The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 199. Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World | Clay Routledge

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Welcome to the Jordan B Peterson podcast season 4, episode 54. This episode was recorded on June 14th, 2021. Dr. Clay Routledge is an existential psychologist, writer, and professor at North Dakota State University. He's also a senior research fellow at the Archbridge Institute and an editor for Profectus magazine. Dr. Routledge studies basic psychological needs and how they're shaped by family, social bonds, economics, and broader cultural worldviews. He has published over 100 scholarly papers, co-edited three books on existential psychology, and written several books, including Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource, Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World. A lot of Dr. Routledge’s work - like Dr. Peterson's - focuses on the need for meaning. The two had a wide-ranging conversation about loneliness, meaning, nostalgia, Terror Management Theory, and existential psychology. They also shared views on human progress, responsibility, religion, and UFOs.Dr. Clay Routledge Website: https://www.clayroutledge.com/Dr. Rouledge Article on Meaning: https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/2020/05/28/why-meaning-matters-for-freedom-and-flourishing/------------[00:00] Intro [00:18] Jordan B. Peterson introduces guest Dr. Clay Routledge[01:55] How Dr. Clay Routledge got into his work[09:43] Terror Management Theory[18:33] The resistance to Terror Management Theory[22:01] Existential Psychology[27:09] The psychology of nostalgia[34:31] What elicits nostalgia[40:36] Pain responses[44:58] Reminiscence therapy and nostalgia[47:47] Collective nostalgia[54:48] Religion and its cultural impact[01:04:03] Secularism and UFOs [01:08:33] Politics, control, and meaning[01:16:36] The different kinds of meaning and the freedom of restraint[01:24:17] Filling the hole of religion[01:28:34] Human progress[01:32:38] Dr. Routldge's survey of American progress amongst university students and the apocalypse[01:43:43] Meaning across different cultures[01:48:18] Religion in free-market societies and ethical principles[01:51:56] Dr. Routledge's qualitative taxonomy on meaning[01:55:18] Responsibility and meaning[02:02:12] Loneliness[02:07:35] Dr. Routledge’s purpose with his work-----------#JordanPeterson #Nostalgia #TerrorManagementTheory #Loneliness #MeaningVisit www.jordanbpeterson.com to view more information about Jordan, his books, lectures, social media, blog posts, and more.Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, and the author of the multi-million copy bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, #1 for nonfiction in 2018 in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Norway, and slated for translation into 50 languages.Dr. Peterson has appeared on many popular podcasts and shows, including the Joe Rogan Experience (#877, #958, #1006), The Rubin Report (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Free Speech, Psychology, Gender Pronouns), H3H3 (#37), and many more. Dr. Peterson’s own podcast has focused mainly on his lecture series, covering a great deal of psychology and historical content. Jordan is expanding his current podcast from lectures to interviews with influential people around the world. We hope you enjoy this episode and more to come from Dr. Peterson in the future.

Welcome to the Jordan B Peterson Podcast, season 4, episode 54. This episode was recorded on June 14th, 2021. In this episode, Dad spoke with Dr. Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist, writer, and professor at North Dakota State University. He's also a senior research fellow at the Art Bridge Institute and an editor for Profectus Magazine. Dr. Rutledge studies basic psychological needs and how they're shaped by family, social bonds, economics, and broader cultural world views. He's published over 100 scholarly papers, co-edited three books on existential psychology

and written several books, including nostalgia, a psychological resource, and supernatural, death, meaning, and the power of the invisible world. A lot of Dr. Rutledge's work focuses on the need for meaning, so he has a lot in common with my dad there. They had a very engaged conversation where they spoke about loneliness, meaning nostalgia, terror management theory, and existential psychology. They also get into human progress, responsibility, religion, and UFOs, so a pretty wide range of topics.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did and have a wonderful week. Hello everyone. I'm pleased to have with me as a guest today, Dr. Clay Routledge. He's a faculty scholar in the Sheila and Robert Shelley Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, professor of management at North Dakota State University, and Senior Research Fellow at Archbridge Institute. Dr. Rutledge studies among other topics, meaning, belief, atheism, magical thinking, existential economics, and entrepreneurship. He is the author of nostalgia, a psychological resource, and supernatural, death, meaning,

and the power of the invisible word. He has published more than 100 academic articles, co-edited three books, and written numerous pieces for outlets, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, and The National Review. I first ran across his work in Newsweek where he wrote a interesting article on what you might describe as the potential moral failings of universal basic income. And it's failure to address people's need for meaning in addition to their the necessity for economic security. I looked up his website and found that his lab does unique work.

There aren't a lot of psychological labs that are concentrating as intently as Dr. Routledge on meaning and belief and that sort of thing. And so I thought it would be very much worth talking to him, especially also given his emphasis on economics, which adds an additional twist to his interest. So welcome, Dr. Rutledge, Clay. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today. Thank you for having me on, Dr. Pearson.

It's a great privilege to be on your podcast. Well, so, so fill me in a bit. Tell me what your lab has been doing and how you got interested in doing what you're doing and also how you managed it because your research interests, I wouldn't say are exactly center of the road by academic psychological standards. So, but you've been very successful with it. Yeah, so I mean, I'm a bit of an atypical academic in a lot of ways. One, when I was in college, I didn't even think I was supposed to be there. I remember I had a high school guidance counselor who said, well, you're not college material. So, you know, you need to figure out, you know, a job that you can do when you graduate.

But I think, why did he think, why did he think he weren't college material? I'm a late bloomer. I wasn't a great student. I, you know, this was, this was decades ago and, you know, now would probably be diagnosed with ADHD or something like that. I mean, I was just a very active young male who wasn't particularly interested in setting still in classes and reading books and things like that. I wanted to be engaged in doing active things. So I wasn't a great student. And you know, but I think I was just kind of a late bloomer

and then by the time I graduated, and I thought, well, I should go to call. I should give it a shot. And I went to a local commuter college. And it pretty much worked, oftentimes full time, as a security guard and a bunch of other jobs. I've done martial arts much of my life. And so I was a part time martial arts instructor.

Then I was just going to college. And I was actually originally a criminal justice major because I thought, well, I should probably do something like the police officer, you know something a little bit more more active And you know, I didn't I wasn't really into that took a psychology class Which is common as part of a criminal justice major and I was like oh wow This is this seems pretty cool. And so I got him you know, I got interested in psychology But even still when you know, I finished my in psychology, but even still when I finished my psychology degree, I had no intentions of going to graduate school.

I spent a few years actually working and outpatient clinical mental health and also in social work, which we can get into later because I do think that some of those experiences have really influenced how I think about things. Just, you know, the practical experience of working with people in the community, sometimes it was because of severe mental illness.

Sometimes it was just people that had real social dysfunction and a lot of problems in their family and their personal lives. Right, so you had the opportunity to do something that was clinical to bring your knowledge down to Earth, so to speak? Yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, I just had an undergraduate degree. I wasn't a psychologist, like a clinical psychologist or anything. I was basically a social worker, an outpatient case worker, but I had, you know,

dozens of, you know, clients that I was responsible for, you know, kind of checking on them, making sure they were medication compliant or doing the things part of that where they were supposed to do as part of their treatment plan. And it was a very as a very interesting and educating experience. I did that but then decided, you know, I you know, I want to go to school. I want to try to try graduate school. I had a professor who was as an undergraduate who she was very much like, you should you should go to graduate school. You would be great. You know, you would do really well. And you know, I just wasn't super confident about it, but then I took the GRE and I did, you know, pretty well, I think, and I applied to a few, I only applied to I think four

programs. I got into two of them and then I went to school at the University of Missouri. So that's a long way of saying when I started school, which was in September of 2001, then that was when right when the 9-11 happened, like it was within my first week or two of classes. I went to graduate school. In graduate school, yeah. I remember I went to this really, I had this ANOVA. Like you know, when you're in grad school, you take these quantitative site classes. That a class, I think it was just called ANOVA. And you know, I was in this class and then, you know, it was kind of announced to that,

hey, there was this attack happening. And I saw some of it was unfolding before I left the house in the morning, but we didn't know what was going on. And then I was in this grad seminar, and our professor actually sent us home and said, everyone needs to go home. There's a terrorist attack, something happening. So this was at the very beginning of my first semester of graduate school. At the time I was in more of a personality and social psych out like health lab.

It was an alcohol lab, and so we were really looking at like very practical, very practical outcomes related to risky behavior, and as predicted by individual differences. But when 9-11 happened, I just started thinking about, I mean, it was just really astonished me how you had these people that are because of a cause or something they believed in are willing to sort override their self-preservation instinct and, you know, and die in the service of an ideology. Yeah, well, that was something that really compelled me to. I was very curious all the way through my graduate school career about what it was about belief that was so compelling that people were willing to risk their lives or to kill

or to commit atrocities, all of that. What is it that belief does that's so psychologically significant that it seems to override everything else? It's a hell of a question. Right, right. And so it just happened by chance that I was at the University of Missouri doing my, you know, starting graduate school. And after this happened, and I was thinking

about these questions, there was a scholar there, Dr. Jamie Arck, who this was his whole area of research was. He was in an area I don't know if you're familiar with, called Terra Management Theory. Yes. And so he was doing research in his lab, don't know if you're familiar with called Terry management theory. Yes. And so he was doing research in his lab, not on terrorism or anything like that, but on this notion of what does it mean to be an organism intelligent enough to be aware of your inevitability of your mortality? Right. That's based on Ernest Becker's work, the denial of death, which is a great book. I think he's fundamentally wrong, but it's a great book nonetheless. He's wrong in a very interesting way, and he's very,

very smart person. So the denial of death is a great book. Yeah, and I'm familiar with some of the major researchers in the in the terror management area. I've met a couple of them and we've had some discussions. Excellent. So yeah, so that's how I kind of got started. And, you know, so I, so I ended up changing labs, which people might not, you know, your listeners and viewers might not work with them in their lab. And then to be like, well, I want to move to a different lab, it's kind of a big. It's like switching in apprenticeship. Right. Right. And it can go quite wrong. Yeah. So it's a risky. It's a risky move. But you know, when I started grad school, I wasn't I wasn't really sure what I was doing. I went to a small, went as an undergrad. I went to small commuter college. and there was no, you couldn't work in a lab. There wasn't anyone doing research.

So it wasn't like what a lot of, like, you know, my own students have the opportunity for, you know, undergrads to work in my lab and get a sense of this for me. So I had no idea. So when I started, I really didn't know how I was getting it into. And so when I had the opportunity

to potentially change labs, I negotiated it carefully, so no one would be offended or anything. It certainly didn't want to hurt my own future prospects in the field. But everyone was fine with it. What did you find compelling about Terra management theory? And can you outline it a bit for everyone we could have a bit of a discussion about that as well? Yeah, yeah, of course. So what I found compelling about it was, and I do have, you know, I do have some issues with it. I'm not in total agreement with it in its purest form. But what I found compelling about it was really the writing of Ernest Becker that it is based on,

which is this notion of what does it mean to be so smart that in a lot of ways where you know as Becker pointed out humans have godlike imaginative capacities right we can we can fantasize about all sorts of things we can do all you know we can engage in all sorts of mental exercises in which we can which has allowed us to transform this planet right and even exercises in which we can, which has allowed us to transform this planet, right? And even send people into, into space. What does it mean to have that intelligence yet at the same time know that you're a biological organism that no matter how smart you are, you can't outsmart your own demise. And not only that, that it can come without warning.

So you can, you can exercise and wear your seatbelt and drink green tea and everything else you're told to do. And maybe if you're lucky, you'll avoid an early death, but that doesn't change the fact that when this podcast is over, I could take a walk out the door, feeling pretty good about my day and get run over by a truck. And so that's what, you know, so, so what becker and then ultimately some of the tear management scholars pointed out is, or they argued was that's, that's so it's always kind of in the background, right? The threat of mortality. It's not, you're not, we don't, you know, we've got things going on. We're not consciously thinking about it most of the time, but we're aware of it. And so.

Becker tried to bring closure to Freudian psychoanalysis. And so people who are interested in Freud could read Becker because he did a good job of modernizing Freud. And he claimed that we needed an immortality project to set up against the mortality and the terror that had held for us and that we were compelled to identify with large scale systems in an attempt to muster a kind of immortal heroism as an antidote to the terror of death. He thought of that, I think, essentially, although he wavered somewhat in the book, essentially as delusional, and I think, in some sense,

from my perspective, that was where he went wrong, because I'm not convinced precisely that it is delusional and it's fundamental essence, but plenty of people would debate that. I think you and I are in the same page about that. I would agree. I don't think it's delusional. And there's some other issues maybe, I think that people can take with some of the theorizing. But ultimately, the Terry Management Theory

for people who aren't familiar with it is taking those ideas of Becker of saying that will because of this awareness and mortality, which Becker argued would otherwise be paralyzing if you didn't have this hero project to engage in. And that's why the book is called Denial of Death, right? At some level you have to deny that that's it, right? And you have to transform yourself into something symbolic.

And so one of the arguments that Becker made is humans live in kind of two worlds. We live in the material physical world that every morning when you wake up and have your aches and pains and need to go to the restroom, you become well aware of your animality, your creatureliness, but we also live in this imaginative, symbolic world where we're able to create works of art,

world religions, all sorts of interesting things. And that world is the world of meaning that we seek to create. And ultimately, that is the world that's immortal because I know that I'm gonna die, but I can be part of a project. Like you said, I can be part of a heroic project that's outlived me. So in a lot of religious traditions,

that might be very literal, right? They're a belief in an afterlife. But Becker also argued that we have the ability to engage in symbolic immortality projects as well. So passing down our genes or creating works of art or, you know, building communities or things that outlive us to the extent that I can say part of myself. than part of myself lives on, even if I don't physically. And so that takes us back to the terrorism idea because one of the arguments was that, well, you know you're gonna die and there's not much you can do about that,

but if you invest yourself in something bigger than yourself and that thing lives on, then you have some type of immortality. And I don't, do you remember that movie Braveheart? Yeah, I interviewed the director a few weeks ago on my podcast. Oh, really? Well, there's a great scene in there where William Wallace is trying to motivate the people

to overcome their fear of what is clearly a lopsided battle. And he does like everyone, and he has this speech where it's like, you could all go home. And right now, and maybe you'll live perfectly fine, complete lives. And but one day you'll be old on your deathbed, and you'll look back on this. And maybe you'll, you know, maybe you'll wish that you would have gone for it. Right? Because this is a bigger, this is going to be a more enduring a meaning project and you just going home and, you know, having a normal normal life course. said at the beginning of the denial of death that he never read Jung. And that was a big mistake because much of Carl Jung's writing centered on the immortality project from a different perspective than Freud. Jung didn't consider the participation in the hero project as delusional. He thought about it as centrally adoptive. And it seems to me, I mean, the tack I've taken is that the meaning that people derive from being embedded in

significant projects is an antidote to the terror of not so much mortality, but fragility, I would say, because there's actually things you can be a lot more afraid of than death, I believe, and that that's not illusory. I mean, it can be, right? It can become delusional, but it's not reasonable for me to believe that the projects that we undertake, the heroic projects, let's say, even such things as raising a family, are the denial of death. They're an attempt to extract meaning out of finite life. And I suppose it's also too much of a cognitive theory for my liking,

because it doesn't take other elements into account, like the existence of a religious instinct, let's say, or something like that. So, despite that, I have a lot of regard for the book. I think it's a brilliant book. Yeah, yeah. No, no, I agree with you. But that's kind of how I got started, is I, so I entered this lab at the University of Missouri and we were doing so the idea was the people who started Terra Management Theory, I think they wrote like a theoretical article or something and presented it maybe like at a social psychology conference in the the early 80s and people were like hey that's all sounds really cool but it's totally untestable and so I think

that was the initial reaction. And then so what they did is they tried to create a series of hypotheses that they could test. And one of them, you know, the most common one, certainly not the only one is what's called the mortality salience hypothesis, which basically is if it's true that, you know, the awareness of death is if it's true that, you know, the awareness of death is the thing that provokes our investment in these belief systems, and as well as the self-esteem project, which, you know, Becca talked about a lot, then temporarily heightening people's awareness of mortality should in turn temporarily heighten their defense of these systems, right? Right. So that's what they started doing experiments.

That was Solomon Greenberg and Pizinski. Correct. Right. Yeah. They wrote a book called The Worm at the Core, on the role of death in life that came out in 2015. I haven't looked at that book. I've talked to Greenberg and Solomon about their work before. They'd be good to have on this podcast actually.

I thought about that. So yeah, so they would bring people into the lab and remind them in various ways of their mortality and then look at the effects on their beliefs, the punitive effects. They also had a hell of a time publishing their work to begin with was resisted quite stringently, quite assiduously by people in the field.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, in a lot of the resistance, it seems to be, this is too philosophical, it's too abstract, it's hard to pin down. And understandably, because I mean, one challenge, you know, one of the challenges that people have made to the theory is when you make people aware of the mortality, or when you heighten people aware of the mortality or when you

heighten people's awareness of mortality, regardless of how rigorous of a control condition you have. So you can say, for instance, well, maybe the problem with death is that it's separation, it's isolation, right? And so maybe it's really a social thing. Maybe what's you're being separated permanently from loved ones and so it's triggering these defenses of something social so you can and it's multifaceted. It's multi-dimensional because you do worry about all these things, right? And there is there is some Israeli social psychologists who were also Victor Florian. I don't know if you've heard of him and Mario, Michael, insert. They were also doing this kind of existential psychology and they were looking at,

through awareness of death more through this multi-dimensional perspective that when people, that the fear of death isn't just the fear of annihilation, which is kind of what becker focused on. But it is the fear of, there's uncertainty about what's gonna happen after you die. There is a social element of it too, which is I'm gonna be separated from the people I love.

There's a fear of pain. I mean, so there is a whole bunch of other stuff packed in there, and it's hard when you make people aware of death, you're bringing online all of that stuff. And so how do you, it's a bit complicated to disengle? Yeah, it's not obvious, too, whether like death is a subset of uncertainty or uncertainty is a subset of death terror. I mean, part of the problem with Becker's theory is that a lot of beliefs are actually representations of ways to act in the world that stabilize the world, right? So if you have a theory about something you act it out and you get what you want, then you validate the theory and you indicate to yourself that your knowledge is sufficient to protect you from uncertainty.

Well, the ultimate uncertainty, in some sense, is your annihilation. I mean, you can make that case. But you can't say that all belief systems function to specifically inhibit the fear of death. I mean, that's... No. He would say that that's the worm at the core, which is of course, what Solomon Greenberg and Paginski talked about in their book. And, but I'm not, I'm not even completely certain of that, because like I said, I think there are things

that you can be more afraid of than death. Pain might be one. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so I agree with that. So there are the kind of hard-line tear management people that take the position you just articulated, which is, this is the core, this is the core existential issue.

But then there are people more like me who sees death as one of a number of potential existential threats. And in addition to that, even though early on in my career, because I worked in the Terra Management Lab, and we were largely running these types of studies where you make people aware of their death, and then you measure a bunch of things.

After that, I really started getting more into a more, when I would consider a more complete existential psychology. And this is an oversimplification, of course, but you can kind of think of existential psychology. And this is an oversimplification, of course, but you can kind of think of existential psychology as having like a dark side and a light side in some ways. And terror management and becker, that was kind of, you know, the edgier dark side, which is ultimately what meaning about is a defense system, right?

Like people are afraid, you know, people are aware of these vulnerabilities and it makes them afraid and so they dogmatically cling to beliefs in order to reduce that fear. So that's kind of an extension of Freud's notions of religious belief as a as a defense mechanism and you can see the Freudianism slipping through there and that is the issue. What's the difference between a defense and an adaptation? Right. And you know, in one hand, culture, you could say that your identification with your culture

allows you symbolic immortality, but you could also say, well, it builds your house, so you don't freeze to death in the winter, too, right? So it's not just symbolically presenting your death, say, let's say, or protecting yourself against your fear of death. It's actually stopping you from dying, which is not a trivial issue. Right, right. Of course. And so there, you know, and then there's, but there's the second side is, you know, we might call the light side, which is more of what people might be familiar with in the positive or humanistic psychology tradition, which is humans aren't just trying to defend, you know, they're not just in this defensive mode. We also are explorers. We're growth-oriented, right? So part of what we're striving for isn't just to, you know, to defend the world as we know it, it's to create new beliefs and to explore new ideas.

And so even when I was in grad school, because there were some positive psychologists in the department, and then I was in this Terremangement Lab, you know, I had the opportunity to work with different, to collaborate with different people. That was what was great about our program is they very much encouraged people to go work with other professors.

So even starting a graduate school, I is starting to explore the tension between psychological defense and psychological growth motives. you can do things that bring you so outside of the structures that provide protection, that provide psychological defenses that they can leave you very vulnerable to anxiety and to chaos, as you know. And then so you might retreat a little bit, look for your protection, and so balancing that. That's just like when a child, you see this in children, I mean, when they start to explore, they move out away from usually their mother, but it can be anybody they're stably bonded with. They move out to explore until they hit a threshold where the fear of being isolated overwhelms

the compulsion to explore. And then they run back to become to be comforted. And then they explore next time a little bit farther. And that meaning that's associated with exploration isn't the same thing as dogmatic protection from uncertainty. There's at least two things going on there. There's the the the orienting that dogma gives you in the world, which is your crystallized knowledge, let's say, but there's the meaning that's intrinsic in extending that knowledge that also seems as a it's like an existential antidote to

Suffering and to even to mortality salience because you get lost in that, right? And that's yeah You get immersed in that and grossed in that and and that's central to the idea of meaning. I think Yeah, yeah totally. I totally agree with that and so I became very much interested in that and you know I was using these kind of regulatory, self-regulatory models of like approach avoid, behavioral inhibition, behavioral activation. And so that was something I became very interested in was what shifts people towards,

a threat shifts people towards defensiveness, because you face a threat and then you're like, well, now's not the time to be super creative or open-minded. Now's the time to be vigilant, right? To shrink in. You saw that after 9-11, right? Everyone was shell-shocked and retreated for a while in a state of surreal existence. Right, right. Yeah. So that's kind of how I got started in existential psychology. And then I ended up, you know, this is going to seem like a, like it's a bit off message, but it connects, which I ended up studying the psychology of nostalgia. history of theoretical writing and kind of case study and anecdotal writing on nostalgia, speculating things like it's a neurological disease, it's a form of repression and all these different things, but there wasn't really much empirical research on it except in the area of

marketing and marketing researchers were doing, they were doing some neat stuff, but they weren't interested in why. So I started doing research in the psychology in nostalgia. Again, this was in grad school. And part of my motivation for that was similar to the ideas we've been talking about, you know, people turn just like people are aware of their ability, our temporal consciousness, right? Our ability to move the self through time

allows us to go into the future and think about our mortality as we've been talking about. So that, we think that somewhat unique to humans, right? That we can think long into the future and think about a future without us. And so what I thought was, interestingly, that might provoke us to turn to the past. Because if I'm thinking about a future

and it makes me anxious or uncertain, I can look to the past at meaningful memories and I can kind of comfort myself to be like, no, I have to have a good life. I have people that care about me. I've done interesting things and that can make me feel, that can kind of reinstate or boost my meaning if I'm feeling potentially meaningless

because of the inevitability of my mortality. So that's why I started studying nostalgia as a psychological defense. But what's cool about doing research, as you know, is you might have ideas of how things are. And so you propose hypotheses and you test them. But then there's also this kind of discovery process. You know, while you're doing a bunch of studies, where you're looking at the data and you're just thinking,

oh, wow, there's a story here that I missed. And what I was finding when we were doing the stasya research is we were asking people to detail and writing a memory that makes them nostalgic. And so we have all these like long narratives that people talking about in the nostalgia. And one thing that I thought was interesting, but did not expect was how much of these narratives were actually kind of future focused. And what I mean by that is people would say things like, when I was a kid, I used to

spend summers at grandma's house. And you know, this was awesome. And this was a great time, and I'll always cherish these memories. It makes me sad that my grandmother's no longer alive. And so that's gone. I can't return, you know, I can't return to the experience. But it makes me hopeful for the future because I wanna do that for my grandchildren someday.

And so what I saw in a fair amount of these nostalgic narratives was this kind of self-regulatory process is where people were like dipping into the past to bring to mind a memory that they found particularly meaningful. And that felt that that was comforting. It was also a little bit sad, you know, nostalgia is an ambivalent emotion.

But then they were using it, that was inspiring them, like that was motivating them, that was saying, you know what, that was special. So I should, you know, I should orient my life in a way that allows me to reproduce something like that. Well, that's the purpose of memory, right? I mean, people think that a way that allows me to reproduce something like that. Well, that's the purpose of memory, right? I mean, people think that the purpose of memory is to remember things as they happen. And that's that's really rather shallow conceptions psychologically.

I mean, you remember bad things so you don't repeat them and you identify good things so that you know what good things are and you can pursue them. It's it's very pragmatic process when it's when well, when it's fun, when it's properly functional, there's no reason just to have an objective record of the past in your head. You want to mine it for significance. And so it's very interesting that, that nostalgia took that future oriented turn. So you think people get meaningless, let's say, and they get a little bit desperate. So they turn to the past and they look for things.

They search for places that were meaningful. They think, oh, that was valuable. Maybe I could pursue that in the future. Yeah, yeah. I think so. And so I've now done dozens and dozens and dozens of studies on the psychology of nostalgia, and which has led me, and not just me, but a number of other researchers

to kind of position nostalgia as being a motivation, as having the self-regulatory or motivational purpose, which is exactly what you just said, which is I might be experiencing loneliness or even boredom or uncertainty or something's going on and I don't feel totally stable in life. I'm missing something and so I reach into the past and I think it's good to think about it that way. It's not because a lot of it there's a popular conception of miscellular

about it's hiding in the past that you're avoiding your problems that you're avoiding the future. And so there's a very negative attitude in some quarters of nostalgia is bad because it gets in the way of progress. But my argument is, no, what happens is you're not running to the past in hiding, you're reaching into the past to pull into the present experiences that will help guide you.

And then that puts you on the path forward that, you know, and now we've done a number of studies on which we find that, you know, after people engage in nostalgic writing. it also increases actual behavior. So when people write about an astounding experience, which is typically social, it's typically an experience shared with loved ones, they subsequently want to go out and do things with people. They were like, hey, that was really good. I should do that again. And so I think that really got me thinking more about this not just a growth oriented approach,

but that people move back and forth between defense and growth, right? And that also imagine that that could become pathologized like anything, you know, I mean, if you're, you know, people fantasize about what they want. And then out of those fantasies, they can derive goals and begin to act in relationship to those goals, or they can just spend more and more time elaborating the fantasies and not moving at all. And that can lead to delusional thinking if it's taken to an extreme. But that doesn't mean that fantasy per se is a pathological activity, just that when it becomes a substitute for action, then it can become pathologized.

So yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, I always say nostalgia is like a lot of things that are generally good for you that people can. I mean, there are people who overexercise, right? That physical fitness is good, but there are people that spend too much time at the gym. And then it ends up causing injury because they're doing too much of a good thing.

Right, there are lots of people who drown from drinking too much water as it turns out as well. So anything in excess can be a poison. Yeah, so I'd say for the typical person, nostalgia is a relatively healthy activity that helps them kind of figure out what's important in life. Do you know what elicits it in particular? Is it loneliness or are there particular eliciting factors? Yeah, yeah. So there's two general classes of nostalgia triggers.

One is very obvious because it's just, you know, what we call sensory inputs, which is you hear song come on the radio or somebody puts like a photo up on social media and so that's a direct trigger of remind you of right? Smell right? Sent yes, sent of open nostalgia is very powerful. So there is those what we you know what we call direct triggers and then there's what we call psychological triggers and they tend to be negatively negative affect typically loneliness but other things as well.. So we've done this where we've induced, we've used like emotion inductions where we've had people watch video clips that either make them happy or sad or have a more neutral affect. And so it's not just the case that any emotion

provokes nostalgia, it tends to be negative emotions. So when people feel sad, when they feel loneliness, when we ask people, loneliness is the most common trigger. But we've also looked even at boredom. We've done these experiments where we have people do these really, really boring tasks where they're just spending a period of time writing down concrete mixture, you know, the formulas for concrete mixtures or things like that. So it just seems like a meaningless task,

which increased subsequently increases nostalgic feelings. We've looked at meaning threats, we've had people read existential philosophy essays that remind them of how insignificant their life is and that increases nostalgia. But because of the social nature of nostalgia, that is most nostalgic memories do involve time spent with loved ones.

So do you suppose that's a, is that a, an analog? Do you think of the security seeking behavior that we discussed a little bit earlier? You know, when a child goes out and explores and then hits a wall, they return to something comforting. And almost all higher cognitive functions are elaborations of something that's much more

basic. So, I mean, affection between adults looks like it's in elaboration, like deep affection. It looks like it's in elaboration of infant attachment circuitry. And so, you make people bored or you put them in a bad mood and then they return to the security of social interactions in the past and you can think of that as purely defensive but it also indicates to them what they did find meaningful and they can use that in a positive way. Yeah, yeah, I think exactly that. I mean, in fact, we've done some work looking at nostalgia and attachment theory.

And it does seem like nostalgic memories. They're basically bringing online these attachment schemas, these frameworks that people use. And in fact, when you look at interactions between people's scores on attachment scales, it is the people who score high and attachment security or what, you know, modern psychologists would say low attachment anxiety or low attachment avoidance. Right. So these are, these are healthily attached people who had decent maternal relationships and that's another indication that this isn't psychopathological. Right. So they, those people get the most social benefits out of nostalgia. One, when you look at the content of their memories, people who have a high in attachment security, those people have, their nostalgic memory or to just share with you nostalgic memory for nearly everyone it's social. But if you if you look at the writings of people who are high in attachment security they tend to get into more intimate or more detailed. They carry more themes of love and like strong body. And so again, like the attachment system, they're really saying

they have a secure, they have these very deep secure bonds. They approach. Be interesting, you know, to see if people who are indulging in nostalgic memories that are associated with attachment to see if they're animal, more analgesic to pain. Because they, right, because that loneliness and social isolation look like their pain-related phenomena, at least according to people like Yacht Panks'ep, and so hypothetically, bringing to mind a social attachment memory that's deeply meaningful should make you more pain tolerant. We used to use this thing that I referred to as a finger crusher, which it wasn't. It was just a weight, a weighted blade, dull blade that pushed on a finger crusher, which it wasn't. It was just a weighted blade, dull blade

that pushed on a finger here, like that. And then the pain sums across time until you tell the people, take your finger out when you think a reasonable person would. And you can ask them, when does it hurt? And then you can measure when they take it out. And you could do it with a couple of fingers to get a good, you know, repeated measure.

And we tested, I never did publish this study, but we tested it, Harvard with an undergraduate, we had people interact with a dog. They had to like dogs, and then tested them for analgesia afterwards, and they were more analgesic as a consequence of interacting with the dog. Hmm, that's interesting.

Yeah, no, that would be, that would be a really cool study. It's not the same thing, but there, and this isn't research I did, but some, there were some researchers that looked at nostalgia in the context of feeling of actual physical feelings of warmth. And the idea was, was kind of like what you're talking about, like we associate relationships with comfort and warmth and emotional warmth, right? And so they did things like manipulate the temperature in the room and the lab and then had people, you know, kind of estimated it. And, you know, people in the nostalgic condition thought their room was warmer. And yeah, I would say that is analogous, you know, and that's a good example too of how these

sources of meaning are not merely cognitive, right? I mean, one of the things that I studied pain responses for quite a long time in their differentiated form. And so frustration produces a pain-like state disappointment does, grief does, and people use tactile contact as a mediation for pain and for grief. And it's about the only thing we know of that's actually useful for grief, real touch. And one of the people that was affiliated with Panks' App did massage with premature infants in their incubators and accelerated their growth up to the rate of normal neonates. And the effects, this was three, ten-minute massages a day. The effects were measurable six months later in terms of physical and cognitive development. And so these aren't cognitively, precisely cognitively mediated meanings. They're really embodied. It's interesting,

though, because you can call them to mind, which is an abstract cognitive representation of something that's much more physical and tangible. But they're not delusional and they're not just meaning systems. They're something far more basic than that. Right. Do you know what the state of the sciences on? I remember a year ago, there was with the state of the sciences on, I remember years ago, there was a lot of excitement about some social neuroscientists that were, they were arguing that social pain, that the neuro systems built upon the same frameworks

as physical pain, and so that, and maybe that you could even, I think they were doing studies where they were giving people, like I see the medicine, I can't remember the solution. Yeah, that was Paul Meister, yeah. I don't know what the status of his research was, but I regard it that as pretty well established. I mean, if the pain system is very, very ancient

from an evolutionary perspective, you'd expect it to have branched out and differentiated into all sorts of higher functions. And if you look at the drugs that affect response to frustration, disappointment, grief, they tend to be opiates. So that's another line of evidence. That's all documented quite nicely

in Jeffrey Gray's book, The Neurosecology of Anxiety, because he talks a fair bit about the difference between pain and so that would be physical punishment. What it elicits as a state, which would be pain like an anxiety, say, which is elicited by threat of punishment and not punishment itself. And opiates are good at moderating punishment-like responses, pain, essentially. So I think it's well-established in the animal literature. Some of that, the human researchers caught on to that, but, but was the animal literature, some of the human researchers caught and gone to that,

but was the animal researchers who nailed it down? Yeah, yeah, so that's kind of the area that I started doing work in the stalsers specifically that kind of branched me away from just thinking about while we're doing these kind of defensive studies, right? Where we threaten people and then see what they defend both in terms of the whole. Just out of curiosity.

Another thing that would be interesting is that if nostalgic memories of attachment ameliorate feelings of depression, because depression looks like a pain phenomena as well, at least in some of its manifestations. Yeah, so I don't know if there's, I haven't done anything looking at actual, but clinically depressed people. So most of the nostalgia work I've done has been, you know, for lack of a better term,

we call the normal population, right? So I've done, you know, done've done work with clinical groups, but certainly in our research among the normal population, we find that nostalgia does have effects that you would predict would reduce depression because it does reduce loneliness, it does reduce negative affect, it does reduce anxiety, it increases positive emotions, and it does things that counter depression, like it increases optimism and inspiration. So, you know, but it's an open question about wall,

what if you looked at severely depressed? Right, but no, all those pieces of evidence that you decided to suggest that at least with normative levels of depression, it would be it would have an ameliorating effect. So yeah, so and there, you know, that that is a I know there is a whole nother literature on reminiscence therapy and, you know, that the stuff we've done has been more experimental. stuff we've done has been more experimental, but I think that I think you could certainly connect nostalgia is a big part of the reminiscent therapy. The reason I think that we haven't really is because a lot of the reminiscent therapy people, they're not particularly interested in basic scientific questions, so they're

not trying to tease apart the specific cognitive and affective mechanisms. They want something that works, right? So they kind of deliver a whole package. And so in the remittance therapy work, a lot of it is what we would consider in the experimental world kind of confounded, right? Because they're doing a bunch of stuff at once. They're bringing the mind and the nostalgic memories, but they also typically are in the context of a group setting where they're talking to other people and sharing memories with other people. So then, you know, you have to get into,

well, is it the nature of this conversation that they're having with people or they're talking about, you know, things that are really important to them or is there something specific about the actual memories that they're engaging in. But what I think our research does

is it complements that by saying, well, if you just isolate the experience of bringing the mind to nostalgic memory in a laboratory cubicle where people are by themselves, and you get these positive effects, it suggests that at least part of what's happening in reminiscence therapy is this individual level experience of bringing nostalgia, nostalgia of memories to mind,

revisiting, reconnecting with them. And then I'm sure it will only helps if you have the opportunity to talk about those memories as other people and share those memories. In fact, that's a new area of research that we don't have anything published in yet, but I had a PhD student who'd actually just graduated. This is what her dissertation was on, is what she called shared nostalgia.

Her argument was what we do in the lab is not very typical of how most people actually experience nostalgia, which is people tend to be nostalgic when they're around others. You get together with family members and you talk about memories. You especially in the context of loss. You go to a funeral or what do you do? You're sad, of course, but then you talk about memories you shared with that person and oftentimes people are laughing and talk about memories you shared with that person and oftentimes people are laughing and you know, trying to honor that person's life, but also trying to connect over, you know, over the meaningful memories you had together. So a lot of it reminds you of your affiliation with those

other people too, which would be a great thing to have happen when you're experiencing a significant loss. Yeah, absolutely. So I do think that there's more research to do in that area. And like I said, we're just kind of getting started into how do people actually share nostalgia? And might it serve even beyond the individual and beyond like the more interpersonal relationships? We're also interested in nostalgia at the cultural level because there are ways that we might pass down traditions and rituals intergenerationaly that connect. So I might have a lot of things that are different in my life and the experiences I've had at the time period in which I grew up, then somebody 20, 30, 40 years older than me. But to the extent that there are things that are passed down in the family or in the community that can connect me to that person,

that might help with intergenerational community life. Right. And so for you, just to make it a social cohesion period. Right. Absolutely. If we're strangers to one another, and then we can identify elements of our past experiences that we share, maybe like shared love of a particular band or something like that, then we're identifying areas of commonality and perhaps decreasing our distrust of one another. I mean, Robert Puntum has demonstrated that, you know, communities tend to be more generous politically when they view those in the community as importantly similar to them. And so you can imagine that going through the search for a shared past and identifying commonalities might be also a way of generating a shared history across time as part of what unifies people together.

Yeah, absolutely. So this is what we call collective nostalgia, what you just articulated, which is, I might, you know, I might have never met somebody who lives across the country, but to the extent that, you know, that we have as Americans, that there is something that we've that we have as Americans that there is something that we identify with, like even music, like you said, or a movie, if you remember when I don't think they were particularly good movies, but when the new Star Wars movies came out, people were really excited about them because there was this collective nostalgia of, we all remember when we were watching the original Star Wars movies and that was kind of like a quintessential late 70s,

early 1980s American thing to do that we could bond over. And it's part of experiencing a shared myth. It's not trivial. I mean, it's trivial in one sense, but it's not trivial experiencing a shared myth. It's not trivial. I mean, it's trivial in one sense, but it's not trivial at all in another. I mean, we don't exactly know what it is that bonds people together in a community, family, a community, a nation, any of those things.

And the idea that it's shared positive memories is, well, that's got to be part of it. Yeah, yeah. I actually talked to a screenwriter a while back about this. And he made an interesting point. He was talking about how, because we have the way with the internet and with all these different entertainment options we have now, his argument was,

we might be losing some of the shared media, shared entertainment. Now, people talk about this when they talk about news all the time. They say people consume different news. But to the extent that he was making even the point that we have all these like dedicated children's programs where he was talking about when he was a kid, he had to watch whatever his dad was watching. And so his dad would introduce him to Western movies or whatever. And the whole family would watch the same thing. And so you had this shared cultural artistic experience that connected you. But now he's like, you know, you know, you might, the kids might be in the back seated at the car, each with their own screens, watching totally separate things, and you're listening to your own thing. And the whole family isn't crowded around the TV together in one room sharing the same experiences. And so we might have very,

very individualistic, very tailored media experiences that make it harder to have those socially connecting entertainment experiences. Yeah, it makes it harder to communicate too, because to communicate with anyone, you have to mostly share their experience and then talk about a little bit of variation. I mean, if you're totally opaque to one another in terms of what you've experienced, there's so much to talk about that you can't even gain a toe hold. And you do wonder if this incredible explosion of entertainment options, let's say, but it's far more than that. It's cultural options. Does produce, well, perhaps does heighten the probability of the kind of fragmentation that we seem to be experiencing right now. Yeah. Well, that might be why every, so every now

and then something's popular enough to where everyone, like, but not everyone, but a decent chunk of people rally around it and it becomes the thing everyone's talking about. So like Game of Thrones, it might be an example. But there's some kind of program that is either so well executed or it just, you know, delivers the goods in whatever way, whether it's a movie or television show, where enough, it becomes a cultural phenomenon.

But a lot of the times, it's not that, especially I don't know if you watch streaming, like Netflix or things like that. But you can now kind of, you don't even have to turn on, it's not like we all have to turn on the TV on Monday night, 7 p.m. if we want to watch something because that's our chance.

Now I can watch a show that you watched five years ago. So not only is it the case that there's a ton of options, they're delivered at, you know, individual times. I can watch, I can, I can, you know, what do you call it when people binge? I can binge watch a show that, you know, you're not going to watch for another year if you watch it at all. And again, I don't know if they're, you know, I'm not trying to... Well, it's fair and peculiar too when you think about it, that we have the opportunity to, you think about something like a Marvel movie with it's, it costs hundreds of millions

of dollars, that we have the technology that enables us to experience that singly. I mean, it's completely preposterous. I've been associated to some degree with one traditional culture and they use dance, music, storytelling, masks, religion, it's all integrated into one thing and they all participate in that simultaneously and that's really the core of their culture.

I mean, without that, they're not a people. And when you're not a people, to be a people is to be very much the same as other people in important ways. And that's part of what makes peace. And you do wonder the increasing atomization of our exposure to cultural material. What that leaves us to have in common. Right. So there is a provocative argument that some have made people like, I don't know if you're familiar with Patrick Deenan,

and some of these, like Catholic traditionalists, and he wrote that book, Why a Liberal is Enfield. And you know, I'm not, and it's not my expertise to, I don't know anything about like political history. And so I can't really, you know, I can't really like litigate his case form or make a case against it from that perspective.

But from this perspective of psychology, I think that he's on to something. And his basic argument is the success of liberalism is its ultimate failure in that if total individualism means that I owe you nothing, right? in many ways that we can think of that as being good because it can mean we can escape being oppressed or we can get rid of bad systems that are barriers to my liberty. But at the same time, that also means there's, it's the atomization that you're talking about

that it can be very alienating and it can get, ultimately, it can get to a point where what he calls anti-culture, which is it's not just individualism is another culture, which is what cultural psychologists tend to argue that there's collectivist cultures and individualistic cultures. His argument is that it's an anti-culture because it's a rejection of culture. And again, I might maybe I'm misrepresenting his, you know, or oh, I'm certainly oversimplifying it. Maybe I'm misrepresenting his, you know, or, oh, I'm certainly oversimplifying it. Maybe I'm misrepresenting this case a little bit. But that is the, that's just one example.

Well, it's not at least an open question. How much we have to have in common with one another to live in something approximating mutual understanding and peace. I mean, it can't be nothing. You know, and the people who I don't attend church, but I have some close friends who insist upon its utility and who are very intelligent people. And part of the argument they make is a cultural argument, like, well, at least for one hour a week, cynical about that, though you may be, the entire community is doing one thing that's the same. And so there's a point of the focal union there.

And of course, the church is used to be the center of the towns and orient the town towards temporality, all of those things. And so we don't really know what we've lost when we lose those shared rituals and shared beliefs. Right. And we don't know what we've lost when part of the reason we've lost it is, of course, people are, you know, people don't believe, and so people are becoming non-religious. But, you know,

I have an argument that, you know, part of belief is, is it kind of an individual difference. And so it could be the case that there's always been varying degrees of people who are extremely committed to a faith versus people who are just tend to be more skeptical. Regardless of the state of scientific knowledge. And this gets to, you know, some people have argued as like the extreme male brain idea. Is it related to interest in people and interest in things? Correct. Correct. Oh, I was wondered about that. Yeah. So the people who are interested in things are much less likely to be

religious believers, I would presume. Correct. Correct. So there is an argument that some people have made that, that sort of that religion is very much relies on social cognition, right? Or relies on the same neuro processes involved in thinking about people, like you just said. Because to spirituality, you have to animate the world with minds in a way, right? You have to anthropomorphize, you have to,

so you could have a, in fact, in some cultural traditions, that we have our big five personality model, of course, but some cultural traditions, we have our big five personality model, of course. But some cultural traditions, they have a spirituality dimension of personality. It's recognized that people just naturally vary. And the West, we tend to be a little bit more blank, slatist about religion. People tend to think, well, you just decide to be religious, or you were raised. It's just a matter of cold cognitive belief rather than temperamental proclivity. Right. But at the same time, we say things like people have a calling,

or maybe secular people don't say that, but people kind of recognize that there's individual differences in what people, some people are good artists, right? Some people are just more artistic. Some people just, so some people are just more likely to see the world as a little bit enchanted, whereas others are just more naturally skeptical. And so, so let's just assume for a second that that's true that there's this individual difference that's always existed where you've had some people that are just more interested in things like you said.

And so they might even be somewhat, at the extreme, they might even be somewhat mind-blind. Religion might not even totally understand it because they can't really tangible grasp it. Whereas other people are, they can see really tangibly grasp it. Whereas other people are, you know, they can see the world is more magical. And even so if that's always existed, then what you what you might find is in the past when we had a less individualistic culture, everyone went to church not because everyone necessarily believed at the same level of commitment,

but people didn't have this attitude of, well, I'm not going to go because I don't believe. People had more of a, well, I, this is the thing that we do. Well, it was also the case, I think, to some degree that, you know, part of the reason that we don't believe now is because we have a variety of things we can believe in. And the farther back you go in history, I mean, imagine a medieval town where Christianity dominated, there might have been some Jews there who would pause it in an alternative faith, let's say, but Christianity wasn't so much an explanation of the world as it was the explanation of the world. So, I mean, maybe you were a brilliant iconoclast and you doubted certain things, but you didn't have an alternative scheme of representation at hand like you do now.

So, yeah, it was the only game in town. So, yeah, so I do think that's part of it, but, but maybe there is a benefit, even though we have more things you can believe, of course, you know, people act like it's weird if you say something to them like, well, maybe it's good from time to time to submit to things that aren't 100% and then line that with what you want to do and what you believe. Right? Maybe there are benefits to being part of a community project, and there's a recognition that it's full of people with individual differences, that there are

going to be people that are devout believers, and then they're, you know, going to be people that are more skeptical, but there's something there's a place for everybody in this community. I mean, we do this with other things like sports. I mean, some people just aren't good athletes, no matter how hard they try, but at least in American culture, and I assume it's the same in a similar in Canada, we think that kids should have a go at it, and we think that it's okay if you're not naturally gifted, it's good for you. There's benefits from participating in physical activities, and it's fun. And it's a way to have teammates and to connect with people until maybe learn leadership skills, learn what it's like, how aren't that good at it, or kind of clumsy, or whatever. And so I'm not trying to say that religion and sports

are by any means the same thing. But at the point as in other domains, we recognize that there are individual differences and that doesn't preclude them for participating in the project, and that there might be benefits for having a more, I mean, I know this is a loaded term now in academia but inclusivity,

but there might be benefits for being inclusive in saying that there's a place in religion even for people who are more skeptical. And I do think that might be the case, I'm not 100% sure, but I do think that that might be the case outside of outside of the Western world. Again, I think in the more individualistic cultures, or more apt to say, well, what do you believe? What do you think as an individual? What do you want to do?

As opposed to what is your duty to do? Or what is your relationship to the collective. Correct. Well, you could also imagine that it might be something like a difference in fundamental cognitive metaphors as well, and those could be different niches. So imagine that, so just for the benefit of the audience, the biggest difference known between men and women in terms of individual differences is interest in people versus interest in things, and men are more interested in things, and women

more interested in people. On average, the difference is about one standard deviation, which is very large by the standards of such things. And so you could imagine that maybe it's more acceptable, more understandable for people who are primarily interested in things to view the world mechanistically. Whereas, so that's a metaphor, the world is a machine, and there's a kind of determinism that goes along with that, but also a logical, analyzed ability and a reductionism and a decomposition that would all go along with tool formation, let's say, whereas you could also visualize being as a spirit. And that also makes sense because

the community in some sense is a spirit. And other people are spirits. And so, and animals are spirits. They have their personality like, and so to view existence itself as characterized by personality would be a different approach, but one that would have its benefits and detractions just as viewing it like a machine might. Right. You know, I'm stuck. I'm often struck by the fact that, you know, it seems to me that engineers, engineer types are more likely to be critical of mythology and narrative, religious in nature, particularly because it doesn't align with their mode of thinking, but they tend to pick up to be critical of mythology and narrative, religious in nature, particularly,

because it doesn't align with their mode of thinking, but they tend to pick up their mythology in the form of say science fiction. It comes in a more implicit level. Right. You're actually getting to, to a series of studies that we did, looking at this. So there was some surveys that came out a number of years ago

that found that the more secular people were, the more likely they were to believe in UFOs. And when I say, that goes along with Jung's analysis of visions of UFOs in the sky, right? He thought those were replacements for religious revelations. The angels essentially descending from on high. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Michael Schumer and I talked about this because he's written about this before

that he's got a great quote that UFOs are like DEDs for atheists or I can't remember exactly what I was but it was something something to that effect. But what we so there there's these surveys that find that the more secular people are the more likely they are to believe in UFOs and not just UFOs in the sense that well we don't know what these things are but they're they're likely to believe that of faith. So that those surveys existed, but what we were interested in in our lab was, well, to what if religion is about meaning, which there's a lot of be so they might be more vulnerable to not having meaning and thus more likely to be searching for meaning. Would they be more likely, would that explain why they're more likely to believe in UFOs? So in other words from like a methodological point of view, what we did is we looked at this correlation between lack of belief and religion and a positive belief and aliens to see if it was mediated, see if that relationship is mediated by these meaning-making variables. And so there's these measures that maybe you're familiar with called the presence of meaning, which measures to what extent you actually see your life as meaningful.

And then there's another measure called the search for meaning, which is basically to what extent you're currently looking for for meaning life. They tend to be negatively correlated, not always, but it makes sense that they are because the more you feel like your life is full of meaning, the less and needs you are to go look for new meaning. And so what we found was what we found to support for a mediation model in which the less people believed in God, the less meaning that reported having, the more the higher they were in search for meaning, which in turn predicted their belief in aliens and UFOs. Have you expanded that to political belief? Because one of the things, I heard this survey once from the Gallup Organization in Canada. Now, you may know this, you may know it, but Canada has had its bouts of separatism.

Right? Quebec, our French-speaking province, has put forward the plans to separate a number of times and has come very, very close to breaking up the country. And Quebec was the last country in the West really to radically abandon Catholicism. It was a really Catholic country till like 1959 and then it just disappeared. And now Quebec has like the lowest birth rate in the Western world or close to. And very many out of wedlock common law households rather than formally married. And, you know, whereas in the 50s, the typical family had 12 children, it's like one now.

So radical transformation, a very short period of time, that dovetailed with this rise in Quebec nationalism. And I always thought, well, you know, Catholicism disappeared and the state became the religion. And then I saw a Gallup poll that indicated that if you were a lapsed Catholic, you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist. I thought, well, there's evidence that when the religious instinct falls out of the religious domain, it plummets down to something like the political level. And then political, the political becomes religious. And so you're seeing that people who are less formally religious.

So, and do you distinguish between dogmatic belief and spiritual belief because that's often distinguished? But in any case, they're more likely to believe in these extraterrestrial events, any work at all in the political end. So I haven't done any empirical work on the political end, but what you just said is exactly what I was thinking. Now there is some work in this model of compensatory control.

So they're not looking at meaning, they're looking at a sense of control in life. And they found like the, there's a paper on it, and I'm trying to remember the name of it. It's called something like God or government. And basically what they find is the less religious the society is, the more people want big government. And so the idea is that people want some kind of controlling

structure that helps make, when you feel personally out of control, that helps order the world. And if a society moves away from religion, they tend to be more interested in government, which isn't exactly what you were saying, but it's close though. It's close. I mean, it indicates, like your research seems to indicate, is that there is this fundamental impulse towards something approximating religious belief. And so then you might think, well, in most cultures, particularly traditional cultures, that need is fulfilled by the totality of the culture. It's relatively integrated, and everything is oriented in the same direction.

Whereas in our culture that's fragmented to the degree that it has, that's all going away, but that doesn't mean that the desire for something like coherence is has and I can't see how it can disappear because who wants incoherence? Yeah. That's uncertainty and trouble. And maybe that's driving part of this search for meaning that you're describing. Yeah, I think so. And one of the things that's really fascinating about this because when I was doing this work,

and I was writing a book on all of this, so I was doing empirical work, but I was also looking at broad trends. So if you look in the US, at the areas of the country that are the least religious, so you can look at that both in terms of self-identified religiosity, but you can also look at church attendance and other indicators of religion.

Those are the places where the new age industry is thriving. So like on the coast. So you can at that broad level of analysis, you can say the more secular parts of society tend to be the ones that go more in on new AG stuff. They also tend to be though, and then this gets to what you're saying. They also, that also tends to connect with the political activism. And I remember this happening during, during, and maybe is the early Trump administration years, you'd see these articles in places like

the New York Times, like these weren't fringe outlets. You'd see articles that were talking about like which the resistance which craft so they're like people. So there were witches that were trying to cast spells against Republicans and Donald Trump and they were these articles totally unironic. And you know, it wasn't like they were presenting this and saying, like, wow, these people really believe this stuff. They were just presenting it as this is how it is, right? There's these people. And so imagine this is something I've read that as it's an

allegace to what you're saying that as belief in dogmatic, the dogmatic traditions of religion decline. There's a corresponding increase in the number of people who in dogmatic, the dogmatic traditions of religion decline. There's a corresponding increase in the number of people who claim to be spiritual. So there's a separation between spiritual and dogmatic. And so it's really easy to criticize dogma, say, well, do you really believe that concrete thing? Why not make it more abstract?

Well, it's less susceptible to rational criticism. And so that's advantageous. It's more individually tailored in some sense, but the problem is it lacks structure and the ability to unite people. And obviously, the problem with new age spirituality in some sense is that everything goes. And there's no uniting. See, the thing about dogma, because it's codified and traditional, everyone shares it. And then you can think about it in terms of your own speaking, your own thinking as well, like you and I can have this conversation, because we accept a whole variety of things dogmatically, we can experiment on the fringes a bit, you know, we don't have to dig into what each of us means by every single term. So we stand on dogman and make a foray out into investigation. But when you get rid of the

dogma, well, you get rid of the blinders and the constraints, but you seem to also get rid of the structure and the coherence and the thing that organizes the community. And it certainly doesn't appear to me that new age thinking is more coherent than say Catholic thinking not not at all. Right. Well, so yeah, so you're actually getting into exactly what we what we observed is it appears that a lot of these new age alternative beliefs. are motivated by the need for meeting, but they don't seem to do a good job of providing meeting because remember they're inversely correlated with the presence of meeting. And I think for the reasons you just articulated, I mean, when we have a meaning framework,

what's it be called, dogmatic framework, everything you just said, like it organizes us and not only that, but it calls, it gives us responsibilities and duties. So with this, anything goes new age stuff, you can just say, like, well, I'm not really into that. I'm into this. But if we all, if we have a shared religious belief that says, well, you have a duty to

do this, like you have a duty to take care of your family, to, you know, you have a duty to help your neighbor. It takes away the selfishness, right? It takes away the, well, I don't want to do that. I want to do this other thing. And, you know, it might be that a lot of things that provide meaning are what you talk about this in your latest book I just read about the connection of responsibility to meaning.

Like these dogmas give you responsibilities where I think about a lot of the new age stuff, it's like you're not responsible for anything. You know, no one's saying that well, you have to do this or you have to do that. It's almost like a consumer experience of, right? This works for me or this doesn't work for me.

And, you know, um, yeah, the problem is atomization, but also that lack of, well, and we should talk about meaning a little bit. I wrote a paper a long while back about different kinds of meaning. And they're sort of paradoxical because there's, there's the meaning that exists when something really unknown happened. And that's a funny meaning because you don't know what it means, but it's meaningful, it's significant and maybe you go out and explore it,

but then there's the meanings associated with things that are fixed, right? That are already in place. And it seems like you need a balance between both of those to have an optimal experience of meaning. Because one takes you way out on the fringes where you're atomized and insane and the other, well, locks you into a structure that has no escape and no room for you. So the meaning is this umbrella term, but decomposing it into its constituent

elements also seems to be useful. And that would also allow for the investigation of what meaning suits what situation, because sometimes what you want is the investigation of what meaning suits what situation. Because sometimes what you want is the meaning of security, you want constraint, you want not that, I don't want all those choices. And other times that's not the case. Right. Yeah, I think so.

So I edited or co-edited a book on the existential side in Civil Legion a couple of years ago. And one of the chapters that I wanted the contributions to the book was making this argument that religion functions as a meta choice. And it's for what you just said. So it actually promotes freedom. Because people think of religion

as being restrictive, right? Often they're like, well, I can't do the things I want to do because religions telling me I have to do, here's all the things I have to do, right? Here's all the rules that are imposed upon me. But this argument was religion at least done in a healthy way. It's a meta choice in the sense that there's this, this behavioral economics type of research where if you have too many choices, you're paralyzed by indecision. So if you narrow down, if you have too few, it suffocate you,

right? So there's an optimal level of choice in which you're free, right? You're not overwhelmed, but you can, you know, you have options. And so what religion might do well is function as a meta choice, which is I can reduce to one choice the system. I can buy into the system that sets up these parameters and is a guidebook for how to live. So I don't have to think about every single little thing. I'm making the meta choice of buying into this framework, but that in itself is a choice because you could reject. You could say, well, I'm not going to do this anymore. Yeah, well, you'm not going to do this anymore. Yeah.

Well, you can think of it in that sense as something that's more akin to, and this isn't reductionistic, it's more akin to a game. I mean, people aren't annoyed when they play monopoly that they can't bounce a basketball off the center of the board, right? They're happy because they have adopted a set of rules that enables a kind of cooperation and competition that's enjoyable and constrains choice to something approximating an optimal range. And you could say, well, we could play monopoly

or we could play Catan, but fine, you make that decision, you got to play something or you play by yourself in a corner. And that issue of being overwhelmed by choices, that's something that that that people don't seem to be quite as as what would you say they're not quite as aware of if you tell people about that, they think, Oh, yeah, I know what you mean, but we our society and maybe that's because of its individualistic nature is we recoil at constraint. We fail to see the fact that

we do want our choices narrowed to a range of, I mean, look, what's our working memory capacity? Four items? Something like that, right? Our field of conscious choices, very narrow. And so when we're presented by options that exceed that constraint, and there's other constraints, it's very easy to become anxious instead of free. Right. Yeah, yeah. And so this is, I mean, and of course, there are a number of people who have put forward ideas like this talking about the idea of order, liberty, or discipline, freedom, you know, that you get more freedom when your life is disciplined.

Like if you, if you don't have certain rules that you live by, then your life can descend into chaos pretty quickly. I mean, people do this even when they think about something as simple as going on a diet. Right? So if somebody gives you advice, like if you went to, you know, if you went to like a nutrition person or, you know, you hired like a trainer or someone to help you lose weight or get healthy. One of the things they would tell you to do is if you know if you don't have certain food in your house you're less likely to at night be tempted to walk into the kitchen and eat a bunch of cookies

if they're not there but that requires a choice of not putting them there so it's not it's not a restriction on your freedom, right? You could get your car, I guess, to drive out to the store and get cookies, but you're less likely to do it if you set up your environment in such a way that removes temptation. And so there's a lot of even very little things we do in life that are like that, right?

There, you know, some people might say, life hacks, right? Where we learn, well, if I do, if I do this, then I know myself and I know I'm the type of person that after a long day's work, if I come home, I'm going to, I'm going to drink too much beer. And so I'm just not going to keep beer in the house. I'm going to make beer a thing that I do only if I go out with friends. I mean, there are people that make these choices because they know they have vulnerabilities to over drinking. And so I think there's lots of things in life

that even beyond religion or other systems in which, like you said, we kind of implicitly understand that you have to set up guardrails and rules. And people don't scream, well, that's anti-freedom. They think that's just being sensible and being reasonable. But when you talk about certain things, like religious traditions or faiths, for some reason, it seems to at least in the modern Western secular world,

people seem to think that that's more a process. It's also, I think partly because more academically-oriented types thinkers have proposed critiques of religion that are very, that reduce it to a single dimension and then criticize it along that dimension. And so the atheist types like Richard Dawkins, and he tends to think that belief in God is like belief in a proposition, a stateable proposition.

Is God real? Like, is a table real? And it isn't obvious that that's the proper way to formulate that issue. And you can make it absurd almost immediately by reducing it to that sort of representation. But there's multitude of functions that religious traditions serve. And even people like Becker, you know, he basically reduced it to a single dimension. It's a defense against death anxieties. Like, well, it may be that, but it certainly isn't only that.

It's a very, very complex issue. And so, but people run into these critiques. Marxist critique, religion is the opiate of the masses, or the Freudian critique, which is, well, God is essentially a projection of the father, an infantile projection of the father. It's like, well, yes, sometimes in some cases and in some ways, but wait. And I guess it depends, too, to some degree, and maybe you could tell me what you think about this. It seems to me that the core of a culture is something that's essentially religious by definition. Like, if you look at what unites people across geographic geography and time, there's some central conception of the world as spirit that brings people together implicitly and explicitly. And then if you dispense with that, well, well, then what? Well, you've demonstrated that, well, you would get people adopting rather odd beliefs.

So that's a kind of heresy, essentially. So there's an automatic tendency to produce heretical religions. That's the consequence. And maybe some of those are political and they're fragmentary. Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, that's actually why I started looking at the individual difference level of analysis, not because I was particularly interested in thinking about spirituality or religion

or any of these things as an individual difference. But I was interested in is if there is people did this and when they talked about the need to belong, you can pretty much get everyone to agree that humans are social and have a fundamental need to belong. That's not controversial. So you can use that as an example. And what researchers did, well, they said, well, if that's true, then you would expect there to be natural variability. Everyone might have some basic need to belong,

but there are going to be some people that are very, very oriented towards belongingness, whereas others aren't going to be so much. And so that individual difference isn't a case against the basic need. It's saying that the basic need manifests you know, differently across the continuum. And so that's pretty much my argument, I think, for for religion and spirituality is that what you just said, I think is true, if people, if a society of bandins religion, they don't really become secular. They start investing in all sorts of other things, what we might call a substitution hypothesis, to fill that space of the role or the multiple roles that religion was playing in their society.

But then an important question, which we talked about a little bit, is just because people are turning to different things to fulfill that function, doesn't mean they're actually doing a good job of fulfilling it. Right? Just because people are turning to politics as a substitute religion or

UFOs or new age beliefs doesn't mean those things are actually doing a good job of providing meaning. So, so let me ask you this then. So, okay, so we've kind of come together on on on a hypothesis here is that there there is some need for union around essentializing tendency. And that kind of throws us back to the beginning of the discussion, because Becker would identify that need for the central 10 centralizing tendency as a manifestation of the denial of death. And we've kind of elaborated on that and criticized it and broadened it, I would say. So it's something more like,

well, the need to, you know, imagine we have to unite in personality to some degree, right? I mean, so we're ruled by a body of laws. And it's interesting that it's a body of laws. And the laws are what we act out. So as long as we're law abiding, that makes us a certain kind of personality. And I would say a more conscientious personality, probably a more agreeable personality, probably a more emotionally stable personality than we would otherwise be alone. And so, imagine that for us to live in a group, we have to partake in a central personality and deviate in our individual ways, but that partake partaking of the central personality without that we get fragmentation and inability to make peace, inability to understand

each other, inability to cooperate. And that is something like the worship of a central spirit. Yeah, at least as it's acted out. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And also connecting back to, you know, something that we talked about, the difference between, you know, more defense versus growth perspectives. It's not just the case that unifying around a belief is somehow, you know, like Becker would argue, somehow allowing us to to escape our anxiety. It's very inspiring and mobilizing because if you look at a lot of the projects that we engage in that, so I know you had Marion Tupillon, who's a friend, you know, a number of weeks back,

and he talked about the human progress and how that people don't see, you know, a lot of people don't think that we've made progress. Yeah, well, they're blinded by the variability. Right, right. But if you look at progress, there's a lot of thing and not just the progress that we've benefited from. I mean, you and I are able to have this conversation

separated by many, many miles over the internet and instantaneously communicating thanks to progress and technology, right? We wouldn't have been able to do this decades ago. But if you look at a lot of projects that are focused on making society or the world a better place, their projects that extend beyond our individual lifetimes. So in other words, you have to make some commitment

to say, I'm not just going to be hedonistically looking out for myself and, you know, trying to have as fun of a life as I can, and then it's over, you know, which some people do, of course. But you have to say, I'm going to give part of myself to something bigger than myself. So that's not just the defense in my mind. That's, and you know, you talked about something that's adaptive, that's something that's very good for society to say it might take 50 years or 100 years before we make this cure this disease or build this project or send something out into space, and I might not even see it myself, but I believe in it.

Right. I believe that. Yeah, well, that thing that we unite around, right? That might be not so much a structure of dogmatic belief as a shared ideal, some of which is described in dogmatic terms. I mean, when I look at the abolition of slavery, let's say, I mean, you can certainly come up with any number of reasons why slavery is a good idea from the perspective

of the slave owner. Now, the question is, how the hell did it ever get to be the case that people decided that that was a bad thing? And it looks to me like it's the working of that ideal across millennia, really, that finally manifested itself in that ethical decision. It's like, well, there was this idea, and it's part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, that we're all imbued with a spark of divinity that aligns us with God, that we're supposed

to act in relationship to that. And there was a logical incompatibility between that and the forces, that the economic forces primarily, that propelled slavery forward. And so it's not just that we're united by a dogmatic structure, we're united by a personality that's the ideal towards which we're trying to struggle, something like that. And that has more of that growth-oriented element that you're describing. Like, I mean, I've been struck repeatedly by this idea recently, and perhaps it's not particularly original, that the figure of Christ in the West is at least the consequence of a millennia long, millennia's long discussion about what constitutes the ideal. We haven't agreed exactly,

because it's too complicated to fully agree on, but I do believe that we feel guilt when we fail to live up to whatever that implicit ideal is. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. So yeah. So I do think that what you're talking about of this,

the central, that we all kind of rally around, isn't inspirational. It gives people a reason to be optimistic, and I think there are, and I suspect you agree with me, just based on seeing some of your some of your own discussions on current trends. There are reasons, I think, to be concerned that we have a growing amount of not just people, hyper individualism of people not, you know, having shared, you know, shared culture, but also just the, the, the associated pessimism and cynicism. You see this in the anti-natalist movement. Right. You see this in some of the activism

that is associated with the social justice movement, which is not, I think most of us would agree that there's more work to be done in any area where you might say there's still unfairness or injustice. But there's this notion among at least a certain component of the, a certain portion of these activists that is it's not going to get better, right? It's permanent.

And that it hasn't. It hasn't. It hasn't. In fact, we just saw at the, at the Challien Institute where when you did my introduction where I'm a scholar at we actually just ran a survey that will probably be released by the time this this podcast. recruited 1,000 US university students from all over the country. And we asked them questions about progress. And we asked them specifically connected to their college experience, because what we were interested in

is what are people learning? You know, you hear all these criticisms about college and indoctrination, but we wanted to ask students, what do they actually, what do they think they're learning? And so we asked them, um, based on what you've learned in college so far, do you think the world has gotten better over the last 50 years? And we even gave them specific examples, because you could say, well, it depends on what you mean, you might have gotten better, right? So we had examples like, examples like things that we knew based on the even progress and other, you know, other data points that had gotten better,

like poverty, right? That, you know, poverty has been decreasing. And I radically and immensely, right? And so what was amazing to me and I can, I can actually bring up. So I don't get the numbers wrong. So we asked people, based on what you've learned in college so far, is the world getting better over the last 50 years. And not even 50% of students said yes. So half of students don't think that the world has gotten better. And we asked the same questions about the US

as the US gotten better, and very similar answers. Only about a quarter of the students of US college students said that they're optimistic about the future of the world, based on what they've learned in college so far. Only 11% of US college students said that their college experience has made them have a more positive view of the US, whereas 45% said that their college experiences, and their ability to make a difference in the world. So I could go on with all these statistics, but essentially, we, you know, we found a number of reasons to think that students, well,

let me back up a little bit. So if you think about objectively, if you think about American college students using, you know, using the terms you think about American college students using, you know, using the terms that are often used in this discussion, which is the concept of privilege. They can be think about the concept of privilege. To be born in America, to live in America, you've already kind of won the lottery. I'm not saying America's the greatest, you know, the greatest place, but compared to a lot of places in the world, there's opportunity, there's, you know, there's a lot more opportunity here, right? So only a small percentage of people have that privilege already, right? And then on top of that, only a't have the opportunity to attend a university, right? So

at some level, it seems obviously true that if you have the privilege of attending university in America, you would think that you should be pretty optimistic about your situation in life and have a lot of gratitude about it, but what we're finding, and of course these aren't, you know, these, this is just a poll, these aren't experiments or anything, and we're not controlling for personality or, you know, other potential factors, but we're getting a snapshot of college students

not being very, one, many of them not seeing that, you know, there's been progress. So where are they learning in college where they're not saying, hey, wow, like maybe things aren't perfect, but they certainly gotten better. They're not seeing that. And then on top of that, they're not particularly helpful or optimistic about the future. And they don't seem to have a real sense of agency, right, that they can make a difference in the world. That there, and again, you would think that if you were sufficiently blessed to live in the United States and go to college, that might, you know, from my perspective, that might come with a certain level of responsibility, right. That's, you know, you're very fortunate and you have a duty to do something in the world to help others,

to make a difference, to, you know, to make your community and your society better. But it seems like a good portion of students aren't particularly optimistic about that and don't really see that they have a place. Well, I talked to Tupi and to Bjorn Lomburg and to Matt Ridley. These are all optimistic sorts of characters who've done a lot to document the radical improvement in absolute terms of human existence over the last, especially the last 30 years. And all of them know that they have a marketing problem, right? It's like, yeah, well, why isn't this compelling? Because it's just, it's an uphill battle to get this information out there.

And the question is why? And it seems to me that it has something to do with, it's in some sense, too materialistic. Like, not that that's bad exactly, because isn't it good to have enough to eat and all of that? But there's some impetus, some spiritual impetus or something like that that seems to be lacking. And then there's another issue. I don't know if you thought about this or not, but you know, in the Christian tradition, there's an apocalypse. There's apocalypse. And it's sort of projected in some sense out into the spiritual world. So the end of the world is at hand, but who knows when? Well, so it's projected, like utopia is projected. And so then you might ask yourself, well, what happens if it isn't projected? Is there a utopian and an apocalyptic tendency in human thinking? And if so, what happens if it's not contained within a religious structure? And so I would wonder to what degree the pessimists in your survey

have apocalyptic visions of the future, because there's certainly no shortage of suggestions that we're facing continually facing, something that looks like an apocalyptic nightmare. And it isn't obvious to me that that's the case. Right. Yeah. Now you see this with what's become almost a religious environmentalism, right? Of it's very apocalyptic, you know, depending on who's talking and on what day it varies from, we've only got like a decade left before the planet

turns into an uninhabitable hellscape. To, you know, on the more optimistic side, you'll see some people say, well, we can still do something to mitigate it, but you do see, again, there are plenty of environmental activists that I think are very practical, very solution oriented, very entrepreneurial

who are thinking about technologies and strategies to make. Yeah, Longberg is like that. Right, right. and strategies to make. Yeah, Longberg is like that. Right, right. But then there's, there's a, but there is an element. Of these activists that it is almost like an apocalyptic.

Mean, you know, meaning, making religion where, because the reason I say that is because it seems to accompany this anti-natalist. And right, right, view of it's almost as if the best, so how you might ask, well, what's that got to do with meaning? Well, it's almost as if what they're arguing is the most meaningful thing that humans can do is go away. Yes, well, you see that. Well, you see that. The surrender, the planet, to the other species because we've screwed it up.

planet to the other species because we've screwed it up. Well, and the thing about the apocalyptic, like, I mean, when I grew up, the apocalypse was basically the threat of nuclear war, which seemed very real, and seems to have at least vanished to some degree in terms of what people fear. And maybe that's because the actual risk has declined. I would say that's the primary reason. I mean, it isn't obvious to me that Russia is going to attack the United States with nuclear bombs. So, and China and America, well, it's not a full-fledged cold war yet. So, but, you know, back in the 60s, there were many people who were entirely convinced that everyone was going to be starving

and that we were going to run out of resources by the year 2000. I mean, the population bomb, Erlich's book, the club of Rome, all these people said, oh, we're going to overpopulate the planet and we're going to run out of resources. And we didn't. And we aren't going to, by all appearances, we're going to peak at about nine billion. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if in in a hundred years, the fundamental problem is that there aren't enough children. I mean, I don't know.

And who knows? Because a hundred years is a long way away. But that apocalypse, those apocalypse, this didn't occur. And we have the environmental apocalypse. And it'd be interesting to see that the more pessimistic students that you described. Do you suppose they would,

would they be more likely to fall into the search for meaning camp? Would they be the ones that were more susceptible to alternative quasi religious beliefs? Do you know any of that yet? Because it would be interesting to look at all that relationship to views of the future? Yeah, no, that's so so there are some data there are some data points that I can bring up not from not from my survey, but that I think speak to this issue.

And other issues you raised including that the material the effect remains religiosity explains part of it. religious people have more meaning. But even when you control for that remains. So what's the story there? Well, it could be that in poorer countries, people are naturally more interdependent. Right, you're not as individualistic, you have to help each other and so you can vary. You can, it's much easier to see how your life matters, right, people depend on you.

Well, you know, I just interviewed a man who has held in Guantanamo Bay for 14 years and released, and he came from Mauritania. He came from a tribal society, like literally a tribal society. He's not even one generation removed from that. And he went to be educated in Germany when he was an older teenager. And when he got to Germany, he was alone in a room for the first time in his life. And he said it really upset him. And he said, we weren't talking about meaning specifically,

but that the meaning in his life was the interdependence with all of his family members whom he was never isolated from ever. And he said specifically, he talked about his mother and said that she was an eternal source of meaning for him and that that dissolved very rapidly when he was isolated and individual. And he suffered repeated bouts of depression

before he ended up in Guentanamo Bay. And so I'd never talked to somebody who had come from a tribal background like that. And it was struck by that degree of interdependence. I mean, we don't know. And you know, the students that you're describing that are pessimistic about the future, many material things have improved, but maybe we are more atomized than we were 50 years ago. I mean, I don't know. I think families are more fragized than we were 50 years ago. I mean, I don't know. I think families are more fragmented than they were 50 years ago, arguably. And some people,

I think, Putnam, again, have argued that social institutions that pull people together have become much less prevalent as well. I think, did he write bowling alone? Was that Putnam? Yeah, he did. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's true. alone. Was that pattern? Yeah, he did. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's true. I mean, that's one of the things that I've been, you know, I've been thinking out because I naturally lean, you know, kind of libertarian, classical liberal. And so I think one of the,

this is something I'm, you know, as a psychologist, I'm, you know, I'm always talking to people in this space because it's, if you're very, if you're smart and have high self control, high trait self control and are relatively successful, then it's pretty easy to be libertarian and think, well, you know, I can choose whatever I want to believe in and I don't want to tell anyone to do anything.

The extreme libertarians like I don't want anyone to tell anyone to do anything ever. But one thing I'm always telling, telling these people is, but that's not how most people are. And one of the challenges that comes with the success of the free market, which I'm a big advocate for, is affluence, right? Like markets have made, you know, capitalism has made societies wealthy. And, but potentially have created

this psychological vulnerability that you're talking about. So on the one hand, yes, we've progressed in many ways along material lines, but to what extent has that potentially contributed to or created certain vulnerabilities in our social lives? Because I don't have to even get along with my neighbors if I have enough money, I can just hire people to do things, right?

I can just pay people for services without actually having to compromise or negotiate. And it turns out or develop attachments or cooperate or inspire or mentor or lead or any of those things, right? And then also you don't do those things that you pay other people to do, which is a form of loss often as well. Right. Exactly. So I think this is it, you know, to take in respect to the unifying religion idea, I think this is a good example where you might need something in a free market society, you know, having religion is a good counter.

you, you know, having religion is a good counter. And people, that's not a novel, it's not a novel observation because a lot of people have talked about, I've talked about this. In fact, I'm in a business school, I'm one of the growing areas, popular areas that people are interested in is ethical leadership. And the idea is people have looked at,

and people have looked at like the financial crisis and all this, you know, the crony capitalism and they can take advantage of people. And so there is this kind of ethical leadership movement. Like if you want the market to work, then you need people to follow certain ethical rules, not just laws, but certain ethical principles. And in a lot of ways, that's a secular repackage of what might have been in the past. It's just like, well, you have two, you have a business world, but you also have the separate religious world and that religious world is where you get your morals, right? Your business world might tell you how to sell a product.

But if selling that product makes you sin or makes you violate certain moral rules, then that's a check on you. I'm not supposed to do that. But if you strip away that moral framework and say, well, anything goes, it's all about making money, or it's all about material gain, or it's all about the rich. It's all about maximizing quarterly profits, which also makes it a very short term. Right. So in a, you know, so in a lot of ways, these, I think these belief systems balance that, and part of the pessimism might be that you,

that you do have in our, you know, materialistic culture, this sense of, well, I'm just supposed to be, well, you see this a lot with the privilege talk, it's because the emphasis is always on billionaires or rich people or you always see this like, well, your life's horrible, you know, your life's going to be horrible because you don't have, you know, you're not a billionaire, which of course, nearly no one is, right, it's a weird fixation because it's like that the model experience is not that right so. Well, it isn't obvious that that would be an advantageous experience to begin with. Right, that's another thing. Along with that comes the same responsibility as running a small country. Right, so that's another thing too, is the fixation on

on privilege in terms of all people are rich or it's in neglects the privilege of having, you know, having loving parents or, you know, you know, having, being, having access to nature or I mean, there's just so many things in life that don't boil down to, um, to that material wealth. And so that might be, that might be part of the issue, you know, like you raised with with with people like Mary and two people, you know, I've talked to I know Mary and we've talked about this a lot as well as because he's this is something that he's grappled with is why why can't people be like wow, like I'm just really, really thankful to be alive right now because it's it's demonstrably better than it was, you know, 50 years ago or 100 years ago, certainly 200 or 300 or 400 years ago. But yeah, maybe there is attention. That's-

Well, have you done anything in your lab like a qualitative taxonomy of meaning? So imagine, because one of the things I've sort of thought through is, you know, where do people derive proximal meaning and so on. And I kind of thought this through as a clinician, you should probably be about as educated as you are intelligent, or there's a lack. You need a career or a job, especially if you're conscientious. You need a vocation if you're creative. You need to spend your leisure time in some intelligent and productive and non-self-destructive

manner. You need an intimate relationship. You need a family, et cetera. You can list maybe a dozen things that seem to be proximal sources of meaning, but I don't really have any idea how those rank order. You know what I mean? What is it that people require to make them feel both secure and exploratory? Is that like, is that a stable network of family and friends? Like, what's

on top there? Do you have any sense of that? So we have done studies where we've just asked people to tell us what makes your life meaningful and it is qualitative. They just write. And then we use human coders and we've also used coding software, you know, scanning software. And not surprisingly, I mean, the most common response to that, the most, you know, the most frequent word uses in these narratives and are about relationships, family and friends. And so it certainly seems to, and that's more than people write that more than they write about religion or anything else.

We looked at this also among, to make sure there wasn't something dramatically different between believers and non-believers. We were, we matched the sample when we recruited, because as you know, in the United States, even though a lot of people don't go to church, you still, we're still talking about less than 10% or so of the population that will identify,

as totally atheist, right? Because people are, like you said, people are spiritual but not religious. So we recruited, we specifically recruited a sample of people that said, they were the real deal like hardcore atheist, and we recruited a sample of people that said, you know, they were the real deal at Cardcore Atheist, and we recruited a sample of believers. Largely because we just, we thought,

well, that's one dimension that might, you know, people might write about different things. And they didn't. You know, basically everyone said the same thing when what gives their live meaning, which was family and close relationships. And people did talk about it. So the coding picked up a few other things.

Like people talked some things about community. They talked about hobbies. They talked about careers. But that was, but family was, you know, was way up here. And those other things were down here. So one thing would be very interesting, then, would be to see what sort of social networks the pessimists have. Yeah. Right?

I mean, if you have a positive of social networks, especially perhaps at the familial level, but maybe, you know, friends and family are in some sense somewhat interchangeable, I doubt it. But perhaps they are. Maybe that's one of the things that sets you up pretty badly for optimism about the future. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's one of the things that sets you up pretty badly for optimism about the future. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a good point. And you know, one of the, you know, one of the things that that concerns me, of course, it's, you know, it's possible you could say, well, young people are, you know, maybe more pessimistic and their college students and there's something kind of edgy or, you know, about being cynical and, you know, they're going to go out of this and, you know, all that's all that's certainly possible. But it seems to me like it's just would be way more beneficial for students to be able to say, hey, this is a real

pro, you know, again, using, you know, the term privilege. This is a real privilege to be here. I'm taking a space that probably millions of people around the world would love to have this opportunity. And that comes with responsibility. But that doesn't seem to be that, you know, that if you talk to people about responsibility, that that gets you almost know. to people about responsibility, that gets you almost now. Well, that's funny, though, because when I went on my tour for my book, I went to about 150 different cities. And one of the things that brought the audience, the only thing I would say that brought every audience I talked about it with to a complete silence was the idea that meaning could be found in the adoption of responsibility. And so it was peculiar because my original attitude would have been much like the one you just expressed, which is, well, good luck selling responsibility. That's what parents and

figures of authority do all the time. But the thing is they don't sell it as a source of meaning. Right. Right. They sell it as a moral obligation. And that's fine because you can see the moral obligation element. But what they don't explain is that in undertaking that moral obligation, you find a sustaining meaning. Right. No, I totally agree. I mean, one thing that, you know, people often think of relationships in a very, I think about the meaning of relationships in a very superficial level.

What I mean by that is people just like, well, you need people to like you and to support you. And you see this in the way we often approach things in academia, which is students want to feel supported. And so you see this very caregiving approach to social relationships, which I just want, we need to make sure there's no bullying, which, okay, we all agree on that.

We need to make sure that people are nice to each other and that we have inclusive environments. But, and that's all great. But to me, that's not meaning. You need to like, so here's a, here's a way, here's a good example. Well, that might be the meaning of one kind of security that's rather maternal in its orientation, but it certainly doesn't exhaust the range of meanings that we might be encouraging university students to pursue. Right. So imagine, so here's an example. Imagine that you were, well, you's work just for, you know, it'll be something people can understand. Imagine you were on a

work team. You, you, a team got put together to work on a project and everyone on that team is very nice to you and very kind to you. No one ever said a bad word to you, no one hurt your feelings, everyone was very supported. But when it came time to get the work done, no one was interested in your contributions. In fact, they were like, oh, you don't need to worry about this. Jordan will take care of it. Oh, that's fine. We all love you, Jordan. You're the, okay, so think about that scenario.

And think about a different scenario on which, yeah, maybe there's more conflict, or maybe it's not high fives all the time where people aren't supporting you, but your contribution is valued. You're making a significant contribution to the team and people and you're needed. People that would be more akin to a sports team. Right. So, but oftentimes, I think in our society, the first approach is what people think of. And maybe like you said, it's a more of a maternal thing that it's like, well, we just need to support people.

And but the problem with that is that's not a recipe to feel like you matter. In fact, people don't like, over time, people figure out that, you know, people are just pitying them and they don't really need them. They don't really like them, you know, so, you know, people need to have some skin in the game. They need to be making a contribution. This actually connects to the argument that I have against things like universal basic income. You know, which we can or don't have to get into. But the idea is it's great to think about taking care of people that, you know, that we like that. Like it feels good to be like, oh yeah, well, we want to help people. But oftentimes just just taking care of people isn't allowing them to have agency. It's

not allowing them to make a meaningful contribution. It's in fact, it could, you know, one of the predictors of the desire to die by suicide is feeling like a burden. To, you know, and so you can have the opposite effect where people will feel like, well, the most meaningful thing I can do is to opt out because I'm not making a contribution. And so I'm very concerned about any kind of movement, even as kind-hearted as it seems,

that's just about, well, let's just be nice to everyone and make sure everyone feels included and loved it seems. That's just about, well, let's just be nice to everyone and make sure everyone feels included and loved and supported. And that's all great, but to me, that's not meaning. We want to live in a polite society, of course. But people need to be able to make contributions and people need to be able to feel that they have a... Well, you could even look at that from a big five perspective,

big five personality perspective. I mean, that provision of basic care is an agreeable value. So it's a reflection of trade agreeableness. And well, on one end, trade disagreeableness is more associated with competition and conflict. And there's utility in that as well. So even by identifying taking care of people as the only value, we don't even exhaust the utility of trait agreeableness. And then there's the meanings of duty and industriousness and orderliness that are associated with conscientiousness and the meanings of creativity that are associated with openness. And you could maybe put security for neuroticism on the same axis as care conceivably,

but there's also meanings of extroversion and none of those are addressed with a sole focus on providing security to people, let's say. I mean, I don't know if using the big five framework in that way is a good way of parsing up the universe of meaning. But, you know, we do know those dimensions exist. Yeah, no, yeah, that makes sense. So, yeah, so I think that, you know, when we talk about even social meaning, it has to go beyond just simple connectedness or having, you know, having a lot of friends. I mean, this is why if you look at like the loneliness literature,

this is what people can be surrounded by people who love them and still feel terribly lonely, right? And still feel totally isolated, even though they're in an environment where everyone's being, being kind of in where they have a lot of social interaction. And so, you know, that, one of my concerns about, you know, some of the some of the movements that we're seeing that I think in it going back to the pessimism thing that seem to come from this idea of, well, there's not going to be any jobs for anyone. Everything is going to be automated. And if you do do something, it's just based on luck because some people are really smart. And so, you know, they're they're going to be privileged in the cognitive economy. And then there's going to be people that can't really do anything. And so if you're if you're kindhearted person, what you do is you just say, well, we're going to financially provide people.

We're just going to take care of people. But to me, that's pretty insulting. But it doesn't may not address the core problem, which is- It may not address the core problem. I think it's very arrogant to assume that you have the answers for who can and can't contribute. I mean, when I worked in, when we were starting with my history, when I, before going to graduate school and I worked in social work and outpatient,

I'm clinical mental health, one of the things that we did because it wasn't outpatient clinic is, and we had people, we had people with severe schizophrenia. Some of these people really couldn't hold down jobs. And they were on disability and they had a really hard time. But many of them did,

even though they were severely mentally ill or in some cases in another group that we worked with had severe developmental disabilities, they still wanted to be contributing members to society. And so what the goal of a lot of the work we did was was to integrate them. This is why it was an outpatient program was they needed some support, right? They needed a caseworker to check on them. They needed an employer that was to check on them, you know, they needed an employer that was open-minded to, you know, finding ways for them to contribute. But, you know, I had this one client I worked with who, I mean, you wouldn't want him in an office place. But he was a very talented programmer.

And so this employer, you know, this was way before the remote work phase, this was decades ago, but this employer figured out, well, this guy can work from home, he does good work, he's got a methodical mind, but he's just, you know, he can't be around people, you know, everyone else won't feel, it won't create a good opposite environment if he's here because he has auditory hallucinations and he's very paranoid. And he self-medicates with alcohol and then that makes things even worse. And so he just adds a layer of chaos to the workplace that we don't need. But he can do, but he actually does good work and his time scale when he can do it. And, and so he had, you know, he was, he was working like he was, he was doing something.

And then we, you know, I had clients and another job I had that, that severe developmental disabilities. And, but they, you know, they wanted to go to work. They wanted to do something. They wanted to have the dignity of feeling like they had a job to go to. And so those are just a couple examples, but that kind of experience, that kind of practical experience stands at odds with a lot of what I see in a very more academic discussion, which isn't based on anyone's real life, it seems. It's based on these hypotheticals of, well, jobs aren't that meaningful. And, you know, some work is boring or or monotonous. And so the best thing we can do for these people is just make sure they have a universal basic income or whatever so they can just do whatever they want with their time.

But that, you know, like you said, that might not get a lot more. That brings its own hazards. Right. Right. So, we started this discussion talking about areas becker and a rather unidimensional view of meaning. But your walk through your research and this discussion indicates that you've, as a consequence of studying this for so long, you've developed a much more multi-dimensional sense of meaning. That's not reductionistic in

the same way. That's not merely defensive. That can't be reduced to the terror of death or defenses against that. And so, is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we close? Is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we close? No, I think we covered a lot of the areas that I'm interested in. I mean, one thing I'll just, you know, it can just add that, because you're absolutely right. Like, what I've tried to do, and this is part of what I like about being a researcher, is I've tried to just kind of follow the data. Like, I have ideas, of course, and I have my own biases.

And but I've tried like within nostalgia work I talked about. I try really hard to test hypotheses, but then kind of see what's going on. And then that gives me ideas or make observations in the rural world. And that gives me ideas. And so you're right, I have gone kind of on this journey where I definitely started out in this more kind of defensive approach, because that's what I learned in graduate school

and have moved more towards this explorative growth oriented kind of creative approach to meaning. And I do think they are connected through some of the attachment and social and cultural security systems and frameworks we talked about. But now, so I'm, you know, I'm even going further into direction of looking at like how meaning contributes to things like entrepreneurship.

Because as you noted before, there's a certain level, even if you look at the developmental literature on attachment, like you talked about the studies where the little kids, you know, when they venture away from mom, mom's the security that gives them, you know, that makes them feel like there's something there that will protect them, which makes them a little bit more willing to explore. Well, if you scale that out in a society level, and we look at topics like

entrepreneurship, which involves risk taking and putting yourself out there and often times failing repeatedly, is that can you imagine that same kind of framework where you, you know, a society that has existential frameworks, whether they be strong social relationships, religion, other cultural worldviews that provide the type of security that encourages people to innovate and to take risks. And so that's kind of the direction I've been going in and more recently,

which I think very much connects to this overall project that we've been talking about, because we need that, right? We need risk takers, We need people who are optimists who who can look at the same set as data of everyone else and who and everyone else feels pessimistic to be like, no, I think there's a solution. We just haven't figured this out yet. And I think those people are often inspired by by meaning, right? You need meaning in my world, another way to say this, meaning isn't an outcome variable.

It's a predictor variable, right? It's because we tend to think of meaning as an indicator well-being, which it is, but in addition to that, I would say it's a cause. It, and fitness research, they've done some study showing that when people think about what's important, what's meaningful in their life, they're more likely to exercise. When you feel like your life's meaningful, you've got like a reason to get up every day and do something. And sometimes that something is take risks to try new things, case you want to make the world better, you want to make life better for your family. And so I think that, um that we just have to be really careful

about that. Like that's an important element of life. And if you have too much cynicism and nihilism and pessimism and anti-natalism, and people don't have any, people don't feel like they've got something to strive for in the future. Then not only we're going to see psychological and social decline, but we'll see economic decline as well. And we won't be able to solve the problems that people say they're really concerned about,

such as climate change, if you don't have people that believe in the future, it's worth saving to begin with. Those are excellent words to close on, I would say. Thank you very much for talking with me today. It was very interesting. The time flew by. It did. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. My pleasure. Good luck with your research and hopefully we can talk again at some point.

Yeah, I would love that. Thanks a lot. You bet. Bye-bye. Bye. you