In my senior year of high school, my last class of the day was AIDS, or AP Environmental Science. Do you remember AIDS? Of course I remember AIDS. I think we're a class.
I called my friend Sean about this a couple weeks ago. Those stupid-ass folders. And one day, we were assigned a worksheet, which was basically just busy work. It was one of those days where he gave us a lab, or maybe we were working on our folders.
We were doing some worksheet on trees or flowers, like amphibians, something. Yeah, I feel like that was a good chunk of what we were doing. It was something to do with bugs, amphibians, or the ozone layer. But while I was working on the sheet, it just hit me.
This was pointless. 30 minutes until the bell rings, and it won't matter. Four months until graduation, and it won't matter. Four more years until we graduate from college, and for most of us, it won't matter.
Given the average lifespan of a person in the United States, and the fact that most of us were 17 at the time, 60.54 years, and we won't matter. I spent the last 30 minutes of class trying to wrap my head around this. I remember being mad. If we're all going to die someday, and nothing matters, how are we supposed to spend our time here?
And then, the bell rang, so I left class in all my misery, and started walking to the front of the school. All of a sudden, the only person I see in this swarm of my kids was Madame Topping. Again, out of all people... Oh my gosh, Madame Topping.
Remember that name? Madame Topping was my friend's teacher. And I went up to her in passing, didn't say hello, like, didn't... Nothing.
And I was like, Madame Topping, why are we here? What's the point of all this? She smiled and said, to spread love. No, I don't know why I would have guessed that otherwise.
She'd be like, live last love. Well, needless to say, that did not solve my existential crisis. I walked home possibly even more frustrated, but I eventually stopped thinking about it. Until now, two years later, I am 19, and I'm asking the same questions.
But this time, they're about careers, because that's what we spend most of our life doing, right? After sleep. So, if we're all going to die someday and nothing matters, how do people spend their time here? I would say, listen to your parents.
This is Robin Kowalski. She is a professor in the psychology department at Compton University. So, in 2018, Professor Kowalski released an article in the Journal of Social Psychology titled, If I Knew Then, What I Know Now. Advice to my younger self.
We all, as adults, wish that we could sort of get back in time, and there's nobody else. It doesn't wish they could change something. When parents offer advice to their children, the children are at an age where they want to be intended, and they want to resist that somewhat. But I think what our study showed is that perhaps that advice is at least worth listening to.
So, I think that what I would say is that young adults, not just their parents, but other adults, accidentally hear them, and then kind of pick and choose what fits in the best. So, I took the train up to San Francisco and did exactly that. So, what do you guys do? For work?
So, I am... Software engineer, special entrepreneur, musician. An attorney, investment banker. I'm in the paper industry.
I do farm work and windmaking. People say, well, how did you get into the paper industry? And it wasn't done to methylene. Public policy at the national level.
Chemical engineering. My third one is I run a startup. I'm really interested in creating trauma-informed rehabilitation programs for sex offenders. I had an idea to have open a bakery.
So, I'm going to concert your music and you're possibly trained. I'm a special musician of flute. You've heard me playing flute, I'm sure. Melodica, piano, vocals.
I've been working with the community garden program. I thought about being a doctor, but... I didn't want to listen to people's problems all day, so I didn't become a psychologist. And I didn't, like, serve them good at STEM.
And so, I didn't do doctor and engineer. And now, I'm a biotech attorney who listens to people's problems all day. We have oranges and papayas. Now, I kind of want to be a scientist.
Figs and limes and lemons. And math. I like math. Fashion fruit and avocados.
But I also kind of want to be an author and an artist. Pears, peaches. You know, in my high school yearbook, I had my everything in the mouth. And the funny thing is, is I probably did everything in my yearbook, down to how many kids I was going to have.
Nectarines, plums, we've got a lot of different kinds of fruit trees. I also called some people. Hello, it's being recorded. Okay, yeah.
Hello. Oh, the call is being recorded. Yep. Okay, cool.
Okay, so that's what this is. What follows are stories of how people spend their time here, what they learned, and given that nothing matters, what matters? I spent most of my adolescence being pretty directionless. This is Matt Kilty.
He grew up in Minnesota, lives in New York. I was very bad academically, starting, like, fifth, maybe fifth or sixth grade. I started doing pretty fast in school, in terms of just, like, my grades. And that persisted, basically, all the way through high school.
And I just didn't know what I wanted. I had no idea. I never conceived of it. I hadn't thought about it.
When I was in college, actually, in your position right now, I very much related to having a crisis of not knowing what I wanted to do. Andrew McCormack, grew up in South Carolina, went to school in Michigan, hung around New York for a bit, and is now in San Francisco. My problem was that that crisis didn't hit me until I was, like, graduating. I grew up in my age in philosophy.
I love philosophy. I worked very, very hard at it. But the only real career at least is law, because you weren't a, are you, like, a motherfucker? I really like reading books.
I really like stories. And I think at some point, like, I had a sort of fantasy in my head of being a writer or writing. And so I got to college. I didn't think I was going to get into any college.
But I surprisingly got into the University of Arizona and Arizona State. Came in undecided. I stayed undecided for, like, a year and a half. Looked into creative writing and English as majors, but I was a little bit too frightened to do either.
I was just like, what, like, what is that life? Like, presumably, I'm just going to teach, like, high school English or something, which I just found through the experience of being a high schooler. And I was like, I have no interest spending a career dealing with people like myself. I actually almost fell asleep during the old pandemic.
I could not wait for the over. I just, like, there's no part of me wanting to be a lawyer. I went home, actually, after my freshman year to South Carolina and I was trying to get back together with my girlfriend. And I got shut down hard.
And I was kind of unbroken and moved back up to Michigan. And I didn't have any money, like, none whatsoever. I started working at Casteria. You know, before I was, like, living off ramen noodles and dining hall and everything.
That was the first time I'd, like, actually cook for myself. And I first thing ever made me mess of potatoes. I was really proud of my knowledge for stuff. I'm terrible mess of potatoes.
I'm much better at now. Actually, I remember in college writing a piece for the All Weekly in Tucson, called the Tucson Weekly. I was an intern there. And basically, it was, like, this piece about this co-ed of mine who showed up on the website called Dirty, wearing, like, lingerie.
And there was some sort of caption that was, like, really disparaging. And I interviewed the founder of the site and talked to her and some other people. And I just remember, like, I remember reading it in the paper, like, the next day and giving a sense of pride of, like, this feels like something. Like, something took place.
Like, there's a website that is doing something that feels malicious and kind of, like, cruel and it has consequences. And I'm talking about it. I'm talking to people who are affected by it. That all felt pretty meaningful.
And it was just, like, the first time I think I've ever done that, you know, like, 20 years old or something. When I started working in the kitchen, I had not realized before that I was belaboring under an assumption that all careers of value had to be either working for a corporation, for the government, or academia, or, like, being a doctor, you know? And, like, I was happy working with my hands. But I saw something, like, when I finish into my day, there's a physical result of my work.
I found great satisfaction in that. I wasn't looking for it. I didn't know that I was thinking I wanted. And at some point, at some point, like, the idea of journalism popped into my head.
And I think for me, I thought, like, well, I'll try that. And I was kind of naive. I was like, I didn't realize at the time in 2005 that, like, the industry was going through, like, a period of complete tumult, just really starting to bleed out from the Internet and giving all of its content away for free. But I fell in love with it.
I mean, my great day was a surgeon. He used the same way. My great day, like, life, the precision, like, showing how to work. He liked getting his shit together, being in order, being literally surgical about it.
So once I figured that out, that you could do other things, I kind of embraced everything as a career. Yeah, I just pursued that. Matt went on to work for NPR, This American Life. He went to Uganda on a fellowship.
And he's now a senior producer at Radiolab. Andrew went on to work in Michelin Star restaurants. He is now the chef and owner of Early to Rise, which is a scratch-made brunch restaurant in San Francisco. Speaking of San Francisco, if you want to go from City Hall to Golden Gate Park, you have to cut through Hayes Valley, which is what I did.
And there, I found Monique, who has had a few careers. So I'm currently on my third. Oh, okay. What are the first two?
I was, my first one, I was an investment banker. Okay. My second one was public policy at the national level. And my third one is I run a startup.
I had actually been quite successful. My first career, I was the youngest partner globally. So it definitely wasn't that I didn't think I could achieve. I think it was some of it where, existential in the sense of thinking, like, is this all there is?
A lot of people make one career and they're happy. For me, I wanted to make sure I was, like, exploring all different points. But they all parlayed into the other. I think as a woman, I would say that as I moved up in management, like, again, being assertive and not really, you know, being a leader and what that means and being, you can still be collaborative and supportive and feminine and still be a really good leader.
And then the other thing I would just advise is to make sure you get hard skills. I'm a big believer in, even if you didn't want to stay in banking or even if you didn't want to stay certain STEM degrees, like, but there's only a certain time in our life it's easier to get the hard skills. And that's the other thing. It's like, it's okay to say, you know, you don't know and you're just trying to figure stuff out.
I think that's what, the smarter people and the ones that you admire the most are the first ones who don't want their ego and say, you know what, I don't know, this is really interesting and I'm going to try to figure it out. Like, I think when you're 20, you think you have to know everything and I think that's a real big fallacy. I think you don't need to know everything, you need to know how to ask good questions and then not have the ego that you're not listening to the answers. I think looking back, you care a lot more what people, their perception of you, because you're still trying to figure out who you is and who you are and what you want.
And I think the confidence you build in your 20s, by the time you get to your 40s, you're like, you're just going to do the best that you can and you surround yourself with people who care about you. But in your 20s, you spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, am I smart enough, am I good enough, am I pretty enough, am I skinny enough, all these things. And I think for a lot of women, that they can have the confidence of their 40s, back in their 20s, we would be probably unstoppable. Back to our phone calls.
What was your experience like with money? Pretty brutal. I kind of assumed when I started doing journalism, I was just like, I will never, and I still won't, I'm never going to make the amount of money that my mom made at the height of her career. In fact, I assumed when I got into it, I would be making very little money, but weirdly, podcasting underwent this sort of like revolution, and now we get paid like what media people get paid, which is just kind of weird.
But by no means, and even with all the sort of like financial security I had from coming from the family that I did, by no means was it easy. I was eating like Easy Mac and like half a Subway sandwich every night for dinner, and just like watching my checking account completely deplete, and I mean the whole media writ large in general, I think it's a challenging industry. Right now, it has been for the past decade, but I think jobs can be kind of far between and they can also be pretty unstable. I earned $9 an hour in Manhattan, working four 16-hour shifts back to back, and then another 10-hour shifts after that.
That isn't just like hard, that hurts you to work that much. It's not good. I think that the industry really needs to change from that. You learn a lot.
I mean, you really do. I mean, when you live with it like that, when you're around cooking so much that you wake up and do it all day every day, I mean, you get a level of comfort with your craft that you can't really get as a part-timer. But I ended up getting a really bad back injury after I moved to San Francisco. I had lots of injuries.
I had a herniated disc. I'll actually never regain full feeling in my right leg. I had a hot fryer grease drop down my shoes one time, and I had surgery burns on both my ankles and new skin grafts. You know, all the while, you like have nothing.
That's one of the craziest things. You realize how low control you have of your own life. Like, when that happened, like I had 25 step-box a week to live on, and I could barely get out of bed. And the reason they had that was because, you know, they come from this like toxic, toxic medicine environment where the code was that, you know, all the money's not important, blah, blah, blah.
So like, basically, you show up at like 10 in the morning or whatever, but you wouldn't actually clock in until like 2 or something like that. So then when you're going to, when you get hurt, and they're going to go calculate how much to pay you, they calculate it based on the hours you were clocked in for. So like, basically, I was working for free for all this time, then I was out of work. I was screwed.
You just feel like a little worm when you can't provide for yourself. That's real. Like, when you cannot cover your bills and you need other people to support you, and there is nothing you can do about it, that sucks. Like a lot, you know, then you go to try to own a place, you know, and you see why that system is the way that it is, because everything's so goddamn expensive.
Like, when the city charges for everything, pork shoulder went up 30% last week for some damn reason. You know what I mean? It was just like, I mean, it's crazy, like, the way things like add up, the way money moves through a business and stuff like that. So you just, you happen to ask about one of the most complicated, sensitive topics in food, which is wages and compensation right now, where, you know, there's so much baggage with that.
Like, I went to the front house for a long time, I went to be a server too, which was great. But it really is true that the way that we take America is a holdover system from not wanting to pay former slaves wages, and so that they would receive tips for work instead after emancipation. That is true. And that's messed up.
You know what I mean? And like, it's not far off right now when you have people working at minimum wage, and to be clear, in most of the country, minimum wage is like $7 an hour, and in New York, you can actually pay less than minimum wage as someone's receiving tips. So like, service there, we're making more like $354 an hour plus test. But yeah, money is brutal, but you have to find your own way and really advocate for yourself and always, like, learn to be financially responsible and always push toward ownership.
And like, we're all desperate, and we're all trying to get by. A lot of times people feel like it's you or me, and it's not. That's an illusion created by anxiety and fear. But people do behave that way, and you have to watch out for that, because they'll still screw you just the same.
Okay. You just blew my mind in the past 10 minutes. Jeez, that's... Rough world out there, telling you I'm serious.
It's not, it's just fucking crazy. While we were in India, I went to a girl school. We're back in San Francisco. And in the girl school, it was like, they would be teaching computer science, like programming language for all the girls.
So they were trying to get more girls into this, and I loved it. So it felt like a natural fit, and at that time, I was not at all lost. And then I got into this really, it's a career for girls, actually, in computer science. So it's just that over time, I think I got burnt out, very intense feels.
I just felt like, when I got burnt out, I was like, okay, I just need a short break. And then after that, I really started questioning, you know, why does this career have to be so intense, and becoming a mom, and I think that started becoming very difficult for me. And then, I think I got lost, actually. Now I have to figure out what else I'm going to do, and if there's something that I've been moving to that's not so intense all the time.
Did you ever think you made a mistake? Did you have feelings of regret? You know, no. I didn't really look at it like that.
that like it's just kind of what you're doing okay so I feel like your question assumes the standard of success that is involved in monetary gain and I would counsel you to instead think of monetary gain as a sufficient condition or a necessary condition for success but not a sufficient one and the reason I say that is because you know what I think that I always scratch my head I was like oh this is over Spruce I think like Spruce I don't know if you know the restaurant that's in Laurel Heights in San Francisco and it's like every CEO of all these big companies all live like right there there's like hell of billionaires hundreds of people hundreds of thousands of dollars and picture cabinets and all this sort of shit like you know it's not a comment for somebody to get like a burger a thousand dollars on the line for shit like not as like a Tuesday you know like um it's weird but like but the thing I was wondering when we were around those people was I was like well we all have like 24 hours a day how much better is this person's experience for having a billion dollars instead of having only a hundred billion dollars you know it's like a billion dollars is so much more than a hundred million dollars it's incalculable for me to like think about that but how much is that going to affect your day-to-day life if you've got that and then you just extend the logic down you know like okay it's like how much does having a hundred million make it better than 10 million and blah blah blah and you do get to a point and um actually I'm going to say about this you know like what am I talking about like they you know like we have study but like you know the point was like that after a certain point being richer does not make you happier so my point is I want to be at that point with a little more comfortably in the past where it's going to affect the stage but after that you know it's community it's relationships and how happy you are with your work other things and do not take that shit for granted that takes work and effort to build too and I think that if I have any regrets that I didn't hang on to a lot of my personal relationships or build them as much during that time because I was working so hard less with the money so I finally reached Golden Gate Park and as I was walking I stopped this bearded barrel-chested beret-wearing man who has an admirable accent originates somewhere in the Soviet Union I didn't ask or maybe I'm completely wrong I don't know but I asked him if he has any regrets as a software engineer uh yes uh to be honest probably not initially no waitly probably in the last five seven years yes uh specifically because kind of a little bit of disillusion software kind of just became a field which has a lot of money in it on one hand which is great because you can earn them on another hand which is bad because now it revolves around money more than ideas regret can be good not necessarily not always but it can be good in the form of a signal to you that you have the opportunity to do something different there's an opportunity to change it so it's like a message that you can listen to the voice he just heard is of Dr. Neil Rose who's a professor at Northwestern and wrote a book called If Only which is really all about the scientific research that has shown what is the the value or what is the function that regret serves in our lives what those regret literature shows Robin Kowalski again is that people tend to regret in actions more than actions so if you listen to your regret and then think seriously about what new actions you can take what change in your strategy can you make that is the value of regret you know the downside of it is if you just wallow in things that are impossible to change but the way to live effectively with regret is to think of it as a message or signal you listen to and then you move on so do you know what you want to immediately and I just need to pay bills and small kids which need to grow up but after that I don't know I had an idea to have opened a bakery right now it's kind of just a funny idea but you know I think you should do it you want to sign you can do it um I thought about being a doctor but now I kind of want to be a scientist so you're into like science and all that stuff yeah and math and math I like math she's followed you with a stem but I also kind of want to be an author and an artist I didn't ask the kid's mom what advice she would have for her daughter oh I would tell her do something that she does like but I would tell her like she should be focusing on something that doesn't mold brain power it could be anything it could be any field but it's not that you're going to wake up every day and be like you know you want to have you know a large percentage of your days where you're happy to go to work but like I said nothing's ever written is done so what I tell my students is if you pursue a direction in life and you know you're like whoa this is not I'm not making a difference this is not doing it for me you can switch horses you'll have to be whatever you major into the rest of your life I mean there's sometimes roadblocks in that you know sometimes money becomes a consideration you know particularly supporting a family or something like that but I think where people lose some of the passion that they have it's only like they are stuck um and then just you know what do they say the the days are long but the years are short so if you want to you know I'm probably going to be working until I'm 70 so you know I think my next career is like as a university professor so I think of like link of your life as in stages and don't think that you're going to just have one there's not one act you probably will have several in your career like a good friend of mine graduated with a master's in biopsych and ended up going to go get his degree as a doctorate in philosophy and he teaches two classes and he's paid to be a philosopher in Korean hell you know what I mean I'm like yeah I was just like impossible I was just thinking of random shit like you know the advice I can only offer to my own experience is just like figure out what it is like just be like really aware and mindful of when you find yourself being really drawn to something or excited about something and um obsessively pursue the thing that you want you know I mean this guy says Gilmar had this one expression that really stuck with me he was like life is really a bar fight you pick up whatever is next to you and you swing as hard as you fucking can I don't know it could break you but it can also it can also totally pay off a lot of people's behavior um or lack thereof is driven by fear you know they're afraid of pursuing a certain career for example um they're like I'm not good enough for that or you know I wouldn't um I wouldn't be able to get a job in that field or I wouldn't be accepted to law school or medical school or graduate whatever it is yeah there's there's this internal voice that's putting these barriers and these blocks these roadblocks in their way so then later on in life they look back and they're like oh would have should have could have so they're regretting those inactions I think it's our fear I think it's our anxiety and I see so much anxiety among young people today at least the ones that I come across that I think really set up those roadblocks so my advice there would be as long as nobody's getting hurt like you know go try to try to tame that inner voice and go for what you want which doesn't say that you're going to ultimately obtain the thing that you so deeply desire that it's something that's like very specific like I want to work at this place or like be covering this thing but I don't know my guess is that in that pursuit you wind up doing something that feels pretty fulfilling or aligned with that thing that you set out to do so yeah you make the best choice with the information that you have and you know if it works out right and you know if it doesn't you learn something I just don't cry about it too much you know it's like nobody probably just a bed of roses you know it's gonna suck it's never gonna be awesome whatever it's like it's like it's all right you know what I mean wait wait wait we still have to at least try and answer this meaning of life question this call is being recorded oh hello sorry hi Tanya how are you I'm good can you hear me so really who else would I call other than Madame Topping to start this one off I just got back from Mexico I was there for a week and I caught her up to speed it was my senior year I was in my sixth period class we were doing some busy work or something and at one point it just hit me that everything is pointless like we're all going to die one day you know this matters and then I got kind of angry about it and I spent like the last 30 minutes of class just being like why are we here and not just in school like why are we why are we on earth yeah and then you know bell rang 3 p.m school was over I left and you were walking like towards my like you were walking in my direction and I like TA for you and everything so I was like you know I'll have Madame Topping so I think I came up to you and I didn't even say hello like there was no formal there was nothing and I was just like Madame Topping what's what's the meaning of life why are we here can you guess what you said oh my god I've been trying to think I have no idea I would say I mean today I would say like to love and be loved make the world a better place I'm not it was along those lines so you said to spread love that's pretty good you just said that and you like walked away I was like oh okay like all right I'm Madame Topping I need objective advice here but those words in the past I don't know two years since that happened were just in the back of my head whenever I thought of the meaning of life because it's like so small and it's like to spread love and I was like huh you know what maybe that's something maybe that's something was right um do you do you still believe that and if you do why you know we do have one friend that's just super generous she's like a VP of whatever she's a VP of human resources um whatever and she okay and this is her name Rebecca sunshine that's her real name I've met all the sunshine family her dad's a doctor you know they do have money they're from Atherton um but they're all sunshine and she is like such a sunshiny person and um it's just so funny because she you see her and she smiles and she hugs and and she just gives you know like oh I like your necklace oh here take it you know oh you look so good I've got here take it you know or you know she she would buy you a drink without you asking or she bought a ticket to concerts like over and over again you know another thing this woman got me she's like oh you know what I always do I always pay for the person behind me when I'm at the toll booth you know when you step the stop and pay the toll she would pay for the toll behind her it'd be like no one you know and then when you get a present like that you're like oh my god how great you know she's just so generous and it's just to spread love like do you think some people are just biologically happier than others or because I don't know I just don't imagine myself being that like how you reach that point of just being sunshine well I'm sure I'm sure she's not totally happy all the time like she's been through she's had a bout with cancer and all that and a divorce so it's not like she's you know everything goes for her all the time but I think there's a little bit of shake it till you make it also you know do something nice and see what it feels like even though it doesn't it seems forced because it is a it snowballs. John Stuart Mill had this quote that always stuck with me where he's kind of summing up when ancient philosophers thought it was a good life and he said not a life of rapture but moments of such with few intransitory pains many and various pleasures and taking at the foundation of the whole not to expect more from life than escape full of the story the idea is that you think about utility you think about good as an abstract thing and for me the thing that keeps coming out correctly is just being like how can I create the most good in this situation and probably that means taking care of myself you know it really does I mean like when I believe you may it matters that I'm happy it's not saying that's an altruist completely quite the opposite it matters to be a lot that I'm happy you know and like when I have the opportunity to make someone else happy I have a moral obligation to take it. It's not all about us individually it's about us and community with other people and I like to think that I've thought about this on some level beforehand but you know how can we go about making other people feel like they are significant and what are the implications when we go about consciously or unconsciously making people feel like that they are not.
So I have to digress for a second and tell you about what happened to me the other day. My mom's most shopped at store consistently for the past like three or five years and I know this because there's data that supports it is TJ Maxx. We go to TJ Maxx a lot and god this sounds like a sponsorship it's not I don't get sponsored. We go to TJ Maxx a lot and as I grew older my hatred for TJ Maxx got stronger but last week I gave in as I do and agreed to go to TJ Maxx with my mom and in the car I was reading an essay and I read this passage and suddenly something changed.
I was now for a brief moment kind of ecstatic to be going to this department store. I felt like the luckiest person ever to get to be going to TJ Maxx. This essay was written by a man named Dev Hathaway, a non-fiction writer and English professor. He died of cancer in 2005.
This call is being recorded. Hello? Hi. Yeah sorry okay there's like a guy that has to say this call is being recorded.
So I reached out to his daughter Marie Hathaway. I don't know to me the adults I grew up around were very much in the like liberal arts college sphere. It was my parents and their friends who were professors and it was a very like humor and language-wrenched upbringing and my parents were also really into nature and gardening which was another like major undercurrent of my childhood. I mean we talked about growing up without a religion but honestly like I feel like nature was the religion in our household and I think about my dad like I know in his 20s to 30s he was very wandering around.
He like dropped out of college was in the Navy for a little while then was like subsistence farming in Virginia. I got married a couple of times and then like yeah didn't go to grad school until he was like almost 40. Met my mom there and things clicked into place but not until yeah not until pretty late I think in life late bloomer. He wrote this piece about having cancer and getting ready to die but I guess drinking up life in the meantime.
I should have a light. Okay okay. Meditation 2. Now then best beloved and cancer's first bloom that shock and offase I see colors intensely.
Primary namely red blue and especially yellow. A mug on the window still glows like an icon. Daffodils wonders. Holy mortality jumping to who's a set.
And so many moments sharp and binocular things razor clear and layered one on another. Indeed time collapses. One day after needles and nuclear kool-aid I have an afternoon off and take a magnified drive to the hardware emporium. Clouds slide up mountains making the illusion that the ridgelines are cresting.
Highway signs bloom glow giant and flea trailing flares of strange letters and no cop pulls me over. At the home supply warehouse blue pipes and hanging lights run high over shelves that themselves need ladders. Home expert associates in snappy red vests glide up and down aisles. Think I'll have a dozen of that six by southern pine and a pallet of cedar for the back porch we're building.
Outside the parking lot in a sudden burst of fun makes a grand panorama. A vendor standing unders a strike yellow awning hawk or gancho and pretzels. I spring for one and a Coke to go with and strike to my car in all of God's glory. Yay!
Yay! It's funny like he's been gone for so long but the older I get the more of him I like discover in myself. More and more lately I just kind of like let myself talk to him like he's there a little bit or like voice him talking to me. Lately like that voice of Dev in my head has been like encouraging me to like prioritize my health and be a little more practical follow through on my commitments.
so this world makes no sense we contradict ourselves every day i mean my time watching four movies back to back on a 24-hour flight will not feel wasted but an hour shopping at tj maxx with my mom absolutely will hindus and muslims will joyously sing along to 17th century sufi poets when they sing about breaking down mosques and temples because god actually resides in our hearts but those same people pick up arms and line corpses down roads in the name of those same temples and mosques and there's so many other contradictions and juxtapositions or paradoxes or whatever i have the most capacity to hurt the ones i love the most i treat strangers better than i treat my family the more time i spend with a person the more i'll probably start hating them i romanticize almost all things and cultures and people that i know absolutely nothing about and i do good deeds for other people mainly because it makes me feel better about myself even religion i know religion was made by other humans i know it's a story a collective delusion a shared myth and i don't know if i consider the sculptures of gods in my house or in temples anything more than stone but sometimes i find myself talking to them i know my uncle was killed a decade before i was born but sometimes i feel like he's silently judging me and there's these other contradictions and weird things that happen like my day could be completely horrible nothing could go right for me everything could be absolutely terrible but then there'll be a moment where the sun has set and the yellow lamps are on and my heartbeat is normal and the day is over and i'll sit down with my mom to watch indian trash television and for a moment everything is perfect and even though i think that god is a myth and everything is man-made i'll say god damn it god you've done it again so the first step is realizing that this world doesn't make sense the very action of me trying to make sense out of all of this is nonsense but i'm still going to add one more contradiction to the list and i'm going to try to make sense of it anyway so what keeps us here that's a really beautiful question um the the word that's coming to mind is people when i was growing up you know my dad was a business friend i should always talk about this recently dad these guys you know the dad was around a lot of super rich people that he worked for and all sorts of things they go around their cars and helicopters or whatever and you know all this sort of shit but then you know you know these guys are the course of their entire life they a lot of them i mean they shitloaded them like their marriages fell apart their kids were weird you know what i mean like it was just like i don't want to be these people they were selfish and it just doesn't work like they just aren't happy like you know what i mean it just this is they were wrong about this so this is gonna lead to some like good life you know like it doesn't work like if you're if you're have all this money all this cool shit and everything and then coming home and like you got the relationship with your children your marriage is on the rocks or distant or something like that or you're not really being honest with who you are your people and don't have anybody you can call up and get here with like what you have the making of this podcast is pointless you listening and me speaking both of us we are going to die someday and our memories will die with us and through the years all the people we know will also die taking their memories of us with them and soon enough it's like we never existed but watch me watch me rationalize this podcast sure that apes worksheet it was pointless but the interaction with madam topping wasn't because her words stuck they led me to make this story after two years and from the story i met a lot of people that i won't forget for a while and maybe one of those people whose face i shoved a mic in in golden gate park won't forget me too and that's the story i'll tell myself is it worthwhile to stop and think why we're living i think it could help that's my friend elijah if you find a reason to live or something to motivate you life becomes a little bit easier in a sense that you're not trying to accomplish everything you're trying to accomplish that single thing so let's say your mission is to spread love that is your individual life purpose then you're going to start making moves towards spreading love you're going to be like you'll go out you'll help and you'll be satisfied and having lived your life that way because that was your own life purpose but if you don't have one and you never stop to take the time to think about what your life purpose is or if it's too broad then you're never really going to be happy and what i really think brings people happiness is making a difference in the lives of other people i think that's one reason that i love what i do is you know i don't delude myself that i'm making a difference with every student that i teach about i know that i don't but um it's a matter of making a difference for one person or you know exposing them to information they might not have been exposed to otherwise that brings me such happiness that brings me such joy okay so so far the things that make up life the things that matter are people the stories we tell ourselves and thirdly i think it's the world has anybody ever recommended alan watts to you do you know alan watts no i don't i always think the book of job is the most profound book in the whole bible white guy in the 70s who like introduced hippies to like eastern thought here is the problem of the man the righteous man who has suffered and uh all his friends try to rationalize it and say well you must have suffered because uh you really had a secret sin after all and deserve the punishment of god or because uh rationalize it somehow and when they've had their say the lord god appears on the scene and says who is this that darkeneth counsel with words without knowledge and then proceeds to ask job and his friends a series of absolutely unanswerable conundrums pointing out all the apparently rationality and nonsense of his creation why for example he said do i send rain upon the desert where no man is most commentators on the book of job end with a remark that well this poses the problem of suffering the problem of people doesn't really answer it and yet in the end himself job seems to be satisfied he realizes that somehow these very questions are the answer i think of all the commentators on the book of job a person who came closest to this point was old d k chesterton he once made the glorious remark that it is one thing to look with amazement at a gorgon or a griffin a creature who doesn't exist but quite another thing to look at a hippopotamus a creature who does exist and looks as if he doesn't in other words the strange world with its weird forms like hippopotami and when you look at them from a certain point of view stones and trees and water and clouds and stars when you look at them from a certain point of view and don't take them for granted they are as weird as any hippopotamus they are just plain improbable and it is in the sense i think that it is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world but it seems only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this and find that thus the true meaning of life is no meaning that its purpose is no purpose and that its sense is nonsense but it has in it rhythm fascinating complexity it is in this kind of meaninglessness that we get the profoundest meaning it's not the answer to everything and it's not yeah i mean he's a little white guy i don't know but aren't they all yeah yeah man no that's really that is really like a thing that i know now i mean i'm a person i've always struggled with like depression and anxiety and i realized more recently that a lot of anxiety comes from thinking that i know what's happening like i think i know what someone thinks about me or i think i know what's wrong in a situation like you don't know what you don't know remember the myth of sisyphus if you don't sisyphus was this guy from greek mythology who defied death a couple times so the gods condemned him to roll a rock up a hill and as soon as the rock reached the top of the hill it would slide right back down to sisyphus's side and he had to do that for all eternity to quote camus the gods have thought for some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor isn't this our condition what i was thinking when you were talking about the story for mythology is that you know that's a person in isolation and that that is so important sisyphus was alone and i thought like the first time i read that story i thought yeah i am sisyphus but he was alone and we're not it's all of us pushing this stupid rock up together and i think that's what gives us this meaning we're looking for all the time pushing that rock up through whatever venue we choose volunteering parenthood son or daughterhood friendship relationships or if we're lucky our careers so yes yes yes yes yes there is no meaning to life and there's a whole lot of suffering i mean there's a lot and yes felt futile because we will perish someday blah blah blah but things which i know now for sure that are here are stories people this random world with its weird quirks and that stupid rock for us to push and i think for me i think that's enough so but what does this have to do with careers this episode was produced by me tanya tabla yes i'm changing my last name not that it matters mental assistance while working on this came primarily in form of elijah shankar who you actually heard because people eat up big shit without whose clarity and edits this episode would have been absolute bonkers even more so than it already is if you want to check out things that were mentioned restaurants books god what else people there will be links in the description and i had no place to put this in the actual episode but i was reading this essay called the pain scale by eul abyss and there's an excerpt that was really beautiful but i had no place to put it so here it is seven is the largest prime number between zero and ten out of all numbers the very largest primes are unknown still every year the largest known prime number is larger euclid proved the number of primes to be infinite but the infinity of primes is slightly smaller than the infinity of the rest of the numbers it is here exactly at this point that my ability to comprehend begins to fail