Existential Philosophy, Nietzsche, Suffering & Self-Awareness - Joe Folley - #974

So, one of the things that in some ways Nietzsche really comes up with a very naturalistic view of what it means to be a human, which I think kind of jives relatively well with a kind of spirit of a lot of modern empirical research into, well into psychology. I mean, Nietzsche is considered by people like, he was a huge impromptu people like Freud and Jung and stuff like that. I mean, I wouldn't go so far as saying that Nietzsche was an evolutionary psychologist, but I think that he might be worth reading if you're interested in evolutionary psychology. It's kind of a very different perspective.

The thing that Nietzsche has, as I say, a kind of picture of the human, which ends up really influencing the psychologist immediately after him, but also just kind of it's still a broad view of the human that still is around today, is the Nietzsche conceives of the mind as basically a collection of drives or the will is basically a collection of drives. And so it's as opposed to a lot of thinkers before him who sort of conceived of the will as like one object. So the kind of, I know, if you want an image, it's like the little man driving our bodies, if that makes sense. Nietzsche kind of throws out this picture and he says, no, that kind of, if I think about how a human being works, they tend not to work quite like that.

It tends to think, okay, I've got this kind of quite chaotic series of drives and it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly what the me drive is in there. And so he comes up with this image of human psychology, which is of we all have, our minds just is a series of drives and some people have those drives kind of roughly pointing them on direction. Other people are kind of completely scattered to the four winds and the drives are pulling this way and that way and they can't act, they can't get anything done, they can't prioritize. And so this is kind of the view of the mind that I would say is kind of, then ends up in a lot of, in a lot of late 19th century and right through the 20th century in terms of in terms of psychological ideas and theorizing and research.

Because you know, if you think about how a therapist might conceive of the human will today, they tend to talk roughly in terms of different drives, different facets of the mind, but this kind of fragmentary view of the human will, where it's not just kind of one set thing, it's this collection of different ideas and drives and desires and that kind of comes from Nietzsche. I mean, he's building off earlier thinkers, but that, for instance, is where a lot of early psychoanalysts kind of credit where their view of the mind has come from. And then this, let's say ends up filtering through right, right, even to, I mean, you know, I know you've mentioned before that you're kind of in, you have had therapy and stuff. So I think that, you know, I don't know how similar that was to how some of the therapy that you've undergone has conceived of the human mind.

Yeah, well, I think Robert Wright in why Buddhism is true, evolutionary psychologist who then pivoted to do mindfulness, a lot of retreats and sort of have a take on Buddhism within evolutionary lens. He's got this wonderful idea about the mind as a collection of modules. And that's not too dissimilar to what you're talking about that there is a module for this and a module for that and a module for the other and trying to get the right module to go at the right time. And the fact that these are kind of compartmentalized off and they don't necessarily communicate very well.

So yeah, the difference between there being one train driver at the front that's pulling this big locomotive or kind of like a racetrack with shit tons of different drivers and they've all got their own design ones going backwards, ones driving the car upside down. And yeah, the, I think what I'm fascinated by my point at the very beginning, you have an area of expertise that you're very familiar with, and you start to see the world through this lens. And then when you start to learn a new topic, you're anchoring by it's inevitably starts, Oh, that's that's similar to the will to power. Oh, that's similar to notes from the end of that similar to such and such.

Like you have your own framing, but when I read anything from your world, I then start to think about, well, that's that's the difference between approximate and ultimate reasons for behavior. Oh, well, that's an adaptive ancestral explanation for this thing. Oh, well, this is the balance in the trade off you have to have between survival and reproduction. So kind of whatever your topic area of choice is, whatever you know best, everything else kind of acts in relativity to that.

And it's so funny, just when you've got one area, you know, well, you learn something new and you start sort of pull these threads out in reference to the first one. Oh, yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why I really enjoy looking at a lot of different topics kind of reading as widely as possible. I think one of the one of the real privileges of being in sort of a public communication philosophy, I suppose, like academic philosophy, is that it kind of gives me the scope to sort of read a bit of this and a bit of that. And actually, I quite often find these kind of connections emerging.

Like I was reading a book, a piece of Godfrey Smith, he's a philosopher, but works mainly in philosophy of biology. And he writes an entire book on the octopus and cusselfish and this kind of divergent evolutionary path where you end up with this kind of radically different looking neurological structures. And yeah, it's kind of, it's nice having that to draw from when I then talk about something like Nietzsche, you know, for example, I mean, this is kind of a tenuous link, but nonetheless, I think it's interesting. Is that is that in octopuses, and I checked apparently that is the correct plural.

Not octopi, I know. Yeah, I kind of I've been saying octopife for years. We've been double psyched. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. It turns out I was just being pretentious. What a shot. But octopuses have this kind of incredibly disparate and neurological system.

So their arms are kind of semi-autonomous. And that again, you know, reminded me a little bit of you know, Nietzsche has a picture of the human willows as a bunch of you know, semi-autonomous drives and you kind of you find yourself sort of in the midst of this situation. There is no there is no kind of point separate from that where you can sit there and you can like, quite commonly and patiently dictate all of your drives to be this way in that way. You are inescapably in the midst of your own life and you're just going to have to deal with that.

And one of the things he becomes increasingly concerned with and you find this especially in his notebooks is he becomes very concerned about the organization of the will. So again, a kind of a concept that comes up a lot in his notebooks is the notion of the organized will where all of these drives are kind of roughly pointing in a single direction and the disorganized will where they're kind of again scattered to the fourth wind. So I think that this is I wanted to kind of start on this point because I think that this is one of the things I really like about thinkers like Yitron DostoSP is that they've got all this kind of like high-fluidun philosophical side to them. And that kind of is what they're known for.

But also as you're reading them, you find a lot of insight that is just surprisingly down to earth and sort of, you know, is immediately translatable into your into your map of how you see the world and navigate it. Why is it that existential philosophy is so alluring? Like, I wouldn't think if you were to just tell me from first principles, if you were to say, here's the books, this is kind of what they're about, this is the level of difficulty, this is the level of length, this is the sort of level of accessibility. These are the kind of takeaways, this is what it was built for, this is the era it came out of, this is the demeanor of the people who wrote it.

I would not put existential philosophy that high on my list of potential matches. And yet it seems to be very attractive, very seductive, very alluring to a lot of people, very life-changing to a lot of people. What's going on there? Why?

I think part of it is this sort of coherence between a set of quite abstract ideas by quite abstract thinking people. And also, and the coherence between that and then a series of very, very down-to-earth issues that you just encounter every day. I mean, something like Dostoevsky, for example, he's got lots and lots of themes in his book that are about kind of religion and a particular conception of theology and and active love, which is sort of an idea of kind of being self-sacrificial in your love and that sort of thing. But he's also got these kind of sudden, incredibly insightful psychological ideas, like the idea that you can't run from guilt or no one on the ground is sort of one of the most troubling and most detailed examinations of resentment that I've ever come across.

And I think that there's something about, say, reading something on the ground. And there are plenty of pastures and that, there are very, very abstract. There's also troublingly relatable habits of behavior that you'll be able to spot or be able to spot on myself, maybe it's just like I'm a bastard, never an officer. But at the very least, I would imagine that most of us will be able to spot in ourselves.

And I think that's part of what makes it so appealing. And if you read Nietzsche amongst all of the kind of impenetrable prose and maybe something I'm not necessarily interested in, there will be these kind of offhand psychological insights. Like, you know, really example, one of Nietzsche's analyses that has ended up being a bit more popular is again, to do with resentment or resente monotony as he calls it. And that for Nietzsche is sort of across between a conscious feeling, resentment and an unconscious drive to sort of recoup a sense of power when you're feeling powerless.

And this is in his book, The Genealogy of Models, where essentially he's trying to give an analysis of Christian morality from his perspective. He's broadly very anti-Christian. He kind of really doesn't like it. This, his analysis of Christianity has been pretty heavily criticized.

But I'm more interested in the kind of angle he takes. So his argument is that Christian morality, which is incredibly concerned with sort of suffering and compassion and pity and concern for the weak in Nietzsche's terms. He basically asks, well, how could this kind of thing come about? And he makes the claim that Christian morality stemmed from a resentful feeling of powerlessness.

And that as an attempt to recoup a sense of power, these powerless people define the morality whereby people would have to take pity upon them and and be compassionate and stuff like that. And so regardless of what you think of that particular story, because, you know, as a kind of historical narrative, it's very quite questionable. Nonetheless, that approach of taking something that almost seems common sensically right. You know, what could be more intuitive than the idea of being compassionate or taking pity upon somebody vulnerable who's in a difficult situation?

And Nietzsche kind of takes that and says, okay, well, if we interrogate of what was underneath this, would we find something really quite comprehensive? Would it be, would it be kind of, would it not live up to its own expectations as a moral system in its origins? And I find that that kind of approach is very fascinating, even if you don't necessarily agree with his conclusions. Let me give you an equivalent from my world of evolutionary psychology.

So sympathy is investment advice is a way of summarizing the adaptive reason for why we feel sympathy toward other people. Now it's pro-social, it is highlighting somebody who needs help and it sort of engenders this sense of unfairness, an imperative to action, softness, caringness toward this person. That all seems fantastic. You're living in a small tribe, you're probably somehow related to them or are going to be at some point near the future.

Good to keep everybody alive. That's probably a pretty good idea. The self-serving, that would be the one layer of analysis, another layer of analysis would be this person is so down on their luck. They are so bereft that their bank account is so low that even a penny to them would be a large contribution, which means that you can invest in them a small amount and they will owe you the maximum amount.

To a starving man, a scrap of food is worth a lot. To a person who is pretty well fed, that doesn't mean much at all. So sympathy is investment advice, not too dissimilar to what you're talking about there, that somebody who has struggled in order to gain dominance or prowess or prestige in society, well, perhaps it's not that they couldn't contribute, didn't have the capacity, didn't do the things right, perhaps it's that they're inherently more noble. The call is coming from inside of the house with regards to that thinking that they've turned the barstool upside down themselves, whereas this one is you on the outside looking at them and saying, oh, this poor meek person that really needs my help, this would be a great idea.

And also the back of your mind is saying, and if you help them, you don't need to give them much and they'll really owe you. That's very interesting. Yeah, I think that to a certain extent, Nietzsche tells a story from the other perspective. So his account of the origin of a compassion-based morality is from the perspective of the powerless.

And he says, well, imagine that you're, I suppose one important kind of preliminary to this story is that Nietzsche thinks that a feeling of overcoming resistance or a feeling of power is just incredibly important for a better term existential fulfillment. So, arguably, I mean, there's an interpretation of Nietzsche by Gaggle Bernard Regenstah. One thing I should say is that pretty much everything about Nietzsche is controversial is not only do you say lots of controversial things, also what he meant is really controversial. So, you know, take all of this with a grain of salt, but in this Bernard Regenstah interpretation, Nietzsche effectively identifies overcoming resistance as one of, if not the primary source of human fulfillment, existential fulfillment.

And so in that under that kind of mode, feeling powerless is sort of like living in hell, you're really in a bad way. And which is, I think, kind of jives with a certain common sense view of if you're powerless, you feel very vulnerable, that can be very, very unpleasant. And so his story of how his idea of how Christianity came about was that these powerless people thought, right, we're very powerless. How are we going to recoup a sense of power?

Because we need to feel powerful. That's one of our intrinsic psychological needs. Again, if we wanted to draw a kind of line to where this has ended up in modern cognitive psychology, you might talk about agency or something like that. You know, these people have got no power over their own lives.

They have no feeling of strength. And so, according to Nietzsche, they play a kind of two-fold trick. One is to say something along the lines of, I chose this, you know, I chose to be powerless. And the other is to say, actually, being powerless is really good.

And, you know, I kind of think that, again, whether this is a good account of how kind of Pauline Christian morality came about aside, I think that when most people read that, they're probably not, they probably take it out of that context and say, oh, yeah, actually, I can think about the times where I couldn't achieve something because of lack of power. I didn't have the strength to overcome resistance, or I felt powerless, or I felt weak. And as a result, I basically went, no, I don't want that thing anyway. Like, I can't get it.

So I don't want that kind of sour grapes, I suppose, is the kind of common expression of that sort of thing. So that's what kind of a there's a kind of divergence between what kind of niches interested in and what most people take away from each other. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. You know, there's nothing wrong with reading a philosopher outside of their original context and asking, you know, how can I build upon these ideas?

Arguably, that's closer to doing philosophy than just sort of paraffing, exactly, taking it. Yeah, very interesting. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do back-end inventory management.

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Yeah, it's very similar. At least it sounds pretty similar to what you're talking about. So he basically says, if you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get. So a good example would be your leg gets injured in a battle.

You try to treat the leg. And if you do, that's fine. But if you can't, then you chop your leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. They talked about retreating into yourself.

And when the fate of those of the world do not deliver to you, that which you deny, which you desire, you retreat into yourself, you wall yourself off into sort of spiritual depth. And he refers to this as the inner citadel. If you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get. This sounds super similar to this.

So I guess why is resentment? What resentment and resistance? Why are these two key themes? Like what makes us so important?

Why these big drivers? So partly Nietzsche has a problem with resentment because he thinks it's dishonest. He just sort of thinks, no, you're lying about what you want. You want this, but you're denying yourself even the ability to go and get it or try and become more powerful in his terms.

The resistance thing is important because Nietzsche has the framing for a lot of Nietzsche's project around the will to power is that he's very worried about the death of God. But at the same time, season is a kind of opportunity. So one of Nietzsche's primary ideas, and I think this is what draws a lot of people to Nietzsche and to that before was using some kind of religious. So Nietzsche's an atheist, but he doesn't really argue for atheism in any meaningful sense.

He kind of takes it as red. His philosophical project is more sort of, okay, if you're an atheist, what now? So because he thinks that a lot of the ways that people have dealt with suffering beforehand have been in some way religious. You know, imagine that you're a Christian, you can think something like, well, sure, I'm a kind of medieval peasant starving to death.

But I'm going to inherit eternal life and moreover eternal bliss. So things aren't that bad. There's a sense in which life can still be made meaningful, even if it's really unpleasant. And Nietzsche wants to figure out how to do this in a sort of post-religious or post-Christian world.

And what he comes up with is he sort of sits back and thinks, right, I need to make suffering not something that is undesirable, but I need to somehow incorporate it into my kind of meaning scheme of the world. I need to take suffering and turn it into something that is desirable. And he, this is kind of the kind of underlying themes in his construction of the world's power. The will to power, for Nietzsche is, you know, when he first introduces it, he largely talks about it as a feeling of overcoming resistance.

So again, I think this, you know, that sounds very abstract. It's also very easy to bring down to earth. You know, you've, I mean, I don't know how long you've been run this podcast, but I imagine it was an awful lot of what I imagine it was still is very difficult, right? And Nietzsche's point, if we kind of bring it more down to the everyday level, is that how something, how fulfilling or how good in a very broad sense, something is going to feel, once you've done it, is partly a function of how difficult it is, how much resistance you've had to overcome to do it.

And Nietzsche spots in this a potential way to re-enchant suffering, a way to make suffering not the absolute end of the world, even if you're experiencing an awful lot of it as Nietzsche was, is that he sort of goes, right, okay, what if we constructed our kind of philosophy of the world alongside this idea of overcoming resistance, because then he sort of goes, right, in that case, even if you're suffering a lot, you can, in some sense, or just stand half a chance of finding a way to celebrate that, because if your aim is to overcome resistance, you must also want resistance. So that's how he kind of wanted to incorporate suffering into the way that, you know, people that the world closed guard. But again, I feel like, you know, regardless of what you think about the very kind of abstract picture there, this is an insight that has trickled down into, well, at the very least you can see it manifest on everyday level, right? I think that, you know, arguably, you can find it in one psychological concept like flow.

You know, part of the necessary ingredients to flow is that you encounter a certain level of resistance. That's part of what makes it meaningful. And furniture resistance is, and resistance and specifically overcoming resistance is what makes something meaningful. And part of what this allows him to do is say, well, whereas before, we were aiming at heaven, we were aiming at a changeless blissful state.

Now, in fact, in order to achieve what we want out of life, we need to encounter resistance and we need to encounter suffering. And this is kind of an image that is scattered all the way through his philosophy. So, the very kind of, well, in the space of the story, as you know, before that, one of his first published works is called the Birth of Tragedians about art. And he's talking there about how he thinks certain ancient Greek playwrights learns to make the very, very harsh life of ancient Greece, something that was to be celebrated, something that didn't tear them down, some can actually make them rejoice in life.

So he talks about Greek tragedy as a means to which they did that. And then, you know, this theme re-emerges and thus makes our thirst. The first metamorphosis of Nietzsche's Ubermensch is called the camel. And Nietzsche defines the camel as a being that takes on load and also celebrates the fact that they're taking on loads.

We have this idea of, you know, challenges not just kind of an incidental thing to be compensated for later. The resistance is the point and the overcoming of the resistance is the thing that's being aimed at. But again, it's all very abstract. But I think one of the reasons why he really appeals to people is that that's a very abstract way of putting things.

It's also very applicable to your everyday life. If you can find a way to celebrate suffering and celebrate resistance or celebrate overcoming resistance, that's going to be pretty handy for when you do encounter challenges as we all inevitably do. What's the role of play or joy or pleasure or sort of moment to moment happiness? It sounds a lot like meaning long term, deferred gratification, the acceptance of challenge, almost the reveling in it.

But this is largely deriving pleasure from meaning, not deriving pleasure from pleasure. So is there a more sort of hedonic element of this at all or is that kind of discarded as flimsy? So Nietzsche doesn't focus as much on the hedonic element, but it is there. It's not sort of, I think, partly because he's less concerned about the pleasurable side of life, because the pleasurable side of life aren't that hard to get.

It's actually very nice. But he does touch up on this a fair amount. He often uses metaphors of dancing and joy and laughing. I think that the way you could incorporate this into this kind of idea of overcoming resistance, it's a little bit like sort of competitive sport.

I think it's a really good example of that, right? Or even, you know, weightlifting or something like that. You know, it's not just that. The overcoming of resistance is something that's, you know, you really suffer through and you think it's horrible and then you get to the other side and you're allowed to feel joy.

Nietzsche thinks that ideally he wants to be in a situation where you're celebrating that process of overcoming resistance as well. So again, I think competitive sport is a good analogy for this, right? Like players enjoy winning a game, but they also enjoy the process of winning a game. Nietzsche's philosophy is very, is in a lot of ways taking joy in process, because again, if your fundamental goal is to continue to overcome resistance, then as soon as you've overcome one bit of resistance, or like in layman's terms, as soon as you like accomplish one challenge, then you've got to find another one.

If your whole aim in life is to continue to overcome resistance or beat challenges or have you on to put it, then it is a very kind of process-based philosophy. It's Nietzsche's very keen on atomic habits for the 1800s. Yeah, a little bit. Interestingly, I always thought that, um, atomic habits reminds me very much of like this, this chapter, I don't know if it's stopping now, this chapter in Aristotle.

So Aristotle's entire philosophy is based around habits. And like his whole like picture of the virtuous human is based around habituated behavior. So I always thought, you know, there's a chapter in the Macuen ethics that whenever I'm, I'm sort of teaching, I can go to speak at schools and teach, yeah, and teach things. And one of the, I always refer to one of the chapters as sort of atomic habits in the kind of full-century BC.

But anyway, but yeah, it is, it's, I think that, again, Nietzsche's philosophy is very, is very kind of taking joy in the journey sort of way. But it's, but again, it's, it's significantly less, I don't know what it is, significantly less fun than I just put it. It's really into the nitty-gritty of suffering, which kind of magic, you know, this is a man who spends like a good portion of his life in really unbearable pay. So you can see how this was a really imperative question of saying to answer.

But nonetheless, he does also eventually conceive of overcoming resistance and the process of overcoming resistance as a joyful activity. Right. So what would be, what would be his advice to somebody who keeps getting kicked in the nuts over and over and over and is, and is regularly or keeps having a splitting headache that was to a month's on end? What would his sort of lay person advise be to them about how to, how to deal with that?

So Nietzsche's ultimate goal for all of his philosophy is this concept of Amalfa, which I think is a phrase that he borrowed from Sirich's philosophy, but he's using it in a very very different way. So his, the culmination of a philosophical project is the idea of loving literally everything that happens to you and not merely kind of being content or kind of accepting it, but truly loving it. And he's kind of, I mean, he definitely never got that because, you know, if you read his letters, he's not necessarily a happy bunny a lot of the time. But that's, so the advice that he, or he, when he's writing about how he deals with his own pay, he largely talks about it as a kind of resistance to overcome.

So something that he's in some twisted way enjoying overcoming. He uses, and he kind of channels it into his writing. So he has these spacing headaches and he has this account of the exact metaphor. But he talks about how it was so painful that it kind of focused his mind in a strange sense.

And so he channeled that pain into his writing or into his work. And although that's not a kind of bit of his formal philosophy, it is nonetheless kind of reminiscent of some of the stuff he does say in his full philosophy, where he talks about kind of sublimating pain or suffering or sublimating your drives towards this kind of organized will that, whose aim is fundamentally to overcome resistance and as a result must will resistance for themselves. Would that mean that a life without resistance would be kind of like a hell? Yeah, essentially, he's very worried about human potential.

So one of the images from Nietzsche's philosophy that really sticks out to a lot of people is the figure of the last man, which is a character in the space of the straw, where the last man is sort of a kind of passive nihilist. But the thing that they're hankering after is contentment. So can not contentment in the kind of, I don't know, like Buddhist sense, I suppose, of kind of reaching the vane or the nature also has a problem with that. This sort of, all right, I'm going to avoid challenge and resistance as much as I possibly can.

And there are two reasons why Nietzsche was a post-list. The first is that he's got this sort of, I don't want to call it sentimental, but he's got this real investment in the idea of humans achieving that potential. You see this kind of again, all through his works, even he has an essay called Shop and Hour as Educator, where he's kind of reflecting on the work of the Shop and Hour. And in that, he has this kind of like, almost mini rant in the middle of the essay, which is like really fascinating about how he just like absolutely cannot stand it when people don't, in his words, kind of embrace what they could uniquely be as that and instead allow these other pressures to interfere with, again, to kind of invoke his terms, to interfere with them becoming who they are.

If resistance isn't there, he's worried that humanity will just kind of decay into this like sludge that doesn't do anything. He's worried that all do is kind of, well, sit around on our sofa's pursuing comfort, avoiding pain. And as a result, we will also never feel for him, the kind of joys of actually ending up overcoming resistance. So I mean, again, it sounds very absolutely polite.

This is actually quite an intuitive thought, where imagine that you'd literally never struggled in life. Like, I'm sure that Nietzsche wouldn't like actually wish his head ache upon himself, but we can imagine a person who literally never encounters any struggle. Well, if we all recognize that there's a real feeling of achievement in overcoming some kind of struggle or resistance, even if it's just a small one, then for Nietzsche, this person will never experience that sort of they will never experience the kind of fulfillment that comes with having overcome something. Does that mean that he hates weak people?

Was he not a fan of cowardly weak people? Yeah, it's interesting, because I mean, a lot of ways, arguably Nietzsche wasn't like a massively strong person. He was a nervous wreck for much of his life, again, he suffered from a terrible chronic pain condition. And so there's this sort of back and forth that goes on in a lot of popular discussions on Nietzsche, where people sort of quite understandably post a question of does Nietzsche really live up to his own ideal here.

And again, if we perceive a power as overcoming resistance, then arguably, he gets some of the way there. But I think that it is perfectly plausible to turn Nietzsche's challenge back on him and say, well, I'm going to say, man, you've got rejected by a couple of girls and then you've decided you hated women as a whole. And you spend, you kind of ran from basically any criticism that you've got and kind of retreated to your cabin and went on walks in the Alps, and that doesn't sound like it's overcoming resistance all that much. So let's bring it back to Nietzsche's view on weak people.

Yeah, he has a real, he has a real contempt for them. Like in a way that I think it's very easy to run from when you're reading Nietzsche, because we've had 70 years of, you know, so well, yeah, since the end of Bobbout 2, so 80 years now, of people going, okay, the Nazis are a real fan of Nietzsche, this seems a bit, have they misinterpreted him? What's been going on here? And basically everyone agrees that, yeah, okay, they have misinterpreted him some key ways.

This does sometimes lead to the creation of what I call fluffy bunny Nietzsche, which is where you sort of imbue Nietzsche with whatever you personally think is a really good thing, and pretend that he said it, which is kind of relatively easy to do on the basis that Nietzsche himself says an awful lot of things, a lot of which contradict one another. It let you actually, you can kind of pick and choose a little bit and create your own sort of model Nietzsche that says everything that you want him to say. But nonetheless, Nietzsche does have a real contempt for what he sees as weakness. And I kind of, I haven't done it one day to what extent he turned that contempt on himself.

I think that he kind of, he has this view for a number of reasons. The first is that he sort of thinks that weakness breeds dishonesty. So again, it's come back to that kind of sour grapes point. But secondly, he thinks that in his view, a kind of unwillingness to overcome resistance, which is broadly how he defines weakness, kind of an unwillingness or an inability to overcome resistance, is going to eventually lead this person to kind of become a nihilist.

So, Nietzsche has this very confusing way of talking about like weak people, or quote unquote weak people, because again, he has a kind of weird esoteric definition for it, whereby he quite often says, oh, yeah, man, like I hate them, I have scorned for them or something like that. And then at another point, he says, no, no, I love all people. And you say anything, well, these things are very difficult to go together. And a lot of the time, this is resolved by interpreters, by saying something like, well, if you imagine that Nietzsche's project is for everyone to become willing and able to overcome resistance, because he truly thinks whether he's right or wrong, he truly thinks that that is the way that you can not become nihilistic in a world without God, and without any kind of even meaning for yourself.

Then when he's kind of hard on weak people, I think a lot of interpreters will kind of try and reinterpret this. And you know, I think that probably this thing is a broad sense of interpretation, as a kind of tough dad attitude. So, no, it will be in some way condescending to extend pity to people when Nietzsche fully knows that they could become this kind of this figure of unity themselves, and they could overcome resistance. So, that's his, one of his broad critiques of compassion, which is a very difficult to get your head around is he thinks compassion is bad for the person that is, the person that one is being compassionate to what he thinks that you're in some way holding them back.

Which again, it's like a, it's a very abstract point when Nietzsche puts it. But again, we kind of all recognize that whether you want to take it as extreme as Nietzsche does, that there are contexts where this attitude is appropriate, and I'm thinking of my own dad, right? My dad was sort of very, you must overcome challenges type thing, and I'm very grateful for that, because it was, it kind of allowed it to kind of talk me how to be more independent. I think of some people I know who had maybe much, and I quote unquote softer parents and actually, I don't know, did that benefit them?

I don't think it did. Don't worry, I mean, I think that Nietzsche's way of putting this is probably far beyond anything that most people want to accept now, because he is really, really anti-compassion and anti-pity. There are like a couple of passages where he's talking about, oh yeah, well you can be magnanimous if you want, but on the whole he's very, very hard on people that he perceives as weak. In other news, I've been lifting weights for about 15 years now, and this year has been the most progress I've made since my new games, and almost all of that can be laid at the feet of Dr.

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It only comes up in the Spexaufistra. And the purpose of the Ubermensch furniture is, at that point, it's someone that is strong enough to make life seem meaningful, and in his terms, create values, even recognizing that there is no God, the world is in itself valueless. The Ubermensch is somebody that can look at that and say, all right, bring it on, I'm going to create values for this world. And the actual term Ubermensch is very quickly abandoned in favor of other things.

So this figure then evolves into figures like the new philosophers, and new philosophers are also creating values. You can tell that they're doing a very similar job, but again, they're given a very different name. And eventually, you know, this ends up culminating, and his final word for this is Dionysian wisdom, which again is the same kind of ideas, this idea that you can look at the world, and most importantly, look at the really awful things in the world, you know, all of the stuff that you would hate to go through, and in some sense, learn to celebrate it. And each sort of doesn't pretend that this is going to be an easy thing to do.

As I say, I think it's I don't think that he would say that he accomplished that. But it's something that he at least believes to be possible. And I don't know, I'm a bit more skeptical, but that's kind of his position with it. You said I've heard you say Dostoyevsky changed you.

Why? Why did that happen? Partly because I think that it's very easy to compute ideas about resentment or hatred, or in the ways that these kind of eat you up inside, right? So not just, not just that it's like a nasty thing to do to someone else, but it's a nasty thing to do to yourself.

It's there are some lessons I find where you can really learn them cognitively, but either, you know, you need to find them out for yourself through kind of no matter how many times somebody has told you something, or I think this is one of the like strange benefits of really, really good novels, is that because you get inside as much as possible the head of the protagonist or the characters, you can kind of feel the lesson in a way that you might have processed intellectually, but hasn't kind of kind of an ever way of raising it like sunk down to the boat. I don't know, again, it's very difficult to talk about this. It sounds really woo-y, but I feel like most people kind of know roughly what I mean, we've all had moments where we've learned something cognitively, maybe from a psychology paper, and it's true, right? We know it's true, and we read it, we think, yeah, I'm definitely going to do that, right?

That's in the old, that's in the noggin now, and it's never coming out. And then immediately you just revert back to your old behaviors. And I think something, for me reading Dostoevsky, I kind of, I like talking about Dostoevsky just because I think that despite the fact that I'm, I'm an agnostic and he's a die-hard author of Christchurch, we have a lot to agree upon. I think one of the benefits of reading these Dostoevsky books and indeed any novels that kind of re-resnic with you is that they allow you to kind of speak directly to your emotions in a way that just makes it much more likely to stick in you know, if I can kind of comment if you think, oh yeah, resentment is a self-destructive emotion that I should try and expunge really at all costs, which is a very difficult thing to do.

I think we all end up feeling resentful sometimes. But nonetheless, it's very easy to think that. The idea of, okay, I've spent sort of like three hours, you know, no trying to run a pretty short book. So I spent like three to five hours with this guy who's just a bust, like just kind of a miserable prick, for like, really not the word for it.

He's just kind of, you know, he's, he delights in the misery of others and delights in his own misery, but it's not true delight. It's this self-destructive outlook on life. If I think about not becoming the underground man, that's much more likely to stick in my head. I think that, you know, no, some underground is a book that I would really recommend to everyone because again, it's very difficult to put into words, but you really come away from it thinking, oh, wow, I may have known before that not caring about other people and only being out for yourself and trying to be an egoist and feeling all resentful of the world, thinking the world hates me and hating the world in return.

I kind of cognitively knew all those things were bad things to do, but this kind of really hammers at home in a way that is truly emotionally unforgettable. Yeah, that's a lovely way to put it. It's interesting to me reading fiction. I'm not able to get through old fiction as easily as I can get through new sci-fi.

If you put a fucking Blake Crouch or a Max Barry or a PS Brown book in front of me, I'll eat that up. If you put some Dostoy asking in front of me, it's gonna, I'm gonna have to do this in five page bites, but anyway, my point being getting lessons to sink below the neck are a pretty difficult thing to do, and it's definitely the curse of the sort of ruminative thinker to assume that you can just top down dictate your system. This is compelling. I should pay attention to this.

Pay attention to that. You're shouting at your own gut and system saying, you will pay attention to this and it goes, yeah, sure, I'll do that. And then as you say, you step out of the house and you forget it all. Whereas Alex had this really lovely idea, actually, which I think is related to this with regards to a anti-atheist argument.

The thing that's most real to humans is personification and narrative and story and archetype and good and evil and myth and motivation and human psychology and relations. And that is what the world of atheism is telling everybody to let go of. The thing which to them is most real and most true and most easy to understand and most compelling. And instead in its place saying, be compelled by statistics and data and theory, and it's all sterile and gray, brown, sludge, and there's no reason for it other than just raw data.

And this is what the spreadsheet says. And I think kind of the fiction versus nonfiction thing is not necessarily too dissimilar to that. We all love the idea of being as compelled by atomic habits as we would be by reading Dostoyevsky. But you know, and this is, you even see this, why is it the case?

Apart from, I guess, like explanatory depth, why is it the case that nonfiction books are filled with anecdotes and little portable stories? Or because it's more engaging, but also because you know that this will hammer the point home better than the statistics can? Absolutely. I think that, you know, whether, again, it's different because narratives, especially, you know, fictional narratives are on their face, false.

So in some sense, this proposes a challenge to anyone reading them right, because you want to learn from them. You know, I want to pick up a Dostoyevsky book and learn from it. But I can't just take everything that I know I'm reading a lie. You can write story about anything, you know, I can write a story about whatever I want to do.

It wouldn't make it have any lessons. And so you've kind of got this weird two part division in what you're doing. Well, like, one kind of, you know, critical side, you've got to think, well, you know, this is a fiction book, I can't take everything it says as it's read, like even it's allegorical lessons. I can't just kind of take them on board because this is the product of one person's mind.

And one person's mind is eminently foul. On the other hand, just approaching the world in this incredibly analytic, you know, I'm never going to put anything into any kind of narrative. I'm not going to talk to my emotions, if that makes sense. I'm not going to appeal to them at all.

I'm just going to just have propositions and relations between propositions. That's really hard to learn from. And also, you know, again, learn from in this kind of emotional sense. I also think that it's, it's, I think that it's quite a, like an empty feeling way to live.

And I think that, you know, part of the reason why we perhaps recognize this is actually we're very good at telling stories. Like if you, if you give people some information, they're almost immediately sorted into a story if they can. It's just, you know, this is fantastic. There are loads of memory techniques and mnemonics that are just based on this idea, you tell a story about something.

And I again, to bring this back to Dostoyevsky and even to tie in nature a little bit. I think one of the things that reading a novel by Dostoyevsky does is it takes these lessons that you may or may not have heard before about kind of psychology and, and kind of the human condition if you want to call it that. And all of a sudden you are emotionally engaged with it and kind of use Nietzsche's terminology. It's not just, it's not just appealing to your cognitive side.

It's appealing to your cognitive side. It's appealing to your kind of basic instincts. And they're, they're a lot stronger. It's very hard to think yourself into motivation into like real consistent motivation.

But if you really feel like something's meaningful and worth getting, you kind of naturally end up following it. I think I might kind of pass all this way, thinking it's very strange. University, I kind of basically just did logic, like kind of formal logic. I was like, I did like the driest form of philosophy, imagine, where you just sit there and you've got a proposition.

They're like, well, prove this. And you sit there and for 45 minutes you go, I give up and you email the lecture. But in theory, you sit there and you finish proving it. And I kind of, you know, as I got a little bit older, I say, well, I'm like 25.

But as I kind of, as the rest of my, my brain might kind of grew into my mid 20s, I kind of thought, yeah, there is really a place for this kind of slightly nebulous, but nonetheless, definitely there idea of taking a really great book from the past and using that to learn a lesson that you know independently is a good lesson. But that when it's presented in this narrative form really sinks in and all of a sudden you can enact it. It's interesting. Propositions and relations between propositions is actually what Alex calls date night on a Friday, which I, I'm recording with Alex tomorrow about the history of the other.

I'm very sorry. I'm very sorry. It's this sounds to me a little bit related to the sort of danger of hyper consciousness, this sort of self referential thinking. Well, how is that play role?

Again, we hinted here at the perils of the sort of ruminative cerebral praying at the cognitive horsepower altar thinker. What's the danger of hyper consciousness? So again, this is really a prominent theme in notes from underground. One of the things that the underground man is suffering from is what, yeah, what he calls the disease of hyper consciousness, which is effectively that he can't act natural.

And by naturally, I sort of mean, he sort of lives his entire life, ever so slightly outside his own perspective. It's as if, it's as if he's moving through the world, kind of viewing himself from a third person perspective, like a video camera, like a video camera is following him around and tries he might, he can't inhabit his own first person perspective. He's like stuck in this third person view. And again, I don't know, this sort of one of the interesting about reading Dostoevsky is very hard to then go away and kind of go, oh, well, there's all of this empirical literature on kind of n equals 2000 people that verifies this.

But I'm willing to bet that at least the fair proportion of people have happened to them, especially if they're all the more kind of ruminate type. Like one of the reasons why I know it's one of the grandbells to me is because we have a lot of narratives. And we're told as kids, right, you know, don't think before you act, don't just don't just act. And I think the fair amounts of population myself included really ran with that and went right, I'm going to think, I'm going to keep thinking until I'm really sure what I'm going to do.

And I'm never going to like all of those kind of instincts and more kind of, you know, forget about those, those are complete nonsense. I'm going to sit here, I'm going to calculate until I know exactly what's going to happen. And one of the, one of the things that one of the kind of sub arguments I suppose if you like of an ocean on the ground is that Dostoevsky is attempting to illustrate. This is simply not how you can live your life in any kind of compelling fashion.

He's not, you know, saying you need to act without thinking at all. He's more trying to indicate that the needs that a person has can't simply be satisfied by cognition. And he's largely responding to other thinkers at the time who are kind of proposing a theory of human fulfilment called rational egoism, which is where kind of you organise society around people rationally pursuing their own ends and everything turns out fine. And Dostoevsky's point is that no, like, people are rational now for that and moreover, like they'd be miserable if they tried to be.

There's a line in Hamlet, those conscience does make cowards of us all this sort of idea that self awareness is paralysing. And it seems it seems unbelievably linked here. Yes. And again, it's one of those things like, I don't, I can't appeal to like airtight scientific evidence.

This is what's right phenomenon. I can only appeal to your own experiences. This is again one of the really nice things about reading a kind of psychological novelist like Dostoevsky or like another example of the French Stondart. When you're reading a very, very broad study, like studying 2000 people, by necessity, any conclusion that that study comes to is probably going to apply to you.

It also probably is going to be as detailed as you might like, just because you know, this isn't this isn't a fault. This is exactly what you want to have generalised about conclusion. You want something that applies to everyone, but humans are very, very different to another. And so one of the things that I think that psychological novels and also, you know, there used to be journals that published on therapists, case notes, and they don't really exist anymore.

They were fantastic for this kind of thing. Where if you pick up, you get you get a very, very in-depth view of one person's perspective on the world, which might be completely useless. But it might, that, if that person is similar to you, that is like fucking gold. You know, if they're facing the same problem as you, that's amazing, because it's really, really detailed.

And you know, you run through this, this novel and you think, oh my god, I'm exactly like this person. They're like, so is my, how am I going to deal with this? And to say, you get a lot more detail out of it. You just then have to make sure that your critical lenses is also fitted so that you don't, you know, read novels and then go write everything in this novel is, you know, buying a set of things.

I'm going to go kill, I'm going to go kill a woman. Yeah. Exactly. That's such a good point.

The fact that by design, representative samples are important in order to be able to do studies. And because of that, you end up curbing off, you shave off outliers, because outliers get regressed back to the mean by there being a sufficiently big sample size that represents it enough. But given that even the most, the average of average person, the most average person on the planet is going to have some idiosyncrasies that are abnormal or non-typical or quirky or different. You actually do need to find for them, okay, what is the person that's like you's thoughts about this thing and what did they learn?

And that kind of requires you to either, I guess, do purposefully unrepresentative samples. You're not trying to get funding for that. Yeah. Or, as you say, targeting individuals' experiences and going very deep.

Yeah. I think a good analogy of this is, you know, I go to the gym as a kind of hobby, but the gym that happens to be nearest to me is like a really intense gym. And so it's lots of power lifters in there who do competitions, lots of bodybuilders in there who compete. And, you know, they're all pretty friendly.

So I go up and natter them while they're trying to get on with things. And one of the things I ask them about is their training programme. And something that I immediately find, I'm sure you're very into the gym. So I'm sure that you've kind of find this as well.

Is that they're all very different because they all get to know themselves in such an in-depth level that all of the kind of everything that applies to the average person, no longer applies to them. Or they can see themselves in such a higher resolution that they will take some of that on board, but also disregard other bits because they just know it doesn't work. Think about like, you know, like, is it dooring gates to like four sets for chest every two weeks or something like that? You know, you think that's 99.9% of people that's not going to work for.

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What do you think? Could it be the case that existentialism is just intellectualised depression with better PR? Oh yeah, certainly in some cases. Like I think that again, you can suddenly, especially when you learn about some of these people's lives, you can really see how their personal struggles bleed through into their philosophies.

I think that, I think that's very controversial thing for me to say, but for me, the value in reading say nature isn't necessarily because I think that his view on the world is all that correct. I think it's because, you know, for me, I also have a chronic condition. So when I read nature, I read someone who is kind of going through with a similar thing that I do, like I'm in pain for like pretty much all my waking out. But, and so seeing him kind of how he copes with that and the philosophy that emerged from that is really, is very, very insightful for my own experience as well.

But like, say your point about the crash and you know, you really see this in, in the philosophy of someone like Camout where a lot of his early novels, like The Stranger, is kind of the novel that he's most known for. It's sort of about a really depressed person or somebody that really struggles to connect with reality or other people in any way. And so everything seems the same to them. And this has a philosophical aspect for Camout.

But additionally, if you are, if you also feel similarly disconnected from life and you've struggled to relate to people and all that kind of thing, then that can be far more valuable for you than it would be for your average person. I think that, I think that to a certain extent, a lot of existential philosophy is philosophers taking their own problems and really attempting to dig into them. And sometimes they get up on something that's really generalizable. Quite often they don't.

I think that one of the the valuable things about reading them is that if they happen to have a similar problem that you have, then that's that so valuable. So, you know, take this kind of, again, take the chronic pain thing. That kind of idea of like, I've got to find something, I'm suffering already, I've got pain, there's nothing I do about it. I need to find some way to celebrate it.

It's like, that's kind of the appeal of aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy for me. Why didn't Camout consider himself an existentialist? So, partly because he fell out with all of the existentialists, but also because he has a slightly different philosophical approach. So, existentialism, to kind of really boil it down as much as humanly possible.

A lot of the existentialist solutions to nihilism or a sense of felt meaninglessness is authenticity in some way. And by authenticity, they don't exactly mean what your average person would mean by authenticity. They mean, in such a case, like a recognition of your radical freedom. So, Sartre, one of the things Sartre thinks that people do is act in bad faith.

And if him bad faith isn't like approaching an argument, wanting to show the other person to be a fool or something like that, it's when we go around the world's denying our own free will. So, he uses the example of a waiter who, when they are doing that, don't think of themselves as a person who's chosen to wait. They think of themselves as a waiter and nothing more than that. They kind of reduce themselves to their social world.

And you know, so Sartre's approach is very authenticity focused. Camus is a little different. So, whereas existentialism is about restoring kind of creating meaning, a sense of, you know, if I was going to boil it down, it's like creating meaning, re-imviewing the world with meaning. Camus sort of wants to know if he can continue to live without appealing to meaning at all.

He just has his phrase, you know, can I live without appeal? And that's kind of the insight out of which absurdism is bought. So, Camus is very against the idea of retreating into meaning in any sense. He kind of wants you to keep the meaninglessness of life right at the front of your head and see if you can maintain the contradiction between you wanting meaning in some sense and then not being any meaning there.

And somehow still continue to live and in some sense enjoy life. And a lot of people have pointed out that Camus suffered from really quite severe bouts of depression. And maybe this was a causative factor in the particular way that he has constructed this philosophy. Again, it's like, I think that, you know, while I think that a lot of these thinkers may have conceived of themselves as creating a semi universal solution to nihilism and problems of meaninglessness, I think that today, certainly the way that I see them is that they're very, very in-depth solutions to similar problems that the authors happen to have.

So, okay, how is actually just when it comes to Camus, sort of the story of Sisyphus seems very relevant to absurdism. What is the lesson to take away from that? Yeah, so the mythicisthysphus in Camus writing is meant to symbolize this kind of it's meant to stand in for us. So, in Camus perspective, we are trudging along a basically cyclical existence in the sense that there is no there is nothing that we're doing anything for.

We're not, we're not ending up, we're not obeying the will of God or the will of the universe. We are just trundling along in a kind of uncaring, unfeeling vacuum. And he compares this to the Greek king Sisyphus, who is in a punishment for his attempts to escape death, is damned to Hades where he has to roll a boulder up a hill and then watch it go all the way back down again and then start to the bottom and roll it all the way back up and just do that for eternity. It's an existence that completely takes us back to our stuff about narrative earlier.

If narratives are almost inherently meaning-inducing, you know, they have a resolution and that's lovely. This is a structure of life that completely defies narrative resolution. It is like, intensely-fect. You know, if you imagine doing that, it's like the most meaning of citizens you can possibly think of.

And on top of that, it probably really bloody hurts. So, Camus, in his phrase, we must imagine Sisyphus happy, is sort of, that's kind of, again, it's like the absurdist project in a nutshell is can you maintain this view of life whereby you are kind of analogous to Sisyphus and analogous to Sisyphus and nonetheless enjoy it and embrace it and be happy. And it's kind of a question, but you can't. Like, I think that I think that a lot of people will read, you know, Camus and Nietzsche, you know, Dostoevi happens to chime with a lot of things that I think bring my life meaning.

Because, you know, loving others, that seems like a very, that's very naturally meaning-inducing to me. You know, a lot of people, I think, read these thinkers and sort of go, oh, yeah, that's great. But actually, it is an open question, whether any of this works. Ladies and gentlemen, you're allowed to say, you know, I take your point, Camus, but frankly, I don't think I can imagine Sisyphus happy.

I don't think anyone else can either. So, shall I? Why was he, why was he concerned about trying to do that? What was he trying to solve for?

What was the end goal he was trying to achieve? So, the, yeah, well, the stated end goal of the myth of Sisyphus is that he wants to know whether he should kill himself or whether anyone should kill themselves, given that in his life is completely meaningless. And his end result is, no, you shouldn't, because in some sense, you can learn to be happy despite, despite yourself being analogous to Sisyphus. That's what he's attempting to solve.

At least as he puts it, it's the problem of suicide. You might instead call it the problem of meaningless or something like that. Or the problem of how can you like literally feel and think that your life has no meaning and yet still continue to live, and potentially continue to enjoy life in some sense. And, you know, I kind of think that, I think that how compelling you find that overall narrative is going to depend on how much like the sting of the world potentially having no meaning really hits you.

And if that's going to depend on, that's going to hit you differently at different points of your life. I think that, you know, for a lot of people, they are just very happy to say, yeah, like the world's meaningless man, like that doesn't bother me in any sense. And like, I'm not like that, that actually does kind of bother me. But for a lot of people, it doesn't.

That's fine. I kind of think that, and I also think that it's, Camus talks about these moments where you kind of realize that life's meaningless. And he doesn't describe it as a cognitive event against tie back to our point earlier. He's basically describing this as one foot in cognition, one foot in emotion.

You recognize that life is meaningless, but also suddenly you feel it. And like, I think that, again, to bring this kind of down to earth, I think that something like a midlife crisis or a course life crisis is a really good example of this. Like, thinking about, you know, I remember before I kind of started the channel, I was just kind of sitting around being like, wow, like, I think that I feel like life is meaningless. Like, it's very kind of, you know, we've got this kind of life to live and you have no idea what to do with it.

You don't even know how you're going to prioritize. Like, I don't have an idea of what you even want to do. And I feel like, you know, that more commonly hits people, kind of midlife crisis is, I think, potentially a more widespread example of that where, you know, somebody gets to like, oh, actually, one of my friends had been life crisis and he described it as like, he got to like 55. And he was like, oh my god, like, I'm actually going to die at some point.

And I feel like my entire life has been for nothing. And I can't like, again, I can't like, intellectualize someone into that experience. Like, I don't think I felt it nearly as much as my friend did. You know, he was seriously in a dark place kind of staring down the barrel of ending his own life on the basis of this realization.

And you know, I imagine for a lot of people it just never happens. That's great. Like, I don't think there's any reason to like, induce it. But I kind of think about my friend a lot to this sort of thing.

It's very easy, especially because now, you know, I kind of have a lot of, you know, I kind of enjoy life of kind of natural optimists. So I kind of find it quite easy to kind of bumble along and kind of sort of generally like quite happy state. But and so I think that sometimes I kind of look at these, look at something like Camu writes and says, ah, you know, he's talking about how the realization that life is meaningless is going to bring in that suffering is going to make you question whether it's worth carrying on. I kind of think I win it.

And then I remember my friend and think, I just don't think I felt it. Yeah. Well, I wonder how much of this kind of goes back to what you was saying before. So much of the work of philosophy or even YouTube channels did everything is a thinly veiled autobiography, as far as I can see.

That's a very niche and idea. Nietzsche thought that a lot of philosophers were just basically writing their own autobiories. Right. Well, I mean, it certainly seems to be the case here.

Does it not? Oh, absolutely. I think that it really applies to existential philosophy. You know, and I think that's again, one of the reasons I think one of the reasons why it's very easy, you know, although existential philosophy pulls people in, it's also very easy to pick up a couple of books like Central Wall Street, basically go, this is like bollocks.

But I think the other side of that feeling of this is like bollocks basically happens if you pick up thinker who is just psychologically wise, very differently to you. Like I sometimes have that with like someone like, you know, I occasionally pick up Sartre. I don't know. I just can't like, there's something about it that just doesn't particularly resonate with me.

I can't quite get inside the head of the problem. How would you advise them? How would Camo advise somebody who is torn between the life is like excruciatingly meaningful and life is excruciatingly meaningless. How do they sort of I laughing my ass off?

How do they thread the boat through the middle of that? As in, sorry, it's in the idea of somebody like alternating between sometimes they feel like, like incredibly mean. Have you seen, have you seen the image that I'm talking about? Do you know this?

This is the thing on the trade. No, so this, this is, this is one of my favorite images. I'll get Dean to put it up for the people that are watching. So it's a tiny little, a tiny little boat, a drawing of a tiny little boat.

I'll put it in the chat. So you should, you should be able to see this here. So tiny little boat and it's illustrated going along the water in between a whirlpool and on the left, it says life is devastatingly meaningless and on the right is a one, two, three, four, five, six headed dragon. And it says life is excruciatingly meaningful.

And there's this teeny tiny little sort of Greek looking boat with oars coming outside of it. And it just goes, I, LMEO. I think that's, I think that's like, you know, I think that's still in Corropis. Right.

Kind of the, the, I actually think that they're kind of an underexplored area in existential philosophy, which I think can we touch upon a little bit. But I think is like, if somebody wants to go out and write like the next tracks of existential philosophy, I'd love for it to be on this would be that idea of excruciating meaning because it's very easy, I think, to romanticize the idea of a meaningful life. But it's totally possible things to be like far too meaningful for comfort. The context of the context of politics, which I think is, is, is, you know, fascinating.

So he's, he, after he finishes the myth of Sisvis, he sort of has this kind of like indifference about it. He's kind of, is that right? Okay. So, you know, all the experiences roughly the same as no jet to meaning.

I'm somehow managing to mud along. Despite that, but in theory, this should make me indifference to all of the bad things that happening around me. Come, basically, find he can't do that. And he has this book called the Rebel, which is by far his most impenetrable work.

But it is generally very, very interesting. And one of the points he makes in the Rebel is that at a societal level, it is perfectly possible to become too imbued with meaning. You know, if you think about any kind of sort of theocratic tyranny, or like the terror of the term, which is a common example, it's sort of Stalin's USSR. He is an allysis of this is that the issue is at least partly that if you have an ultimate meaning that you're willing to literally sacrifice everything else to, then you will sacrifice as many lives as humanly possible.

Or as you think is required to fulfill this vision. What I think, it occurred to me that this observation definitely works, not quite in the same kind of apocalyptic sense, but works at some sense on the individual level. In that, you know, we all, I think that the sense of life being too meaningful is very, very natural. It's the sense of being under too much pressure.

This idea of like, oh, everything that's happening to me counts an awful lot. What am I going to do? Is, I think, a perfect example of somebody feeling too meaningful. But again, I think that that means that's a really insightful mean actually.

I'm going to spend a long time on it. So again, I think that what a lot of people want is not an abundance of meaning, nor a complete lack of meaning, but enough meaning to give them a general direction, but also enough meaninglessness that you can make arbitrary choices along that way. You don't actually want every one of your decisions. I would argue at least.

I think most people don't want all of the decisions to be dictated by a kind of set of values in advance. And I also think that that's kind of, I know that it's kind of vaguely robotic. And also, I think that that kind of approach doesn't do justice to just how difficult some decisions are. I think that, you know, certain moral dilemmas, you kind of, you know, imagine that, imagine that I, you know, you spoke to someone, the Sartre has an idea of like an insoluble moral dilemma.

And his example is that, you know, somebody's told between staying home and looking after their elderly mother or going to fight an artsy's in the French resistance. And I know, I, you know, his mum could really suffer from this. She could even pass away while he's gone. And the moment it's uncertain whether the French resistance will be victorious at all.

And Sartre's point is that this seems pretty indeterminate. And, you know, I don't know if somebody's value system was so well organized that they could give me like an instant answer to that dilemma. I don't know if I'd like that. I think that would be like, I think that, you know, there's a sense of which their choices will be so determined that, I don't know, I don't know if it would do justice to how excruciating real moral dilemmas and real just decisional dilemmas are.

I wonder how much of this is a challenge of communication, that it's so, it sounds so flimsy to sort of talk about emotion and desire and being pulled in different ways and gut instinct and this ephemeral, like flaky sense of something. But it's, you know, show me, let me grab a hold of it, put it into language that is testable that's, does this make sense? This is desire to communicate things in a much more concrete, verifiable way. And I do think that's a pretty good instinct because at the same time, you know, I, I do think that philosophical discussions can quickly go into territory that is so abstract that I don't think anyone could possibly give a shit.

But, you know, there's, I think that one of the ways to sort of keep this down to earth is to link things like meaning back down into things like motivation and action and affect. So I think that, you know, it's when somebody says, you know, what's the meaning of life? There's a reason why that question constrances really, like pointless, like, you know, what's the meaning of life? Like, how do we even go about passing that?

And I think that instead of asking questions, like, what's the meaning of life? I find that people are often a lot more enthusiastic if you phrase an existential question, just in terms of, you know, what gets you up in the morning? What actually is the kind of motivating force behind your action? What, what if you removed it?

Would you then struggle to do anything with it? Like, and, you know, I think that this allows people to get a grip on what they find meaningful, which is quite a useful thing to learn. You know, if you find out that actually, like, I would really not know what to do without my group of friends, that might tell you need to invest more of your time and effort into that area of life. And so it's getting kind of quite a way away from these ticker existential flossips.

But I think that's one of the, one of the, the values and asking existential questions is that it does force you to confront what matters to you. And I think that it's very easy to forget what matters to you. I mean, you know, to take Titus back to fiction, I know that a book that you like is the alchemist. And I feel like a lot of, you know, they're the same kind of lesson occurs there.

Right. This is no idea of like, it's very easy to forget the kind of things that are intuitively and instinctively meaningful. I think that I'm one of the real flaws, I think, in approaching questions of meaning in the way that I do, which is to go and read lots of existential flossips and see what I think is that there's a tendency that you can just become really ruminative about it. And, you know, occasionally I get a comment under one of my videos that's like, you're just overthinking it.

And sometimes if I'm in the right mood, I look at it and I'm like, you're probably right. There is a sense in which you can get so deep into what this person's particular interpretation of mutualism or this person's signature of camu or sattra or particular. And I really, I find that stuff naturally interesting. But there is a sense in which for the way that just you would want to approach an existential question if you don't necessarily want to go in and read a bunch of this stuff is that it's, I think the part of it is recognizing that meaning is at least partly extra cognitive.

It may involve cognition, but it's not merely cognition. All vibes, man. Just comes out of the mind. I think that vibes are really important.

Like I do not undervalue the vibes. Yeah, I think so. You know, think about what you come away with from a social set, like a kind of hangout with friends, hangout with someone. You might not remember exactly what was said.

You remember the vibe. I think that, you know, we kind of, I don't want to get too woo-y. But I feel like we have far beyond that point. One of the, I think that something that's one of the valuable insights in Nietzsche's kind of prioritizing the instinct, or kind of Dostoevsky's novelistic approach to existential questions, is that they are both essentially saying, you know, this isn't merely a cognitive issue.

This is something that you also need to feel and enact. And you know, they disagree in a lot, but I think it's nice when they agree on something. Mm. Yeah, I, this sort of balance between what the cerebral ruminative thinker loves, which is to ask the why question, and the realization that there is such a thing as too much reflection.

There is a golden mean for fucking everything, right? And rumination is one of them. I'm kind of obsessed by this idea at the moment that advice which is made and worked for most people will be widely distributed, because on average, it's most ineffective. It's an effective meme and it'll continue to spread.

But the problem is, because it's so popular, it's got such a bull run behind it, that even people who that advice is not for, who already have too much of the thing that it's pushing them to do more of, attempted to take it on because it works so well for everybody else. So one of the good examples here is something like, just work harder. Now, just working harder will reliably give everybody, almost everybody on the planet will benefit from that. There are very few scenarios I can think of where working harder is not going to make the outcomes better.

But there is a particular cohort of people for whom working harder is something they already do too much of, and what they actually need is a good rest ethic rather than a good work ethic. And I think that, sorry, just that the same thing comes for reflection rumination. That there are many people, think before you act, young Joseph, think before you act, this is very important. Oh, I must think before I act, thank you, Mom, thank you, Dad.

You know, if you are a perennial thinker, maybe think of it less, maybe follow your gut. But the problem is thinking before you act, even for the over thinker is likely to give them from an objective metric sense, better outcomes in life. They're going to be more careful. They're going to be more considered.

They're going to make fewer failures. But what is it that they've lost all of the losses here ahead and all of the successes that tend to be pretty observable? So the losses of time, of the quality of peace, of the inner texture of your mind, of lost opportunity, because it took you so long to be able to arrive at this particular thing. And the same thing for hard work.

Well, how much are you tearing yourself up? What about the state of your health? What about your blood pressure? What about how much time you're spent thinking about this thing and obsessing when you should have just been eating a sandwich or playing with your friends or doing whatever?

Well, objectively, it's made you more successful. But again, I think this is why widespread, rough human advice should always go through a filter. And it's also why I find the criticisms that kind of treat audience members, you know, the podcast election with Rogan last year, it is so fucking patronizing to say, look at these agent-unwashed peons watching this man just shovel like radical dogma down their throat. They voted exclusively because of what he said.

Okay, right. So you're saying that these people have no ability to discern anything that they see. And there's no filter between what they watch on YouTube on Joe Rogan's channel or this advice from David Goggins saying to work harder or, you know, the fucking Camus saying you need to refer whatever, like, there is no degree of filter. And in the same sentence, I know that if the advice is sufficiently seductive and if it's sufficiently popular, that people do tend to imbibe that.

So there's like a big tension going on there. But yeah, I'm pretty obsessed with this idea. Popular advice gets taken on unquestioningly and for some people, they already have too much of it. So they probably need less.

Absolutely. I think the other side to that is a lot of the a lot of popular advice just kind of generally is going to be maximized towards sort of minimizing social harm. So actually, the thing that reminded me of this was a clip by David Mitchell on what I like to you. And he sort of says, you know, children broadly speaking, are divided into reckless children and timorous children.

And he sort of says, you know, in order to keep the reckless children from jumping off of things and killing themselves by virtue of their, you know, untethered love for life, you need to tell all children, stop what you're doing, you know, think and slow down and be more afraid. And if you're already naturally fearful as David Mitchell was, this is terrible advice and it's actually going to harm you. But because the harm is significantly more hidden, as you say, it's less likely to end up on the news and have more guardrails. Oh, that's so good.

You explained what I was explaining much more succinctly than I managed to do it. That's right. I think that the I take up on about popular advice. I think again, you know, one of the benefits of reading novels is, yeah, you kind of laser in on if you really relate to a particular novel, then you laser in on advice that is almost tailor made and lessons that are almost tailor made.

You know, I go about Dostoevsky all the time because that's a novelist I really like and who really resonates with me because a lot of the, you know, he resonates with me far more than someone like each, for example, because a lot of Dostoevsky's advice for or kind of like, the lessons for living meaningfully are to do with this notion that he has an active love. You know, he's very religious, but he, the way in which this religiosity often manifests in his work is through the idea that of loving others. But he's pretty, he's pretty clear that loving others is going to be really hard work. He has this wonderful kind of offhand brilliant insight from a doctor in the Brothers Karamazov where the doctor says, Oh, you know, it's very easy to love mankind in general.

It's very hard to love people in particular. I think that's amazing. That's so true. And I think, yeah, Dostoevsky outlining that active love is going to make your life incredibly meaningful, but also is going to be really, really, really tough.

Is, you know, that's an approach to life that very much resonates with me. That's why I kind of go on about Dostoevsky all the time. I find all of the stuff that Dostoevsky criticizes people for are applicable to me. And I find all of his lessons are also applicable to me.

So that's kind of, but my point is that other people might find authors or philosophers or anyone who really resonates with that. I think that we kind of, again, we have a tendency, and I have a tendency as well, you know, recovering logic students and all that. So only to only ever take on lessons that are universalizable. And the trouble is that kind of, if we're, you know, if we're talking about the mean earlier, the kind of level of standard deviation of human properties is absolutely massive.

So, you know, you go off the mean as a good chance that you might end up, you might end up severely down the wrong path, especially in the kind of details. And that's where I think it's kind of novel stuff. I'm still, you know, don't, I feel like I sound like I'm reading down on a period of psychology. I'm brilliant.

I think it's brilliant. But I also think that, you know, I'm going to try to make the case for the kind of psychological novel, which is that you absolutely won't learn anything about human kind. But you might learn something about a few people and one of them might be you. Oh, dude, that is so good.

Hey, man, let's bring this one home. I love your work. I love your channel. Everyone should go and subscribe.

Where should people go? They're going to want to keep up today with the stuff you're doing. Oh, yeah. I suppose I'm unsolicited advice on YouTube.

I may change the name at some point. That was kind of a name that I basically put on to acknowledge that nobody asked me to do this. Everything I do is deeply on the very pro. I'm very pro using your own name.

If you ask Alex when you see tomorrow, ask Alex for the war zone that he made me crawl through in order to convince him to change his channel name from Cosmic's getting. Just get him to explain to you because he could, he could make me breakfast for the next six months and still on me. Every single day, you can make me breakfast. I'm so bullish on you making a change, making your name, dude.

Capture that fucking personal accountability. But everyone should go and watch it. You've got great, great rounds of tons of different books and ideas and like even stuff I wouldn't have expected on their ideas about masculinity and love and crushes and stuff. It's sick.