The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 96 - Without This You WON'T Find Fulfilment In Life: Stephen Fry

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

How many times have you said that you will finally be happy at some future date or when you have achieved some far off goal? Only once you reach that future time or accomplish that goal you aren’t happy? In this moment Stephen Fry discusses how we madly chase for complex things that we think will make us happy or indulge in fake happiness, all the while ignoring the simple things right in front of us that give true joy. Stephen says that our feelings of self worth and fulfilment ultimately come from the way we treat other people. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/df7qu211gxb Stephen- https://www.instagram.com/stephenfryactually/ https://twitter.com/stephenfry Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. We tend to set ourselves goals of, if only I could live in that kind of a village in the south of England, like quite near a station and nice little house, but not too expensive, and then you get it.

And so, yeah, you live in the suburbs, hooray. Oh, maybe that car, that new one there, that Tesla or whatever, I'll get a, then I'll be happy. You don't literally say, then I'll be happy, but there's a kind of sense of that's all I really want. And each of these goals is met and it isn't it. As the line of T.S. Eliot, that's not it. That's not it at all.

And we go through life thinking, that's not it. That's not it at all. There is something in all of us, a whole, a need for connection and love and truth and and a sense of something beautiful beyond and we can if you're religious you call it heaven and if you're a humanist you you you know you call it a fallen achieved life um of of friendship and you know elements of sacrifice and so on but you know you know that there's a hope for it. But if you mislabel it and think that it's connected with money or cars or mortgages or jobs or status,

you're never happy because of your status, because of things you've achieved. Happiness comes from somewhere else and of course i've yet to meet anyone who can tell you where it comes from regularly where it can be tapped like some resource ah that's where you get your happiness we know there's fake happiness from a blow of a drug or something like that and that couldn't be a more fake happiness. And there's the happiness of sitting around a table with friends, those beautiful fleeting moments with friends and family where it's all working and people aren't shouting at each other

and you can just look at each other. I was at a memorial service for a very dear friend, the composer Leslie Brickus, you know, who wrote Feeling Good and Pure Imagination for Willy Wonka and Goldfinger and a lot of great songs. He was an amazing songwriter. And I remembered I had this diary entry, which is just getting to know him, where there was a party. I think it was his birthday.

It was full of people, some of whom were super famous and extraordinary people. But I remember just catching sight of him and thinking he looked so like a Persian cat, just looking from one friend to another with this huge smile on his face, just being happy to have his friends around him. It's a simple thing, and yet it's the best thing and and we chase we chase things that give us less time to see our friends we we we chase work targets and we chase journeys and holidays and things with individuals and so on but and i think we grow away from it

i think the older you get the the less you appreciate friendship which is really sad when you're in your 20s you tend to do things as a group you go on holidays as a group because you haven't yet got married and partnered off and paired off so i don't know if you agree with me but i do think maybe that one of the one of the jobs of getting older well i'm convinced it when the job is getting older is not to become gnarled you know like a tree when the tree is young you can bend it it's you know a green stick as they call it you can bend it and shape it and so on but once it gets old you know and it starts getting that bark and if you tried to bend it it would snap and and we become a bit like that coming back to the the the first point you said

there about the goals we should be striving for, I found that really interesting. If not striving for a gold medal or this thing or that thing, how does someone, you know, listening to this now, what kind of goals do you think would protect them against that gold medal depression? What kind of orientation? It's an interesting point. And of course, I, you know, obviously understand that there are people who need to meet goals in order to pay debts. And, you know, that there are certain amounts of money they have to have to pay for their heating and their mortgage and all the rest of it.

And I'm obviously not suggesting that that it comes from how you treat people and how they treat you back and how you try to be a better person. I know it sounds really silly. I'm not a religious figure at all, but I'm very interested in religions. And I can understand that in some cases religions help cement a sense of community. Where I don't like it is where it's exclusive of course, where you have to buy into a certain set of ideas and so-called truths in order to be part of that community.

But I can understand how looking at a wider sense of life and it's really about when you're falling asleep at night, and this may just be me, can I fall asleep at night and feel I've been a reasonably okay person that day? Is this someone I have to apologize to next morning? Was I short and sharp with someone? Was I a bit mean? Was I lazy? Did I,

did I lie and, because I wanted my own way there? And it's not suggesting I'm a saint and I always manage it to, but I do have a very loud voice in my head. Philosophers call it a deontic or deontological voice, this sense of obligation that is a peculiarity, it seems, of our species. As far as we know, the image I was used because they look so cheerful, an Amazonian tree frog perched on a branch with its big grin isn't thinking, oh God, I was a terrible Amazonian tree frog yesterday. I really let myself down. I was mean. I was unkind. I must try to be a better Amazonian tree frog. What we admire about animals is they spend 100% of every day being themselves.

And we as humans are fully aware that we don't. We are not fully ourselves. We lie, we hide behind, we pretend, we fail, and we judge ourselves. Now, that peculiarity of humanity is tried. People have tried to explain it in different ways. Obviously, the Genesis myth is that we ate a fruit. It gave us the knowledge of good and evil and the sense of shame of our physical selves, all those things that separate us from animals. Because humans, since we were cognitively conscious, have been aware that we're animals

because we can see that we defecate and eat and sleep and mate just like other animals and sometimes very quite close to the other animals depending on what part of the world we live. But we can also see that we have these other things that animals don't. Who gave them to us? Where did they come from? What do they mean? And how do we live up to them? Are they a curse or a blessing? Do they make us mini gods? Or do they make us the playthings of gods, a cruel kind of, you know, little as

flies to wanton boys to the gods are we. They kill us for their sport, as Webster put it. And those oldest questions still really obsess us, particularly now, of course, because in the age of AI, we are able to be gods ourselves. We are making sentient beings, and we will have to decide whether, like the Greek gods, we give them fire or deny them fire, and maybe they'll kill us. But will they have what we have, this sense of, I try to be good? I mean, you try to be good, don't you?

I try my best. I fail. Yeah, you fail. It's right. And we all like that, but we don't pay much attention to that, and yet it's the most extraordinary thing about us. It really is.