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This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 811, the meaning of Life, part 3 by DerekSiversOfSivers.org, and I'm Justin Molick. Happy Thursday! It's a happy birthday for me today, actually, because you're here listening, that's all I care about. Welcome to the podcast where I simply read blogs to you for free, usually sometimes books, and now sometimes performances, I guess.
Always with permission from the authors, free of charge, and all with the hope of helping you optimize your life. Today's post isn't really a post, it's a transcription from a performance that DerekSivers has done around the world, and this is part 3 of 3, so if you're new here, I recommend listening to parts 1 and 2 first, and with that, let's get to part 3 as we optimize your life. The meaning of Life, part 3 by DerekSiversOfSivers.org. Chinese.
A few years ago, I started learning Chinese. I'm fascinated with the writing. I'm trying to memorize how to write these characters. Chinese characters look complicated, but they're mostly made up of smaller, simpler characters, the way that English words are made up of Latin roots and such, so you can remember the meaning of each character by knowing the meaning of its ingredients.
For example, the word language equals words plus 5 plus mouth, so language is words that at least 5 mouths speak, brilliant. Thank you equals words plus body plus inch. Hmm, this one is not so obvious. Maybe the idea is that when you say thanks, you speak words that give a body an inch of respectful space?
That's interesting. Name equals evening plus mouth. So your real name is what's spoken by a mouth in the evening? That's kind of romantic.
I get so curious about the historical or cultural meaning behind each one. Let's change the subject. Talking heads. Talking heads were a great band from the late 70s to mid 80s.
Their lyrics were really evocative and mysterious. They made you wonder what they were really about. Then I read an interview with the talking heads where they said that many of their lyrics were just random. They would write evocative phrases on two little pieces of paper, then throw them into a bowl and shuffle them up, then they'd pull them out and put them into the song in that order.
They did this because they liked how the listener creates meaning that wasn't intended. We assumed that if someone writes a song, then sings it on stage into a microphone, then it must have meaning to them. But nope, it was just random. Any meaning you think it contains was put there by you, the listener, not the writer, like a Rorschach test.
Back to Chinese. I got so curious about the historical meaning of these Chinese characters that I got a Chinese animalogical dictionary that tells a full history behind everyone. I looked up the examples I gave here and found out those characters were just phonetic. Those composite character bits were not chosen for their meaning at all, just their sound.
So it seems I've just been putting the meanings into them myself. They actually had no meaning at all. It blew my mind. I've been memorizing hundreds of characters for months, reading all kinds of meaning into the ingredients of each one.
After recovering from that, I thought, how many other things in life really have no meaning? What else have I been putting my own meaning into thinking it was true? Wired. I know that we're wired to do it.
I know we survived on the savannah for eons because we evolved to look for patterns. Our ancestors are the ones who noticed the patterns of the tiger stripes or the lion face in the grass. A moth is so deeply wired to fly towards the light that it may never accept that your light bulb is not the moon. We are so deeply wired to find patterns that we may never accept that many things are just random.
We should have the same sympathy for our faulty wiring as we do for the moth. Evolution taught us to do this thing but didn't teach us to stop. Give us some dots and a line and we'll see a face. Burn some toast and we'll find Elvis in it.
A carrot for my garden looks like Jesus. What does it mean? A black cat crossed my path as I walked under a ladder on Friday the 13th. What does it mean?
An old friend called us just a minute after I was thinking about them. What does it mean? What does it mean that you went to a prestigious well-known school? What does it mean that you didn't?
What does it mean that your good friend died? What does it mean that you're tall? What does it mean that you have a lot of followers online? What does it mean that you don't?
What does it mean that you're female? What does it mean that you're an entrepreneur? What does it mean that you're not? What does it mean that all of your previous attempts at something have failed?
Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing has inherent meaning. Everything is only what it is and that's it.
So let's get back to our original question and wrap this up. Life is blank. What is the meaning of life? Life is time, choice, memory, learning, suffering, love, replicating DNA.
You can tell by the variety of answers that they are just projected meanings. You can choose to project one of these meanings onto your life if it makes you feel good or improves your current actions. But you know the real answer? It's clear and obvious now.
Life is just life. It doesn't mean anything. A race any meaning you put into past events. A race any meaning that's holding you back.
A race those times when people said that this means that none of it is real. Life has no inherent meaning. Nothing has inherent meaning. Life is a blank slate.
You're free to project any meaning that serves you. You're free to do with it. Anything you want. Thank you.
You just listened to part three of the post titled The Meaning of Life by Derek Sivers of Sivers.org. Welcome aboard the derail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch.
Steep, flip, or that, and enjoy. Vereel, love the way. I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health. What supplements to take?
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I recommend you actually watch his video and witness the original. I tried to do it justice, but his is better. Trust me on that. I have his performance linked in this episode's description, which you can always find at oldpodcast.com.
And since it's my birthday, I do want to say that you being here and listening every day is like a birthday present every day for me. It really means a lot. It's all I could ask for. So thank you for being here and continuing to be a subscriber to the show, whether you're new here or been listening for years.
I greatly appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day and I'll be back tomorrow with a guest post on Cape Flanders' site. I'll see you there, where you're optimal life. Oh, wait.