few years, especially since discovering Ray, I can't help but think that I found myself in a "rat park" experiment during that time. Or I perhaps I was one of the rats looking on, watching as others were freed from certain death by drowning. My habits in Australia suddenly seemed dull and useless, like I was stuck in what the Germans call a goldener Käfig or gilded cage; basically inescapably trapped in an environment forged by my own riches and good intentions. Participating in the foreign exchange program widened my horizons. I could see that what I was missing out on indeed was possible, and I had the power to change my lifestyle.

It would be nice if I could now say that I've since enjoyed a deeply enriched life and it has been smooth sailing from there on out, that this turning point in my life catapulted me into nirvana. But alas I wouldn't be a fan of Ray's if I never encountered a struggle or two along the way. But it seems to have profoundly changed the course of my life for the better. Ever since then, I've found it extremely difficult to waste my days away without having a sense of direction in my life. Although, this has been a source of anxiety, some time more than others. I certainly don't think I would have found it so simple to move abroad and continue to learn German whilst living, studying, and working in Munich for several years like I have been if I had never gone on that trip.

So I guess, in that respect, watching your fellow rats have a good time, in real life, might just get you to settle for no less. One look at those old menial habits and—poof—they're gone. And for that I'm grateful.