Daily Motivations - THE 13 TRUTHS

Episode Date: September 5, 2026

Speaker - Jordan PetersonInstagram- Daily_motivationsorgFacebook- @daily_motivationsorgSupport us PayPal

It's sad to see that people are disenchanted and nihilistic and depressed and anxious and aimless and Perverse and vengeful and and all of those things. It's terrible and then to see people Question whether that's necessary and then to start to rise out of it. It's like it's so fun like last night I was at after my talk. It's overwhelming I don't usually think about these things but I was I was after my talk last night and so all these people line up and you know they have their 15 seconds with me and And they're kind of tentative. They're excited and a tentative when they come up to talk to me. And then they have, you know, 15 seconds of time to tell me something.

I'm really listening to them. And they're hesitant about whether or not to share the good news about their life, you know. And I think it's often because when people share good news about their life, people don't necessarily respond positively. You know, they don't get encouragement. And people need so little encouragement. It's just unbelievable. And so they'll tell me something good. God, that's so good.

You know, somebody says, oh, I'm getting a long way better with my father. I hadn't seen him for 10 years, and now we get along. It's like, God, great. And the power of that, you can't overstate the power of that for individuals to get their life together. The individual is an unbelievably powerful force, and every single person who gets their act together a little bit has the capacity to spread that around them.

It's a chain reaction, and so it's a lovely thing to see. I have to treat yourself like you matter, because if you don't, then you don't take care of yourself, and you become vengeful and cruel, and you take it out on people around you, and you're not a positive force. None of that's good. So you suffer more and so does everyone around you. And there's a malevolence that enters into it. None of that's good. So that's what happens if you don't treat yourself like you matter. And then, well, what happens if you don't treat other people like they matter? Well, you lie to them, you cheat them, you steal, you, you enter into impulsive, you're...

relationships with them. They can't trust you. That doesn't go anywhere. They don't like you. You end up alone at best and maybe like incarcerated at worst. Like that doesn't work. And so you watch the people around you who thrive, regardless of what they say, they act out the proposition that everyone matters. And then you have a functional society. And I think, okay, well, if if when you act out the proposition that everyone matters, you have a functional society, maybe that's evidence. that that proposition is true. It's like, I think it's true. One of the things that's really interesting

about the Old Testament is that, and the Jews in the Old Testament, is that they don't take the path of Cain. Every time they're walloped by God, which is like fairly frequently, they say, we must have done something wrong and we have to set ourselves right.

And that's an unbelievably heroic attitude because that's the alternative to cursing fate. It's like you take the receipts, responsibility for failure onto yourself. And you think, well, if I was just, maybe if I just had my act together a little bit more, if I took advantage of every opportunity that was put in front of me, if I wasn't resentful and bitter, then I could have done something that would have tilted the situation in a different direction. And like, that's almost inevitably true.

Dostoevsky, I think, said something like, every man is responsible for everything that happens to him and everything that happens to everyone else. and that's, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, it's a crazy statement, right? It's a crazy statement and he was a pretty extreme person in many, many ways. But there's a level at which that's metaphysically true, you know, because what happens is that it's, it's, it's failure to act often, that's the most catastrophic, you know, I mean, I've, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's to not do the right thing when the, when the situation presents itself. And it's very specific. You know, you're constantly in situations where you could do the right thing if you were willing to take a risk that's actually of relatively moderate size.

And you know that you could take the risk and you know that you should take the risk and you don't. And that happens to people all the time. And then what happens is the thing that they didn't oppose grows a little bit and they shrink a little bit. And that starts a loop, hey. Psychologists have been, not all psychologists, obviously, but the psychological profession is, it's neck deep in this pathology, has been beating the self-esteem drum for 50 years. Oh no, you're okay. You should feel good about yourself.

Like, you're fine the way you are. It's like you think, well, that's a calming message for people. It's like, no, it's not. It's not at all. And I watch my audiences. It's like, it's full of people in the audience who think, I'm suffering a lot more than I think is tenable. A whole bunch of it's my fault.

my life is not in the order it should be. I know I'm doing 50 things wrong. It's like, what the hell's wrong with me? What's wrong with the people around me? This is really serious. And some, you know, well-meaning person comes up and says, you're okay just the way you are. It's like, no one wants that message.

It's like, no, I'm not okay the way I am. I'm not okay at all the way I am. I know that. And so, you know, when I'm speaking to, when I'm speaking now, I say to people, well, oh, you're nowhere near what you could be. That's the positive message. It's like, yeah, you're a mess. but you don't have to stay that way.

If you're a mess, you know it, obviously you're suffering away. Like so much you can barely tolerate it. It's like, that's okay. You can do something about it. That's the thing that turns the lights on. It's like you could do something about it. There's a line in the New Testament that's relevant to that. Do not cast pearls before swine.

And what that means is that if people are not listening to you, stop talking to them. And that's really, that is the best piece of advice. that I can give you and what happens is that if you stop talking to people who aren't listening to you and start watching them instead they will tell you what they're up to but so if you have things to say you say them but you find people that will listen talk to them the ones who aren't listening pull back because you're you're devaluing what you have to say by offering it to an audience that does

nothing but rejected and that's a good guideline to life in general so you're harmless you're not virtuous You're just harmless. You're like a rabbit. A rabbit isn't virtuous. It's just can't do anything except get eaten. It's not virtuous. If you're a monster and you don't act monstrously, then you're virtuous. But you also have to be a monster. Well, you see this all the time. Harry Potter's like that too. It's like he's flawed, he's hurt. He's got evil in him. He can talk to snakes, man. He breaks rules all the time. All the time. He's not an obedience. at all. But, you know, he has a good reason for breaking the rules. And if he couldn't break the rules, him and his little clique of rule-breaking, you know, troublemakers, if they didn't break the rules, they wouldn't attain the highest goal. So it's very peculiar, but it's a very, very, very, very common mythological notion. You know, the hero has to be, the hero has to be a monster. But a controlled monster, Batman is like that. You know, I mean, it's everywhere. It's, it's, it's a total.

a story you always hear. I know you stated in the last lecture that the importance for setting age in life and to kind of have goals to work towards, right? So my question was, how do you, how do you do that if you don't know where you want to go? Because that's kind of where I got stuck on your future authoring program because. Okay, that's a good question. That's a really good question. So there's this notion in the Old Testament that morality is following a sequence of prohibitions. There's a bunch of bad things you shouldn't do, and then basically you're good enough. And I think there's wisdom in that. I think that's kind of where children start, right?

I mean, I love children and all that, but they're crazy little creatures, and they need to be civilized. But partly what you do is you lay prohibitions on them, and mostly what you're trying to do is lay prohibitions on them, for the behaviors that if they manifested would make their life miserable. So this is why this thing that I've said to people has become this crazy internet meme, but that's to clean up your room, which is a lot better and more useful than people think. It's a lot harder, too. But the first thing you do, I think, and I learned this in part from Solzhenitsyn when he was trying to iron out his soul when he was in the Guleg,

because he was trying to figure out how he got there, how he contributed to how he got there. You know, not Stalin and Hitler, even though they were kind of to blame, you know. But there wasn't much he could do about that. I think what you have to do, and this is part of humility, is you have to look around you within your sphere of influence, like the direct sphere of influence, and fix the things that announce themselves as in need of repair.

And those are often small things. And they can be like your room. Put it in order. Because the thing is, it isn't exactly so important that your room is in order, although it is. What's important is that you learn how to do. distinguish between chaos and order and to be able to act in a manner that produces order. And I think you can do something as simple as just sit on your bed and think, okay, there's probably like five things I could do today so that tomorrow morning is slightly better than this morning was, at least, or at least I'm not falling behind. And those will usually be, it's like having to eat a toad in the morning, right? It's like it's not going to be something you want to do. There'll be things you're trying to avoid. They're snakes, essentially. But if you ask yourself, like you're asking,

someone which I think is a form of prayer. If you ask yourself instead of telling yourself, you know, what is it that I could do to set things more right today that I would actually do? It's usually some small thing because you're not that disciplined, you know, then you can go do it. And then you put the world together a little more when you do that. And that spreads out. But you also put your, you also construct yourself into something that's better able to call order forth from chaos. And that makes you just incrementally stronger. And then the next

day, you can maybe take on a slightly larger task. And like, you get the benefit of compound interest if you do that. It's a tremendously powerful technique. And I think if you do that at some point, instead of just having to fix things up that are not good,

you'll start to get a glimmer of the positive things that you could do, you know, the positive things that you could do that would actually constitute a vision. And that's what I would recommend. If you're hungry and you eat, well, that's good, but it's over and then you're on to the next thing, right? It's not exactly sustaining. It's just necessary. That's called consumatory reward, by the way. This other reward system is incentive reward. And the incentive reward system works on dopamine,

this neurochemical dopamine, which is also the neurochemical tracts that opiates and cocaine and amphetamines, the drugs that people really like to abuse alcohol often for some people, activate. And so you might say if you don't have enough meaning in your life, then you're more prone to addiction. And that's definitely the case. Even with rats, if you take a rat, you put him in a cage by himself and he has nothing to do, and then you give him access to cocaine, he'll get addicted to the point where he won't do anything but take cocaine. But if you throw the rat back in with a bunch of other rats and he gets to do rat things, then it's very hard to get him addicted to cocaine. And so the purposeless rat is prone to addiction. Well, it's the same with human beings. Now, here's

a corollary to that which is really cool. So the magnitude of the reward you experience as you're moving towards a goal is proportionate to the importance of the goal. So that means the more important the goal you pick, the more possibility there is for the kind of reward, let's say, it's really a state of being that is life affirming and it is directly life affirming in that, you know, like if you're in a football game and it's an important football game and maybe you break a finger. And, you know, normally that's, that's a problem. It hurts and you're going to stop doing whatever you're doing. But if you're right in the middle of the game, then you'll be so amped up on this reward system that it's analgesic. It stops the pain. It also suppresses anxiety.

So if you have a purpose, then it's analgesic. It takes some of the pain out of life. It's very positive in that it motivates and energizes you and focuses you and makes you able to remember and pay attention. and it quells fear. And so those things are all direct. And so then you might think, well, what's the best possible goal? Well, and that's the purpose, I would say, of religious training and philosophical training. It's like, just what the hell are you doing in the world? You have to treat yourself like you matter.

Because if you don't, then you don't take care of yourself, and you become vengeful and cruel. And you take it out on people around you, and you're not a positive force. None of that's good. So you suffer more and so does everyone around you and there's a malevolence that enters into it None of that's good. So that's what happens if you don't treat yourself like you matter and then what happens if you don't treat other people like they matter? Well, you lie to them you cheat them you steal you you enter into impulsive relationships with them They can't trust you that doesn't go anywhere. They don't like you you you end up alone at best and maybe like incarcerated at worst like that doesn't work and so So you watch the people around you who thrive, regardless of what they say, they act out the proposition that everyone matters.

And then you have a functional society. And I think, okay, well, if when you act out the proposition that everyone matters, you have a functional society, maybe that's evidence that that proposition is true. It's like, I think it's true. Make a damn schedule and stick to it. Okay, so what's the rule with the schedule? It's not a bloody prison. That's the first thing that people do wrong. They say, well, I don't like to follow a schedule.

It's like, well, what kind of schedule are you setting up? Well, I have to do this, then I have to do this, then I have to do this. You know, and then I just go play video games, because who wants to do all these things that I have to do? It's like, wrong. Set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want. That's the trick. It's like, okay, I've got tomorrow. If I was going to set it up so it was the best possible day I could have,

Practically speaking, what would it look like? Well, then you schedule that. And obviously, there's a bit of responsibility that's going to go along with that. Because if you have any sense, one of the things that you're going to insist upon is that at the end of the day, you're not in worse shape than you were that at the beginning of the day, right? Because that's a stupid day. If you have a bunch of those in a row, you just dig, you know, you dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it. It's like, sorry, that's just not a good strategy.

It's a bad strategy. So maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation, or maybe it's more than that, depending on how far behind you are. But even that, you can ask yourself, okay, well, I've got these responsibilities. I have to schedule the damn things in. What's the right ratio of responsibility to reward? And you can ask yourself that, just like you'd negotiate with someone who is working for you. It's like, okay, you got to work tomorrow. Okay, so I want you to work tomorrow.

And you might say, okay, well, what are you going to do for me? that makes it likely that I'll work for you. Well, you could ask yourself that, you know. So maybe you do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes. I don't know, whatever turns your crank, man, but, you know, you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself. Like you're negotiating with someone that you care for, that you would like to be productive and have a good life. And that's how you make the schedule. It's like, and then you look at the day and you think, well, if I had that day, that'd be good.

Great. You know, and you're useless and horrible, so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy, but that beats the hell out of zero, right? And if you hit it even with 50% accuracy, another rule is, well, aim for 51% the next week, or 50.5% for God's sake, or because you're going to hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward. One of the main reasons that people don't get what they want is because they don't actually figure out, what it is.

And the probability that you're going to get what would be good for you, let's say, which would even be better than what you want, right? Because, you know, you might be wrong about what you want easily. But maybe you could get what would really be good for you. Well, why don't you? Well, because you don't try. You don't think, okay, here's what I would like if I could have it. And I don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force

it to deliver you goods for status or something like that. That isn't what I mean. I mean something like, imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for. And then you thought, okay, I'm caring for this person. I would like things to go as well for them as possible. What would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case? Well, people don't do that.

They don't sit down and think, all right, you know, let's figure it out. You've got a life that's hard, obviously. It's like three years from now you can have what. you need. You've got to be careful about it. You can't have everything. You can have what would be good for you. But you have to figure out what it is. And then you have to aim at it. Well, my experience with people is being is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them, and then they aim at it, then they get it. And it's strange because they don't... It's a strange thing. It's not quite that simple because, you know, you may formulate an idea about what would be good for you,

and then you take ten steps towards that and you find out that. that your formulation was a bit off. And so you have to reformulate your goal. You know, so you're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal. But a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria for success. And so since success is a very narrow line

and very unlikely, the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero. And so there's a proposition here and the proposition is, if you actually want something, you can have a little, it. Now the question then would be, well, what do you mean by actually want? And the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible.

And that's a sacrificial idea, right? It's like, you don't get everything. Obviously. Obviously. But maybe you can have what you need. And maybe all you have to do to get it is ask. But asking isn't a whim or today's wish. It's like you have to be deadly serious about it. You have to think, okay, I'm taking stock of myself. And if I was going to live properly in the world, and I was going to set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation,

and I don't mean as a harsh judge, exactly, what is it that I would aim at? Sit on your bed one day and ask yourself, what remarkably stupid things am I doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life? And if you actually ask that question, but you have to want to know the answer, right? Because that's actually what asking the question means. It doesn't mean just mouthing the words.

It means you have to decide that you want to know. You'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl. Stop doing the things that you know are wrong, that you could stop doing. Right? So it's a fairly limited attempt. First of all, we're not going to say that you know what the good is or what the truth is in any ultimate sense. But we will presume that there are things that you're doing that for one reason or another you know are not in your best interests. There's something about them that you just know you should stop. They're kind of self-evident to you. Other things you're going to be doubtful about, you're not going to know which way is up and which way is down. But there are things that you're doing that you know you shouldn't do. Now, some of those you won't stop doing. for whatever reason. You don't have the discipline or maybe there's a secondary payoff or you don't believe it's necessary or it's too much of a sacrifice or you're angry or resentful or afraid. Who knows? So forget about those for now. But there's another subset that you could stop doing. It might be a little thing. Well, that's fine. Stop doing it. And see what happens. And what will happen is your vision will clear a little bit. And then something else will pop up in your field of apprehension that you will also know you will also know, should stop doing and that you could stop doing because you strengthened yourself a bit by stopping doing the particular stupid thing that you were doing before that just puts you together a little bit more

and you could do that repeatedly for for an indefinite period of time and and you know that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to ever be able to formulate a clear and final picture of what constitutes the truth and the good but it does mean that you'll be able to continually move away from what's untruth and what's bad And you know, that's not a bad start. The next best predictor of lifetime success is conscientiousness. Well, so, and of the two aspects of conscientiousness, say, orderliness and industriousness, the better predictor is industriousness.

So the question is, well, what can you do about your industriousness? And the answer to that is, well, that's kind of rough too, because there's a strong genetic component. But you can work on micro-habits with regards to your conscientiousness. And I think the best micro habits, this is partly to do with this future authoring program processes. I think the best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself, goals that you actually value. And the future authoring program helps people do that. And basically, it does a situational analysis of, it helps you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis, I would say. And so the questions are something like, well, all right, you're going to have to put some effort into your life.

And you need to be motivated to do that. And so what are the potential sources of motivation? Well, you could think about them in the big five manner. You know, if you're extroverted, you want friends. If you're agreeable, you want an intimate relationship. If you're disagreeable, you want to win competitions. If you're open, you want to engage in creative activity. If you're high neuroticism, you want security.

Okay, so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on, that you could tailor to your own personality. But then there are dimensions that you want to, consider your life across. And so we ask people about, well, you know, if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years, if you were taking care of yourself properly, you know, what would you want from your friendships? What would you want from your intimate relationship? How would you like to structure your family? What do you want for your career? Well, how are you going to use your time outside of your job? And how are you going to regulate your mental physical, mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use? Because that's, that's a good place to auger down, you know, because alcoholism, for example, wipes out, you know, five, you know, five, to 10% of people. So you want to keep that under control. And then, and then so maybe, you know, you, you, you develop a vision of what you would like your life to be. And that associates the, so the goal, once the goal is established, and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement, the micro processes become rewarding in proportion in relation to their

causal association with the goal. And that tangles in. your incentive reward system. You know, we talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system, and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward. And the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards

a valued goal. Okay, well, what's the implication of that? Better have a valued goal, because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out. And so the more valuable the goal, in principle, the more the micro process is associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge.

And so what that means is while you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day, you're ready to go. And so as far as I can tell, what you do is you specify your long-term ideal. Maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding, because that's also useful. You specify your goal. You do that in some sense as a unique individual. You want to specify goals that make you say, oh, if that could happen as a consequence, of my efforts, it would clearly be worthwhile. Because the question always is, why do something?

Because doing nothing is easy. You just sit there and you don't do anything. That's real easy. The question is, why would you ever do anything? And the answer to that has to be, because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile. And then the next question might be, well, where should you look for worthwhile things? And one would be, well, you could consult your own temperament. And the other would be, well, you kind of look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan.

So you do a structural analysis of the sub-components of human existence, and I already did that. You need a family. You need friends. You don't need to have all these things, but you better have most of them. Family, friends, career, educational goals, plans for time outside of work, attention to your mental and physical health, et cetera. That's what life is about.

And if you don't have any of those things, well, then all you've got left is miserable. and suffering. So that's, that's a bad, that's a bad deal for you. So, so once you, but once you set up that, that, that's really, in many, in many ways, that's what you should be doing at universities is, that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be, right? And you, you aim at that. And then you use everything you learn as a means of building that person that you want to be. And, and I really mean, I don't mean want to be. I don't mean should be, even those things, those things are going to overlap. And it's important to distinguish between those because that's partly, and this is back down to the

micro-routine analysis, so I say, well, you're going to try to make yourself more industrious. Okay, number one, specify your damn goals, because how are you going to hit something if you don't know what it is? That isn't going to happen. And often people won't specify their goals, too, because they don't like to specify conditions for failure. So if you keep yourself all vague and foggy, which is real easy, because that's just a matter of not doing as well, then you don't know when you fail. And people might say, well, I really don't want to know when I fail because that's painful.

So I'll keep myself blind about when I fail. That's fine, except you'll fail all the time then. You just won't know it until you've failed so badly that you're done. And that can easily happen by the time you're 40. So I would recommend that you don't let that happen. So that's willful blindness, right? You could have known, but you chose not to. Okay, so once you get your goal structure set up,

you think, okay, if I could have this life, It looks like that might be worth living, despite the fact that it's going to be, you know, anxiety provoking and threatening and there's going to be some suffering and loss involved and all of that, obviously. The goal is to have a vision for your life such that all things considered, that justifies your effort. You don't have to necessarily have done anything wrong for things to get completely out of control. It's a terrifying doctrine, but it's not a hopeless doctrine because it still says that there's a way forward. There's a pathway forward. And the pathway forward is to adopt a mode of being that has some nobility so that you can tolerate yourself and perhaps even have some respect for yourself as someone who's capable of standing up in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering. And that the pathway forward as far as the existentialists are concerned is by, well, certainly by the avoidance of deceit, particularly in language, but also by the adoption of responsibility for the conditions of.

existence and some attempt on your part to actually rectify them. And the thing that's so interesting about that is, well, too, as far as I'm concerned, and some of this is from clinical experience, you know, if you take people, and I've told you this, and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of, you know, that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals, their self-defined goals. If you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of, they get stronger. And you don't know what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if for 10 years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by the depth by your own definitions right within the

value structure that you've created to the degree that you've done that what would you be like well you know there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are people who do find out over decades long periods what they could be like if they were who they were if they said if they spoke their being forward. And they get stronger and stronger and stronger. And we don't know the limits to that. We do not know the limits to that.

And so you could say, well, in part, perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're not everything you could be and you know it. And of course, that's a terrible thing to admit and it's a terrible thing to consider. But there's real promise in it, right? Because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world and another way that you could act in the world. So what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you now My experience is with people that we're probably running at about 51% of our capacity

Something mean you can think about this yourselves I often ask undergraduates How many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day You know inefficient studying while watching things on YouTube that not only do you not want to watch that you don't even care about that make you feel horrible or about watching after you're done, that's probably four hours right there. You know, you think, well, that's 20, 25 hours a week. It's 100 hours a month. That's two and a half full work weeks. It's half a year of work weeks per year.

And if your time is worth $20 an hour, which is a radical underestimate, it's probably more like 50. If you think about it in terms of deferred wages, if you're wasting 20 hours a week, you're wasting $50,000 a year. And you are doing that right now. And it's because you're young, wasting $50,000 a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because I'm not going to last nearly as long. And so if your life isn't everything it could be, you

could ask yourself, well, what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you? You'd be, who knows how much more efficient, 10 times more efficient, 20 times more efficient. That's the Pareto distribution. You have no idea how efficient, efficient people get. It's completely, it's off the charts. Well, and if you're, we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that's another thing people do all the time. Not only do they not do what they should to make things better, they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely

pathological package. If people stopped really, really trying just to make things worse, we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that. So there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability, social judgment, both of which are major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt. It isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being. It isn't only your fate. It's the fate of everyone that you're networked with.

And so, you know, you think, well, there's 9 billion, 7 billion people in the world. We're going to peak at about 9 billion, by the way, and then it'll decline rapidly. But 7 billion people in the world, and who are you? You're just one little dust moat among that 7 billion. And so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do, but that's simply not the case. It's the wrong model because you're at the center of a network. You're a node in a network. Of course that's even more true now that we have social media.

You'll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life. And they'll know a thousand people each. And that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion. And so that's how you're connected. And the things you do, they're like dropping a stone in a pond. The ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully comprehend. And it means that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think. And so if you act that, of course, the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do.

And you might say, well, that's better than living a meaningless existence. It's better for it to matter. But I mean, if you really asked yourself, would you be so sure if you had the choice, I can live with no responsibility whatsoever. The price I pay is that nothing matters. Or I can reverse it and everything matters. But I have to take the responsibility that's associated with that. It's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path. Now when you say, well, nihilists suffer dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer.

Yeah, but the advantage is they have no responsibility. So that's the payoff and I actually think that's the motivation. Say, well, I can't help being nihilistic. All my belief systems have collapsed. It's like, yeah, maybe. Maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out. And the price you pay is some meaningless suffering. But you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you.

and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr. So that's a pretty good deal all things considered, especially when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world. Well, what Solzhenitsyns figured out. And so many people in the 20th century, it's not just him, even though he's the best example, is that if you live a pathological life,

you pathologize your society. And if enough people do that, then it's hell. Really, really. And you can read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the fortitude to do that, and you'll see exactly what hell is like. And then you can decide if that's a place you'd like to visit, or even more importantly, if it's a place you'd like to visit, and take all your family and friends,

because that's what happened in the 20th century.