https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5Aoy08tjHlg
It’s funny that philosopher Kierkegaard, you don’t usually hear a joke that starts like that by the way, he wrote 150 years ago and he was one of the first people who really wrote about anxiety. He was one of the first psychological philosophers and he regarded himself as rather useless, all things considered. He wrote a section in one of his books about all the industrialists that were operating in Europe at that time, trying in every possible way to make life easier and easier and more efficient and productive for everyone, which was definitely happening during the Victorian period and Europe was rapidly transforming into an industrial powerhouse. And he said someone as useless as him with an orientation towards being a student who liked to sit and contemplate ideas and talk in cafes and smoke cigars and drink could never do anything to make anything easier for anyone and everyone was already trying to make it and so he thought that his task would be to make things more difficult for people because there would come a time when what people wanted wasn’t more ease but more challenge and more difficulty and that’s really smart, you know, and it’s witty and it’s true and one of the things that I’ve come to understand, I believe, is that And Dostoevsky knew this too. He wrote about this in Notes from Underground. It’s a great book, very short book, brilliant, absolutely brilliant, compelling, dark read. It’s the confession of a miserable, resentful, like murderously genocidal bureaucrat who evaluates his own soul, I suppose, and confesses his sins. It’s also a critique of the idea of utopia oriented towards security and Dostoevsky, who was dealing with the set of ideas that are really tearing us apart culturally right now, this idea of eventual utopia based on something like security and safety. Dostoevsky really objected to that back in this, like, 1860, a long time ago. He said, you know, the thing about people that you don’t really understand is that, he said, fundamentally we’re ungrateful and we can curse. That’s what distinguished us from the animals, which I thought was pretty damn comical, but he said something very interesting, you know. He said, if you set up a utopia so that all people had to do was eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, that, yeah, right, Russian humor, you know, that after a surfeit of that, after enough of that, which would happen quite quickly, people would just go mad just to break things, just so something unexpected and remarkable could happen and that we’re not built for security and safety, but for something, well, let’s call it adventure, something like adventure. That’s a good thing to know, you know, because you don’t want to suffer unduly. That seems reasonable. And you might think because of that that really what you want is happiness, but then Solzhenitsyn, for example, he wrote about what happened in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin and said, you know, if your goal is happiness, what are you going to do when the jackboots hammer down your door at two in the morning and haul you off to the prison camp because you’re not going to be happy there? And so, you know, happiness is a boat that’s easily capsized and the waves are always there, and so if your philosophy is one of, say, impulse of happiness, same sort of thing Dostoevsky was pointing at and Kierkegaard, then you’re not prepared when all hell breaks loose and all hell, it will absolutely 100% break through at some point in your life and you’re lucky if it won’t be decades, you know, it’ll certainly be some of it and it might be a lot of it and for some of you it’s going to be damn near the whole thing. And so if what floats your boat is happiness, you’re going to be capsized by the first decent wave and so then you might ask yourself, you know, what do you have instead of happiness that might be even more reliable and I do think that adventure is more reliable than happiness and in the Old Testament story of Abraham, founder of the Abrahamic faiths and obviously, what would you call it, a crucial figure in the development of world culture, Abraham is presented as a late bloomer to say the least, it’s like 83, people lived longer back then, at least so the story goes and he had a very rich father by nomadic standards and he could just sit around in the tent all day and, you know, a doting mother and a rich father, he could just sit around in the tent all day and eat peeled grapes and busy himself with the continuation of the species and but, you know, God appears to him and says, get away, get out of your security, get out of your comfort, leave your family, leave your community, leave your nation, go out into the world and it’s a very interesting story, it’s very interesting to contemplate it from both a psychological and a religious perspective because what God is presented as in that book, which is a crucial book for the, as I said, for world culture, is God is presented as the manifestation of the spirit that calls even the too secure and pampered to adventure and then Abraham has a pretty rough time when he goes out and has his adventure, it’s not all, you know, skittles and roses from then on in, quite the contrary and he runs right away into a conspiracy of elites to steal his wife, he runs into tyranny, runs into starvation, he encounters war, it’s like he goes out in the world and he has the whole tragedy of his life, both on the social and political front and individually, you know, but the promise is the promise of adventure and the implication is that if you have a sufficient adventure, then that cannot so much protect you from suffering because perhaps that is impossible, but to justify it and because you need to kind of know this in your own life, when you look at your life, you might look back on travails that you’ve undertaken, you know, and they’ve done end of life surveys with people and asked them what they regret and you know, people don’t regret what they did that didn’t work, they regret what they didn’t do that could have worked, you know, they regret the chances they didn’t take and you know, even if you do an evaluation of your biography, one of the things you want to be able to say to yourself is something like maybe there’s nothing better you can say to yourself than this, you can think about this for yourself and see if it’s true that was extraordinarily difficult, but it was worth it and you know, it’s not like you can have one of those without the other because you can’t imagine that you could have some confidence in what you’ve managed to accomplish, right? the kind of confidence that would instill you with a genuine, a certain genuine sense of self-regard despite your fundamental inadequacy to have that fundamental sense of self-regard that’s grounded in something real it has to be based in a narrative that approximates that was extremely difficult but it was worth it, you have to have both of those and so that’s interesting because one of the questions we always ask ourselves, this is the theodicy question technically, you see the suffering in the world, you see the suffering of children, you see maybe your own children or your suffering and you wonder, well how can reality be constituted so that I can have faith in its essence when there is so much suffering and one answer to that is something like, well how much suffering do you want? and you might think none, it’s like, yeah, I don’t think so I don’t think that’s right, you want, at least you want something approximating, optimized challenge so you could say, at least you want to be pushed to your limit and maybe you find the most exciting times in your life in fact you’ll pay for this, you’ll pay to have this experience, to be pushed to your limit not beyond it, or maybe even a bit beyond it, you know and maybe not so far beyond it that you crumble and break and things fall apart but could you be pushed to your limit optimally if there wasn’t the possibility of falling apart and breaking? that’s an open question, how are you ever going to take something seriously if the consequences aren’t actually serious you know, and there’s something delightful about dancing on the edge that’s why Hawaiians believed that surfing was sacred, you know and it’s because to surf you have to be on the edge, right and the waves can come and take you out at any moment but without the possibility of the waves rising to take you out then you can’t dance on the edge, and maybe that’s exactly what you do what to do, you know, and there’s good evidence from the neuroscience literature that consciousness itself is something akin to dancing on the edge so technically when you’re conscious, when you’re awake your brain is occupying a position between something it’s a position that’s something like between chaos and order and if your brain’s maximally ordered, well you’re just bored, nothing is changing and if you’re chaotic then it’s anxiety and catastrophe but you want to be positioned right between those two and that’s when your consciousness is optimized you know, and when your consciousness is optimized then you’re deeply engaged in life and everything seems alive and meaningful and maybe that’s the solution in some profound sense to the problem of suffering it’s that you optimize your interaction with chaos rather than being protected all the time from everything that could hurt you you kind of know this too, if you have kids because you don’t want to keep your kids in an infantile state because when they’re infants, pretty much what you do with them say they’re six months and younger you just keep them secure and safe you just provide everything that you can for them you have to do that because, well, what are they going to do? they just lay there fundamentally and squawk now and then it’s not like they’re ambulatory they can’t go out and do things for themselves so it’s up to you and you know, you’re not going to be able to do that so it’s up to you and your goal is to keep them secure and safe but once they start being able to move around then increasingly it’s sort of up to them and if you have any sense as a parent, the psychoanalysts used to say the good mother necessarily fails and what did they mean by that? they meant, well, if you’re committed to your infant when you’re a mother for the first six months it’s like it’s all the kid, 100% full self-sacrifice devoted towards the infant attitude, but even by nine months the child can crawl around quite a lot they’re developing something of an independent will you start handing them challenges you start handing them responsibility and you keep them on the edge and some of your kids are going to be able to be pushed harder than others and part of the reason you have to develop a relationship with your kids and your husband for that matter is so that, you know you can keep them dancing on the edge, on the proper edge that’s even better than the mere provision of security