Making Sense with Sam Harris - #347 — Finding Sanity in 2024

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. It's now widely acknowledged that even in the most affluent societies, perhaps especially in the most affluent societies, there's a crisis of meaning. There are many signs of this. There's what's often described as an epidemic of loneliness. There's also a widespread erosion of social trust and new extremes of political partisanship. There are soaring levels of drug addiction and overdoses in many Western countries. It's pretty clear that the abundance of modern life is no guarantee of living a good life.

Simply buying more stuff and watching hours of TikTok each day can't be the final fruition of millennia of human striving. It certainly seems like something is missing. The question is, what? Well, there are many levels on which our collective problems need to be addressed, and there may be many ways to alleviate this apparent crisis of meaning. But one remedy is for more of us to understand our own minds directly and to take responsibility for them. All the chaos we see in the world, beyond natural disasters, is a symptom of human minds being out of control.

Greed, fear, hatred, ignorance, false certainty, These states of mind can reduce whole cities to rubble. Of course, most of us can't change the culture in any significant way. We can't change the laws. We can't change our institutions. We can advocate for change. We can add our voices to the cacophony on social media. But there are very few people who can affect things quickly at scale. However, each of us can radically change our own lives and the lives of those closest to us by understanding our minds. We live under the curse of partial attention, partial attention to the people we love and to our deeper priorities and to the ongoing consequences of using our attention in such superficial ways. We don't notice what we don't notice, almost by definition, so we tend to be bad judges of what

this fragmentation of our minds is costing us. Even when we've gotten almost everything we want, we are strangely unsatisfied. We're never quite full of happiness, or ever truly empty of desire. We're never quite full of happiness or ever truly empty of desire. Therefore, we're almost never at rest or even at ease. And many of us aren't even sure we want to be. Aspiring to contentment somehow sounds like an admission of defeat. This has been a perennial spiritual problem, of course, but there's reason to worry that modern life has made it harder to understand,

much less solve. And an endless series of life hacks won't do the trick. It's not a matter of dialing in your sleep, or your diet, or your fitness, or your finances. Those are all good things to sort out, of course, but the problem we face is deeper. It's quite literally existential. With the passage of each new year, we're all forced to confront the finiteness of life, as well as our tragic failures to make the most of it and to appreciate what we have in each moment. A real understanding of our predicament requires meditation. And by meditation, I don't mean some strange practice

propped up by stranger beliefs. I mean an actual awareness of what your mind is doing in each moment. The ability to pay attention. The ability to stop talking to yourself so that you can recognize what the mind is like prior to being distracted every waking moment by thoughts. Real meditation isn't a life hack. It isn't a hobby. It isn't even a solution to a problem. It's the recognition of what the mind is like prior to solving any specific problem. I occasionally talk about meditation and related topics on this podcast, but most of what

I have to say about this is available over at Waking Up. We launched Waking Up five years ago, and at first it was exclusively a meditation app. My goal was to teach meditation and its insights in the most effective way I could, and the app is much better than a book for doing this, and to do it without the clutter of religious dogmatism or New Age superstition. Some of the insights one can have about the mind through meditation sound obvious, or even trite, and yet they run very deep. The experience of impermanence I just referenced, for instance. Everyone understands it conceptually. We all notice how quickly time is passing. We see the face in the mirror aging. We know that nothing lasts, but somehow this knowledge doesn't make us wise. Meditation

allows us to experience the truth of impermanence much more clearly. When you pay attention, you see that there's a mirage-like quality to even the most intense experiences. There's nothing you can really cling to, and while this might sound depressing at first, releasing one's hold on experience leads to a real feeling of freedom. More and more one finds that one can be truly fulfilled before the next good thing happens, not merely because it has happened. The search to become happy relaxes, and one finds that one can simply be happy more and more, even while one makes positive changes in one's life, and even while one seeks to make changes in the world. Of course, there are other insights from meditation that sound far more paradoxical, or even spooky. For instance, the

idea that the self, the feeling that we are the unchanging subject of experience, is an illusion. This insight into selflessness, or what can be described as non-duality, can be hard to understand conceptually and hard to experience directly. But it is available, and it is without question the most important thing I've ever learned. Amazingly, waking up has now become a regular source of instruction about this insight for hundreds of thousands of people. While it seems crazy to say it, we might now be delivering more guidance on how to recognize the non-dual nature of mind than any other resource on earth. However, waking up has become more than a meditation app.

We now have a wide range of courses that are essentially applied philosophy and psychology. Our life section has series on stoicism, time management, cognitive behavioral therapy, and other topics relevant for just living a good life. And this section of the app continues to grow. So if you haven't checked it out recently, I want to encourage you to. And as with the podcast, waking up is free for anyone who can't afford it. As I look forward with some apprehension to what seems likely to be a very chaotic new year, I feel tremendous gratitude to know how I will stay sane and seek to help others stay sane. It's obviously hard to predict the future, but 2024 seems like an unusually open book.

There are at least two wars of real consequence being fought now. And they're not just regional conflicts, but wars whose outcome seems likely to affect the international order for a generation. And it's easy to see how war might spread. In fact, it's becoming a little hard to see how it won't spread. And the 2024 presidential election in the U.S., barring a miracle, is going to be some kind of nightmare. Even in the best case, it will further expose and exacerbate the divisions in our society. And the addition of artificial intelligence to the chaos of social media does not seem auspicious. There is surely a hurricane of lies and misinformation heading our way. The tug of history can be felt everywhere, and it is ominous.

I honestly don't think I've ever felt this concerned about the state of the world. But sanity is possible. Wisdom is possible. Love and compassion and gratitude are possible. It is possible to surrender one's thoughts about the past and the future so that the beauty of the present shines through. Whatever happens in 2024, I'm going to do more of that, and I hope you'll join me. I wish you all much happiness in the new year.