https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nkuJjfAw81U
And then the question is, well what are you leaving out if you’re leaving out responsibility? And the answer might be, well maybe you’re leaving out the meaning of life. Well if you took on all the responsibility you could take on, and you faced everything that you needed to face, what would you be like? Who would you be? And how would the world transform around you? If the partial answer is, well if I do that a little bit, things get a fair bit better, then the next question might be, well what if you did that completely? You know, perfection is a horizon that always recedes, but it isn’t obvious to me what the upper limit of that is. There’s a deep idea in the West too, it’s like pick up your damn suffering, and bear it. Well that’s a truth, you know. I read a lot about the terrible things that people have done to each other, you just cannot even imagine it. There’s this idea that hell is a bottomless pit, and that’s because no matter how bad it is, some stupid son of a bitch like you could figure out a way to make it a lot worse. So you think, well what do you do about that? Well you accept it, that’s what life is like, it’s suffering. Well so what do you do in the face of that suffering? Start with yourself, get yourself together for Christ’s sake, so that you can stand up solidly, so that people can rely on you. It’s like lift a load. Then you can tolerate yourself, right, because look at you, you’re useless, easily hurt, easily killed. Why should you have any self-respect? Pick something up and carry it. Make it heavy enough so that you can think, yeah well useless as I am, at least I could move that from there to there. It’s like, okay, what are you aiming for? Right, it’s the star. You can decide man, but you know there’s some criteria, it should be good for you in a way that facilitates you moving forward, maybe it should be good for you in a way that’s also good for the family and the community, it should cover the domain of life, I mean there’s constraints on what you should regard as a value, but within those constraints you have the choice. You have choice. The thing is that people will carry a heavy load if they get to pick the load, and they think, well I won’t carry any load. It’s like, okay fine, but then you’re gonna tear pieces out of your own legs because you’re bored. People are pack animals, they need to pull against a weight. That’s the secret to a meaningful life, and without a meaningful life then all you have is suffering, and nihilism and despair and all of that, and self-contempt, and that’s not good. The pathway to less suffering is through suffering. How do you make it worse? Run away. How do you make it better? Confront it. Yeah, but it’s suffering. It’s like, yeah, but it’s there. There it is, it’s right there. It’s a precondition for existence or something like that, and it’s like you have something important to do as well. When you see people bear their suffering nobly, there’s nothing in that but good, and you confront it, and that’s the pathway to transcending it.