Within Reason - #124 Sisyphus 55 - So You're Having an Existential Crisis

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

Ben Thomas is @Sisyphus55, a YouTuber creating videos about philosophy, existentialism, nihilism, absurdism, and meaning. His new book, So You're Having an Existential Crisis: a Roadmap for Lost Souls, is available now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. I'm going to be on stage in London on the 17th of November at the Leicester Square Theatre in conversation with my friend Dr John Nelson talking about philosophy, God, religion, consciousness,

whatever you like really, there will be an extensive Q&A period. Early bird tickets are available right now for substack subscribers or the general sale starts on the 6th of October. It's the first time I've done anything like this, just putting on a show and seeing how it goes. I'm sure we'll do more in the future if this goes well, but for now at least, it's one night only. So get your tickets when you can. All the links you need are in the description to this episode. What exactly is an existential crisis? Yeah, so that's a good, definitely a good jumping point into this. Because when I'm writing in the book about the existential crisis, that's kind of like also the entryway into how I get into philosophy. And I think that's for a lot

of people. That's how they get into philosophy. And I think also just broadly bringing up an existential crisis before we get into what it is, what it isn't. I think there's always a potential pathologizing it and that there's like kind of levels of severity with an existential crisis. Like there are, I think people that can be very, very depressed and they can try to like intellectualize the depression sometimes. And I do think like, yes, we can have this like discourse about the importance of philosophy, but if people are like really struggling, um, there's other resources that are maybe less, uh, you know, intellectually, like, troubling, uh, to kind of go through like, you know, seeking actual help and stuff. But at the

same time, I do think like an existential crisis is a good concept for describing kind of a wide range of experiences that involve kind of alienation, um, a sense of isolation, kind of grappling with one's own mortality. And it really, like, at the end of the day, I borrow this from Nietzsche a lot, the notion of pain on some level as being a doorway to some sort of truth. And the pain point here in the same way

that, you know, you're not really thinking about your right arm or your left arm until you feel like some pain in that area. Then you become aware of its existence. I think kind of thinking of identity in those terms, we don't really think of our identity up until a certain age or a certain point where we feel some pain with regards to our identity and then we become really aware of our existence. And this is sort of alienation or Camus talks about like the absurd where we're not really

aware. We don't really become like that tragic hero until we confront kind of the indifferent universe and our own yearning for meaning. So I think crucially it's this, it begins with a feeling of pain deep down. There's some suffering. And then I think from that, how I kind of explore it, there's a million different ways to explore it, but there's two kind of consistent themes with an existential crisis.

There is contingency, which is kind of looking back and realizing that there's some sort of fatalism in your life, that you were born into these sets of circumstances. there's things that you were ascribed, things that were kind of inherited, passed down, and not even just that, but just like environmental influences, and you kind of think, why was I this person, not that person? And here is where I really emphasize, like, high digger's notion of throwness,

that you're really just thrown into a person. Like, I love the kind of, like, idea of that motion, because that's what it kind of feels like when you're suddenly aware of just existing and then besides this contingency it's like this is what has happened to you there is also a sort of kind of ambiguity and uncertainty when it comes to now what do I do and that's that's really like kind of the second part of this that's very there's there's almost like a wide like a wide range of options you don't really know which ones are more meaningful or better or worse. There's kind of social and cultural customs that you can perhaps pursue. There's also

maybe your own innate kind of volition or sense of autonomy or agency that you could also use, but it's also sometimes hard differentiating between the two. So I'm really looking at that kind of naive notion of authenticity that I think in like the 20th century, especially people really romanticized, which is there's some essential self and you just have to like follow your card or something but that's it's we can get into that but it but it's it's not entirely clear how relevant that is nowadays um so it's these two pillars of contingency kind of what's been done to you and arbitrariness which is what you can do and that also introduces the question of free will and can you actually do anything um so that's how i that's how i kind of set up what an existential

crisis is. You know, there's more, I guess, like sociological terms that the people have used like a sense of alienation where you don't feel comfortable or like you really like belong in the world on some level or there's some almost like dissociation with yourself. And then also, yeah, like the absurd where you yearn for some meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. I think a lot of the existentialists were quite talented in capturing this feeling in like a million different ways. So Sartre uses this in nausea, also just the sort of, especially his use of the term gelatinous. He really likes to use these kind of visceral gross term that seem to kind of, they like horrify

us in a way. Like it's like, oh my God, like that sort of essence of existence is kind of disgusting or it just feels very, like, weird or almost, like, alien to us. And there's a lot of just, like, great works of art that I think also, you know, really capture the idea of the existential crisis. So my main claim is that, you know, it comes from pain. It seems, or it derives a lot of its form from pain. And it really relies on these two pillars of arbitrariness and contingency.

And it's arguably fairly universal. So maybe, like, the, I don't know, The Buddha had that kind of first principle, the first noble truth of, you know, life is suffering or life as discontentment. And I think he too suffered a sort of existential crisis around, you know, 20, 26 or 27, he saw, I think, he like looked out the window and saw an old man, a sick man, and then an ascetic and he was, or I think like a corpse also. And he had this, you know, realization of, oh, my God, like, I'm born into this set of circumstances with this wealth and everything. And then also, like, what do I do? Like, is there, like, it just seems like I'm in this cycle of, of no matter what happens. Like, I'm going to get sick.

I'm going to get old. I'm going to die. The ascetic was there to kind of provide a potential answer, but it's not, like, the only answer. And I think that's where it introduces arbitrariness. And, of course, Buddhism comes from his own pursuit of this tension between the arbitrary and the contingent. But that's, you know, I guess I'm giving like one potential example of how people have pursued this. The existentialists have their own way. There's, you could argue almost all religions are some attempt to resolve this, these these kind of paradoxes or feelings of discomfort or pain that seem to apply to the human condition at large. But yeah, that's my my overview of the existential crisis. Yeah, well, you've clearly got a lot to say about this. And, I mean, you've just written a book. So you're having an existential crisis is the name of the book. How does it feel, by the way, to be outselling Albert Camus in the existential philosophy section of Amazon? It was good. I think that at one point, there was, it was ahead of Camus on the, it was ahead of the myth of Cissippus, which was kind of a surreal and kind of just funny experience. But yeah, it's very cool. And like the response.

has been really nice just hearing what people think. And, you know, I think I'll also use this just to just to put it out there that this is really, and, you know, my channel has functioned the same way as just a method of getting people to get into philosophy more. This is definitely not like a treaties or a manifesto of like some serious philosophical claims. But I really hope that this gets people to read more philosophy, get into psychology more, maybe. find some clarity if they're going through similar sort of questions and, you know, strife with their sense of identity, place in the world, direction, and so forth. Yeah, well, it's, it's, so you're having an existential crisis, a roadmap for lost souls.

And it's, I mean, it's a relatively short book, right? It's about 150 pages or so. And the chapters are all relatively short, but you sort of go all over the place with philosophy. It's a brilliant sort of, it gives you like different ways in to the issue from different schools of philosophy and different philosophers and you sort of bring them up into far as it's relevant for this particular, for this particular discussion. But broadly speaking, right, you separate it out into like sections and it's about finding yourself, then making yourself, then being yourself or becoming yourself and then being yourself. And so like when you want to start thinking about this, the reason I ask what an existential crisis is, is because, because it's quite difficult to define, right? It's kind of something about, it seems to have something to do with death, like the recognition that all of this is going to come to an end. It's something to do with the arbitrariness of existence and not quite being sure that you sort of know where you stand. And I would sort of find it impossible to even know, like, where to begin discussing this. So as a way in for you, you talk in the introduction about the discovery of Albeckermus, the myth of Sisyphus, which you've just mentioned. That was your like way into thinking about Existential. philosophy? Yeah, yeah. I, and I, it's kind of like a multi-faceted sort of origin story because

I happen to go to Europe around this time too. And, you know, I was kind of in my, kind of in the, where most people, I think maybe it's the first time they encounter an existential crisis is the kind of teen years around there where you do start having to think in terms of what am I doing with my life. And, like, Dan McAdams, the personality researcher, he kind of frames the personality in these developmental stages. We're in the beginning, we kind of just have these dispositional traits. So, like, you'll think of, like, the big five, like openness, consciousness. It's, like, how we express ourselves. Even early, early on, infants, there's, like, reactive infants, non-reactive infants. Just kind of, you're kind of an actor or a player in the social world,

but you don't really have strong motivations. When I was a kid, I think I was, like, most interested in like the latest star wars and like you know getting ice cream and stuff like that and you're not thinking too far ahead but around puberty especially um his argument is that you see kind of motivational uh development occur where we are seeing ourselves as an agent in the world and we can be effective and we can actually pursue certain things then you start dealing with certain issues such as, well, it seems like I'm pretty limited. Like, you know, I'm Canadian. For example, I can't pursue the goal of becoming the president of the United States or something because of just, you know, going back to what like High Digger was talking about. I was thrown into this specific

national identity. So you're kind of cut off from certain things early on or, you know, like I'm not seven feet tall. My chances of going into the NBA, it's probably going to be fairly small. And then the other issue is like, okay, well, there seems to be some things that I can do, but I don't really know what I should do. And then naively, I think, you know, at the time I write in the book about kind of adopting general social standards of success. And that's really, really tied to usually when you're a kid, like just the media you consume, your parents, like other people in school and what you're being taught at school and this is all very like

you know people have talked about this for so long nothing I'm saying here is new but it was when I went to Europe and I was going through this and I remember just having some conversations with like French people and you know first of all they're not conversations like they love arguing and they love

like debating and kind of like you know and it's just for the spirit of the debate itself like they this is just maybe maybe this is Europe just in general, which I just, I think personality-wise, I actually quite liked. I was like, oh, this is fun. Like, I actually liked just having conversations with people. And it didn't seem as identity-based. It seemed like really almost like you're playing with words. You're trying to figure out concepts. And it was cool. And then, you know, I find out that the education system is a bit

more philosophy and humanities based than in North America. And, you know, I'm seeing there's also a lot of protest. There's a lot of like beautiful architecture. Like, uh, this is a, um, uh, coming from North America, especially from Alberta, like where I'm from, where it's really like petroleum, uh, industry based, very kind of materialistic, uh, consumer based society. Um, not to say that Europe doesn't have these things, but it was a stark contrast. Um, and then I, I was kind of like, feeling good when I came back. And my dad, he has like all of these philosophy books. And I was like intimidated by a bunch of them, but I, you know, I wanted to read them and I look at, he has like Hegel in there. He has Kant. I, you know, I probably like leafed through a couple pages and gave up really quickly. But I did find this one where it was, I could tell that this was written by like a somebody who had also written philosophical work, Camus. But this was like a novel. And so I read the novel and I did not understand it at all. But it was like there were parts of it that I felt a lot. about, like, it was almost this kind of just initial reaction that I couldn't really explain.

And then it was kind of fun because I was like, well, I need to read more of this guy to understand what this kind of short book called The Outsider was really about. And that's where I was introduced to Camus and I was introduced to the, I think the, you know, I don't know for certain, but I'd imagine throughout my whole life I'll find like the whole idea of Sisyphus is quite useful when discussing the human condition because it really is what I was feeling at the time was this I'm just doing things every day and what are they amounting to especially if we're just going to die and everything's kind of meaningless like it was it was just such a such a great image and here is this writer from you know decades ago who is

capturing this and he's applying it and he's coming up with his own argument of how should we live, you know, specifically why shouldn't we kill ourselves? And he really like earnestly explores that. And also he's like even attacking not just like religion, but also other philosophies, you know, the existentialists, he considers it a form of philosophical suicide of, you know, you're not really fully resolving this tension of the kind of indifferent world and our need for meaning. So I was extremely, uh, invigorated by this. And then, of course, philosophy is great in the sense that you see them refer to all of

these other influences and writers. And then you want to understand what they're talking about more. And then so you go and you kind of start, it becomes like a roadmap, your own personalized roadmap where you, okay, now I have to read some Nietzsche. And then Nietzsche is referring to Schopenhauer. So I have to read Schopenhauer. it's this awesome like journey and sometimes I've seen philosophy referred to as it's not trying to give you answers it's just trying to point out that the question that you asked was asked

in the wrong way that there's something wrong with the question and so it's just going to be this endless journey which is also very sisyphian but I think it's it goes back to that kind of it's intrinsically satisfying just to pursue this maybe just for me maybe for I know for a fact some people do not like this stuff at all. But for me, it really, it really hit home. And I think that's what informed what you're talking about when you, when you mention the structure of the book, is that it's a roadmap.

And it's really my roadmap, but I would want people to then take from like these authors and thinkers and read the primary texts, read their own work, and kind of develop their own sort of almost syllabus or curriculum of, of how they're navigating an existential crisis, how they're trying to figure out these themes and ideas, and not just philosophers,

but friends, family, you know, random people you meet in pubs and stuff. Like, it's really like a nice journey. It's a journey, I think McIntyre talks about this.

Like, are, like, the kind of purpose or the aim of a life is, is in understanding what a good life is. Like, it is kind of, uh,

in itself, that's, that's the pursuit. That's like one of the most fulfilling pursuits. you can have. It's why Aristotle frames the philosopher as kind of like the best position you could be in in terms of living a good life because that's pretty much their whole job. So that's, yeah, like broadly, I got into, I got into philosophy because of Camus and it kind of developed into this roadmap. And I hope that the book can kind of offer a somewhat

similar kind of seed, I guess, for people that are going through stuff. So Camille encounters this problem, which is that most people, for some period of their life at least, kind of live according to rules that they didn't even realize they'd accepted. They wake up at a particular time, they go to work, they have a lunch break, they come home, they eat some food, maybe they go out with their friends and they go to sleep, then they wake up and they do it again. And it's one thing to sort of not enjoy that is one thing to suffer or to say, I don't really like my job or I hate early morning. mornings. It's another thing to sort of step outside of it and realize not only do I not enjoy this, but I'm also not quite sure why I'm suffering through it, like what it's for. You know, like sometimes we suffer for things that we care about and we can say, well, I'd rather not be suffering, but I know I know why I'm doing it and it's well worth it.

You know, I go to the gym so I can get a nice muscular body. I think, well, I don't like the suffering of the gym, but, you know, I've got this goal in mind. But if you step back and then think, But why do I even want the muscular body in the first place? That is the existential component of suffering. It's that sort of slightly detached higher order level of question. And so Kumu most foundationally realizes that we have this desire for meaning. We have this desire for purpose and something to sort of connect within the universe. When we look in the universe, we just don't find it.

And this is what he characterizes as the feeling of the absurd. And of course, we'll talk about this a bit, but you just mentioned that Albert Camus criticizes the existentialists. That's a word that we've heard a few times now, and you hear the phrase existential in existential crisis. So people are going to connect these two ideas, but what is an existentialist? What is existentialism? Yeah, no, and I mean, this is a very important distinction to make because I think Camus is a lot of the time. First of all, he's clumped in as a philosopher, which I think he, on the record, said he doesn't consider himself a philosopher. And you do, I mean, like, I do think he's arguably a better, like, novelist and playwright than he is, like, a really, like, serious academic philosopher.

But secondly, he, like, in the myth of Sisyphist criticizes existentialism. Now, they are, you know, absurdism and existentialism are two schools that I think are diagnosing the same condition. Like, they're going after the same problem, and I don't think there would be an issue necessarily. What he doesn't like is that he feels that they don't go far enough and fully satisfying that kind of contradiction between wanting meaning and living in a meaningless world. the existentialists so Starre you know Beauvoir

Merleau-Ponty to a degree you can go back some people would argue Kierkegaard he's like a proto existentialist truly like a

subjectivist high digger they're they also believe like okay there's people have an existential crisis

there's an inherent meaninglessness to the world Sartre for example and Bufa they were they were huge critics of the kind of bourgeoisie values and bourgeois values, the religious institutions, they were all very like fervent atheists. And Camus too. So they would

agree on that kind of religion doesn't quite resolve it. But then it gets to the existentialists and they think that, you know, something that can be resolved here is the lack of meaning because we need to create our own meaning. And I honestly think that the, This is maybe the best example of this is Victor Frankel, like in his logo therapy of, you know, man's search for meaning. And he really believes in this will to meaning, where we just need to kind of what you were talking about with the gym. If you have a why, you can bear anyhow, as Nietzsche said, where it's as long as you have a sort of really important and substantial subjective purpose, it will justify existence and all of the suffering. existence. And Kamu considers this philosophical suicide, and I think he even brings up Kierkegaard in this example, because Kierkegaard really is also a bit religious, and he brings up the leap

of faith and the notion of like a personal god. And I think Kamu also sees similarly the other existentialists are exemplifying a sort of leap of faith here, that they are kind of saying this can be resolved. But his argument is that it's a bit, and this is maybe looking at, like, a later form of Kamu but it's a it's solipsistic it's a bit um you know can't is this really actually solving anything or is this just another form of coping that you can create your own meaning and and and so forth the myth of sissivis at the time what he really believes in is that that's unnecessary that that existence is already justified in sort of the uh you know the objects of the absurd that that develop you know especially when he he writes beautifully and this is

The thing that really touched me early on was his writings on nature, on like the Algerian coastline, the Mediterranean. He shares this with Nietzsche quite a bit, the notion that heaven is on earth, that this is enough, this is sufficient. In the first draft of the outsider, the stranger, there's an initial book called A Happy Death. and I think this really represents this more kind of young Camus who really sees just existence itself as justifiable and by kind of loving and endorsing life itself and these objects that he considers worthy of love you're rebelling against the the sort of claim of absurdity of this indifferent world and part of the function of the book, and it would be cool, I guess, like, in a more kind of academic setting if I was to ever

pursue this or somebody would ever pursue this, is like later throughout his life, he becomes a bit less individualistic because a lot of people would find that form of absurdism kind of unsatisfactory, because that could potentially just develop into hedonism, which Camus in his personal life definitely can attest to. And you see that in his work, especially the fall, which he wrote after the attempted suicide of his wife, Francine Camus, and she was extremely distraught because he had an extreme affair. And you can actually, like, this affair was, there is a book about this thick of love letters that he wrote, him and his mistress wrote to each other.

This was like a very serious form of cheating. And he, you know, he obviously somebody who was very passionate and he loved quite a bit. And he brings up Don Juan in the myth of Sisyphus as a kind of, the example of an absurd figure. He doesn't entirely endorse him, but Don Juan isn't necessarily seen as immoral. He's somebody who has a lot of lovers, but because he's lucid. He's aware of his existence, his function as this Don Juan figure. He can love fully each time with a different lover. And you can see from the position of Don Juan, that sounds quite good.

And from the position of Camu and his personal life, that sounds great. But it's when you start considering other people that you're not a solitary being, you're not an island, this is really in development in the fall because around the same time, you know, I could imagine he felt quite bad with his wife. That almost led to their separation. I believe he had a family at the time. And you see him begin to develop an ethics and a sort of like humanism that still doesn't go into existentialism fully. Because the other thing with the existentialists that he doesn't like is the appreciation of abstraction at times, because the meaning that you develop could be potentially abstract. And Sartre and Beauvoir, specifically with Sartre, the existentialists at a certain time really fell in love with kind of Stalinist USSR Marxist ideology. And well, Camus was definitely like a kind of into communism, into some Marxist ideology. And well, Camus was definitely like a kind of into communism, into some Marxist ideology. notions he was very fervent in you know you should not kill and you know these these camps are just horrific kind of regardless of what you're using to justify their existence so he he was very

anti-abstraction he was very no like you should not um do things because of some like higher level idea so how do you develop kind of an ethics where you're simultaneously um kind of loving things justifying existence, but you're not really giving that kind of why answer necessarily. One of the more, one interpretation you can make with this, and I think it comes out in the rebel is that we're all kind of inherently in this together. We're all struggling, we're all suffering, we're all kind of crawling in the dark. And just that sort of kind of empathy or that sort of shared struggle in itself is justifiable as a form of compassion of, you know, why we shouldn't murder and stuff like that. And I think on a smaller level going back to his personal

life, like with his wife, it's like, oh, you know, maybe I shouldn't cause like some sort of undue suffering and maybe consider other people when I'm doing these things. And this, it's interesting because Camus died at a fairly early age. And so I don't really think his system of philosophy fully developed, but he was kind of capturing a philosophy that I felt was very human. And it wasn't really concerned with like metaphysical claim. It was really trying to be on the ground. It was trying to be of the earth. And he had a trip planned to India at a certain point. And I do kind of wonder how much that would have affected his thinking if he did run into some some Buddhist thought, Hindu thoughts, where, you know, he is slowly developing this kind of compassionate

appreciation and acceptance of suffering and the world without um really without like trying to rest it on any sort of abstraction and you know it would just be cool if somebody and i've seen some some writings where people talk about like kind of buddism and absurdism and i think groundhog day that movie is probably one of the best representations i don't know if you've seen it um with i don't think i have actually no it's it's with bill murray and it's it's a yeah Yeah, he lives the same day over and over and over. Like, it's like Sisypest. And it's also the notion of samsara, which is the kind of cycle of suffering,

the cycle of, you know, the karmic cycle that supposedly enlightenment or nirvana kind of gets you, gets you out of. And I've just always been interested in that sort of form of thinking because I don't think I could ever claim that Camus was the best at forming a full philosophical system. But I totally believe that he was on to something a lot more than I think the existentialists, even though I think all of them contributed substantially to the notion of the existential crisis and how to get out of it. And I would encourage people to just like, that's like the beauty of this.

It's like just the more you read, the better as long as you always have kind of an open mind. And you're, you know, like as I just kind of gave some biographical details alongside the philosophy, You're also informed of the context of these thinkers, too. I think that's what's important. Okay, so let's talk about some of these solutions, and let's try and figure out whether they actually work for people. So we've just talked about Albert Camus contra the existentialists, and you said that these guys are a bunch of people who sort of believe you can create your own meaning.

Do you think you can create your own meaning? And what do people even really mean when they say such a thing? You can definitely create your own meaning. Like, this is, I mean, I almost feel to a certain degree, it's extremely difficult to not do this. I think, I read a book recently called Buddha Socrates and Us, and he is applying kind of both mindfulness practices and Socrates is sort of aporia, that state of confusion where he, you're really just endlessly questioning things until people just don't know what's going on. this is like uh it's almost like a trained skill that you need to develop in order to not extract meaning from things um and i think in this circumstance it's it's helpful and and you know potentially like healing um because it it kind of creates that uh like uh impasse or

or kind of space where like you don't really know what's going on and and you're kind of aimless and i think that's maybe kind of the healthy side of the existential crisis is it it frees up your thinking. Things kind of lose inherent meaning. But on the other hand, like trauma, for example, in a lot of clinical settings, that's considered kind of you're unable to apply meaning to a specific event. And one of the healing properties of therapy, for example, and especially like narrative therapy, written therapy is you're giving meaning to things. And this is like an important point is that most of us really require stories or narratives to understand things. I think I'm not a huge fan of a lot of these people, but, you know, Peugeot and Peterson,

they are emphasizing something that is cognitively relevant, which is we are living in an information age, but we as species very much rely on narrative structure because we are, you know, semantic. Like, we actually need to make sense of things. And we are constantly just blasted with information and data. And it's like, well, we need to actually know what it means. And we're constantly trying to do that. And I, you know, I, I could imagine this causes some burnout and, like, mental health issues is, how do you make sense of all this when there's so much conflicting information? There's an abundance of information. I think meaning is, as the existentialists and Camus bring up, it's, like, kind of an innate desire or, like,

drive that we have is to just try to understand things on some level. And I totally think that we do create meaning if we just mean that in like the kind of sense of, you know, humans themselves can create meaning because it's like a cognitive thing to the extent to which like we're creating meaning in some like metaphysical way where, you know, it means something to the universe or to the world or to, you know, if God exists like if it means something in that sense. I have no idea. I'm definitely like agnostic on that level. Like that's where I just can't. You know, there's definitely people have spiritual experiences. But I think it's helpful enough. We can talk about the creation of meaning, meaning making without necessarily bringing that in to a certain degree. Like I'm, I suppose that an important question would be whether we're talking about objective or subjective meaning, so to speak, right? Because when people say, I create my own meaning, what they typically mean is something like, well, look, I started a family. I had

children, I got a job, and that is where I find my meaning. Maybe I'm really into art or music, and producing that, like, fulfills me. And I think that someone who's having an existential crisis will look at that and say, you're confusing, like, fulfillment

with meaning. Because you've created all of these things which make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. But the point is that it's completely arbitrary, that the universe does not dictate that you have to do those things, that somehow you were supposed to do those things, you just made it up, right? And if you are capable of literally just making your own meaning, then suppose I said, okay, I use this example sometimes, you know, maybe I decide to take meaning in my life by counting the blades of grass

in my front garden every day. And, you know, whenever the wind comes and sweep some of them away or someone steps on it, I have to start all over again. And I just decide, that is, you know, that is my, I need something to do, and that's what I'm going to choose to do. And so my life is now meaningful. The subjectivist would say, yeah, okay, you've chosen your own meaning and you're pursuing it. But it would seem absurd to say that that person's life is as meaningful as someone who spends their life, you know, dedicated to charity or alleviating suffering or trying to be the first society on Mars or something like that. It seems very strange. And I think people will want to resist that implication.

And the two options you're left with is either to say, well, actually, there is some kind of standard which is outside of just what we invent, which gives one of those things more meaning than the other. Or you're committed to saying, well, because there is no such standard and the universe doesn't tell you what to do, kind of none of it is meaningful. And it's all just, you know, a massive cope. We just come up with stuff to make ourselves feel better. But to use the word meaning or purpose would be a bit of a mistake. there. So I think that's the observation that somebody has that, okay, you can create your own meaning, but it's totally subjective and arbitrary, right? Yeah. And I mean, I would even clarify not just subjective, but intersubjective. I think there's a, there's probably like

a distinction between the kind of intersubjective meaning because like wanting to have a family or, you know, pursue a line of work or something. It's probably a certain amount of variance is explained also by the fact that other people consider those things meaningful. And you consider Are those people meaningful? And there's, you know, that's where, I mean, some people argue that's where a lot of truth really just develops. I had a professor who said all sciences just intersubjective agreement, which is kind of, yeah, if we're using science to derive truth, that is kind of maybe, I don't even know if it's cynical. It's just a very kind of a realist notion of that. But you're hitting on something that I'm really interested in in terms of my research because Aristotle,

a long time ago brought up eunomonia. He brought up the idea, what is the good life? And, you know, we have this ultimate aim, this, this telos. And this can be flipped. Like, I think Camus does it. He flips it in the same way Aristotle is making the argument of like, what are we supposed to do? Camus is saying that just in darker words with, you know, why shouldn't we kill ourselves? Like, it's just a bit more extreme. I think when the French get a hold of these things, they make them a bit. bit more, you know, drastic. But, um, it's, it's interesting because psychologists generally are pretty decent at measuring, um, subjective well-being, of measuring kind of affective states of well-being of, you know, if somebody has like an ice cream or if somebody, uh, you know, gets into a good relationship. Like, you see kind of consistent predictors and indicators of, of hedonic functioning, at least. Like, people are pretty good at saying, I feel good. But, And this usually coincides with greater kind of material safety, kind of physiological safety, and comforts, basically. This is kind of taken to the extreme in like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where people can just have like a pill where they're basically always feeling good on some level.

But I think that this is brought up a lot, especially nowadays, is like, that's not enough. Like there needs to be some other sort of well-being that we're aiming for. Like, yes, maybe the purpose of life is happiness, but it's not just this affective happiness. It's meaning, perhaps. There's something meaningful about it. And this is where we get into huge issues because, yes, psychology, on some level, you can just ask for a self-reportive, are you happy or not? And people can answer that fairly reliably. But if somebody says, you know, it's very meaningful that I count blades of grass, it's like that might not generalize to the population, but also,

Who are we to say that that's not true? How do you actually measure this? What is meaning? What does it mean for somebody to live a meaningful or good life in the sort of Aristotelian sense of eudamonia? And that's developed this entire field of research in eudamonic well-being, because I think they're still uncomfortable with saying that they're measuring eudemonia because that's kind of a nebulous philosophical concept.

But eudamonic well-being is supposed to capture the stuff that hedonic well-being doesn't quite get at and I work in like the specifically it's like self-determination theory and they've done a fairly good job I would say at universalizing this this

the kind of three basic psychological needs and the same way that like Maslow brought in like the basic physiological needs of like shelter food, water and then he kind of talks about these psychological needs you go you go further up they also introduce kind of these three needs that seemingly across cultures, although cultures will differ in terms of how much they kind of

prioritize one or the other. Generally, people need to feel a sense of autonomy so they can endorse their own behavior. They need a sense of relatedness. So that's the need to belong and need to feel included, to feel valued, connected, and a sense of competence where they feel mastery at something. And so that is like kind of an objectivist argument for you. eudomonia for eutomonic well-being, that there are some nutrients we've discovered where we can go, this person is living, you know, regardless of their self-report in terms of are they living a meaningful life or good life, we can say like, oh, this person is like measuring high on eutemonic well-being. But then a lot of philosophers have criticized this because it's completely leaving

out the subjectivist approach, like what you're bringing up, which is the grass, especially. Although, I mean, usually what they use is kind of extreme versions of like, what if a white supremacist, you know, technically they're endorsing their own behavior of white supremacy, of going to rallies, they feel a sense of belonging when they are, you know, fighting for their bloodline and, you know, a sense of competence when they're making like the picket signs or whatever. I don't know exactly what a lot of these people do, but, you know, to apply those basic needs, who's to say that they aren't feeling some sense? of satisfaction. What I'm interested in is looking at the subjective and trying to unify this model of like more of an objective approach. So I always think of it as like people are like plants and it's like a flower, for example, it needs water, soil, sunlight.

Similarly, this model of eudamonia identifies kind of basic nutrients that everyone seemingly need, so autonomy related in this competence. And then as Aristotle argued with eudamonia is that it's it's not just feeling kind of, it's not that you're doing good things. You're also feeling good. There's some pleasant sensations. And just to be clear, you've said eudaimonia a few times. Can you just define what, what that means? Yes. Yes. So eudamonia is, it's a sense or it's the, I mean, to use Aristotle's traditional term, it is the pursuit of excellence, Arrette, with the. There's usually some civic or social consciousness involved. There is the feeling of kind of pleasant experiences, pleasant states. He usually includes friendship in there. He has very kind of specific ideas, but broadly what a lot of psychologists and philosophers operate on is this definition of,

like, you are living excellently, like you are living with some level of excellence because he feels like this is a sort of fulfilling and flourishing of human potentiality. And he was more objectivist. Like he literally in the Nicomachian ethics writes down point blank the kind of exact amount, you know, the golden mean of courage you should be exhibiting, the golden mean of, you know, humility and so forth. Like he really doesn't care too much about like what people individually want.

And he very much, you know, because of the time, restrict it mostly to like men and also specifically philosophers because these people are going to kind of have the most material comforts and the best sort of social acclaim. Although broadly, he says, you know, most people could experience some sort of eudomonia or happiness. So does that, does that kind of clear? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think people might just hear the phrase and either not have heard of it, or maybe they've heard of it, but don't quite know what it means. But Aristotle, of course, believes that there is another word used to tell-offs, a sort of end, a natural goal, let's say, to human life that was literally just like built into the person. It's not something that you sort of choose or that you fancy. It's like there is an actual purpose to human life in the sense that there is something human beings tend towards. And that the sort of fulfillment of that end is what being a human is for. And that end is eudaimonia. Some people translated, is like pleasure, but as in any case when the word pleasure comes up in philosophy, it's not

like hedonism. It's not like the pleasure you get from partying. It's like the deeply fulfilling pleasure of genuine goodness and excellence, as it were. It's quite difficult to define always, of course. Yeah. Well, actually. I think worth just flagging. No, no, no. And I mean, that's actually a good, just because to specify, it's a lot of eutemonic psychology now, it does consider pleasure or pleasant feelings or like they're they're kind of byproducts of living this life and you usually see that i mean there is like i think one study by like hoota and and dc were they people pursuing goals with the idea in mind that they want to enhance their happiness tended to not actually experience as much happiness as people pursuing meaningful goals

which were goals that were kind of unrelated to the outcome of the affective state and they were more related to just like doing the thing itself, usually like the process or the activity itself is intrinsically satisfying. So there's a, um, that's kind of like, kind of where I was going is like if you have these kind of more objective nutrients where regardless of any flower, it's going to need water, light, um, soil, there's kind of this byproduct of it growing, which I always consider, you know, in the same way. If we give people those things broadly, they're going to be happy. Like we can generally say that. That's what this, a lot of this research, is shown. If you take care of a plant, it's going to kind of emit a nice odor. So I always

think of the hedonic byproducts or the happiness is almost kind of like, it smells nice. But that's not really, you know, it's fleeting. It's not really enough. But a lot of people, that's what they're looking for all the time. They're looking for hedonic pursuits. And, you know, that's where you see a lot of like addiction, for example. And kind of, you know, you can argue consumerism. And the one thing that this model isn't capturing is that no flower is exactly the same, that they all have their own kind of form, their own kind of direction of growth and, you know, own color and vibrancy and so forth. And what I've been really interested in is just directly asking people, what is their idea of the good life and getting a qualitative measure, along with kind of a sense of efficacy and a sense

of motivation and a sense of appraisal for what their idea of the good life is. So then we are including this subjective variance in the idea of eutomonic well-being, because there's one researcher Jack Bauer who brought up that the one issue in well-being research is we rarely give the participant the privilege to define what good is. It's usually almost always defined by the researcher themselves. And this is like, this is hard. This is really getting into like the bread and butter of kind of psychology and philosophy. And to what extent can we actually measure these kind of immeasurable things. But I think it also speaks to once again this heritage, this intellectual heritage, going back to the ancient Greeks of trying to answer these seemingly

simple questions, which are what are we to do? And why are we alive? And why should we continue living? And what does it look like if we're living the good or correct way, if there is a good correct way. So it's, these are all things that I've been, you know, very, very interested in it. So why is it then that we, when we think of existential philosophy, we think of like Camus and we think of Sartre and we think of these guys that seem to sort of just crop up in the black and white photographic era, you know, like sometime in the 20th century, these guys sort of come out of nowhere and it seems to be something quite distinct. Like, what is, what is it about the 20th century that gives rise to this particular breed of interaction with the problem of meaning?

I mean, I think the 20th century was especially, I mean, you see it a bit before and even afterwards, this is definitely a social trend, but the championing of authenticity, of this kind of romantic endorsement of like the essential self, that you need to pursue things your own way. And I bring it up in the book that there's kind of this different machinery of identity making throughout history, starting with kind of Lionel Trelline's notion of sincerity for a long time, people weren't really having these existential crises to use the Buddha as an example again. You can use a lot of religious figures as an example of this. They're usually rare people that they kind of went, why am I doing this? Because

most of the people back then were fairly, you know, maybe not entirely conscious. of level of agency and even like the notion of free will, there's kind of a controversial, I don't know if you're familiar with like Julius James, like the notion that free will is like actually a fairly contemporary concept. And when you look back to ancient Greek literature in like the Homeric text, when people are thinking,

when they're referring to kind of like these like hearing voices and reflecting, it sounds like a lot of the time it's almost like the gods are communicating with them. And so this author's argument is that kind of our inner worlds back then would have been characterized by, you know, we would have thought that this was actually coming from the outside on some level. There was not really much of an inner agent. And you see this, you know, I don't know how much I totally agree with that, but I will say like after Christianity, the notion of free will and that, you know, there is a right or wrong way to operate and you're kind of given this privilege of deciding, you know, ethically what to do, because. a lot more popular. And this, I think, was in tension with this notion of sincerity for a while, which is that you are born into a position, into a role, and that is who you are, and that's who you're going to be. If your dad was a farmer, you're going to be a farmer, for example, it's the sort of unquestioning. But around like the 18th, 19th, 20th century, you do see, like,

the era of romanticism, you see, you know, Nietzsche starts really criticizing any sort of established truths. Kierkegaard really, really emphasizes subjectivity and this like romantic notion of like the person kind of doing their own thing and and prizing their own, their own subjective experiences. I think the existentialists, this is maybe a bit of conjecture, but they, a lot of them really liked the U.S., and not because they thought the U.S. was this, like, amazing, beautiful country necessarily. They thought it was kind of like a hilarious representation of a lot of, like, the things that they found abhorrent with the bourgeois values and the sort of elitism of these passed down, you know, customs and so forth. And going to America, like a lot of them

really liked jazz culture. They really liked, you know, fast food, dirty movies. And I do think, because the U.S. is very much like the American Revolution was primed on this on this real authenticity as a nation of like this is who we are. And, you know, to this day, they have one of those longstanding constitutions. It's, it's, they are a country of individualism. I could argue compared to maybe a lot of other countries. And I think them meshing with existentialism at this time of increased authenticity, which is the notion of, of you have an essential self and, you know, sincerity is kind of this more conservative, ancient thing that is incorrect in some way. You should follow your heart, for example.

I think that that really projected the existentialist aesthetic. And I mean, it's a cool aesthetic. Like you're in a trench coat. You're smoking cigarettes. There's jazz music. They were kind of edgy. And I think like you see young people especially really endorsing that. Like they think that that, I mean, It is cool. It's a cool looking, like, philosophy. It's one of the, I mean, there's not a lot of people that want to, you know, look like Emmanuel Kant or Hegel. You know, it's like, kind of their marketing is, you know, also just a lot better. And it's, it's like more rebellious, more captivating. But, you know, one of the things that is associated with the rebellious child is a sort of lack of understanding and utopian. spirit, like when, you know, the parents say you've got to follow the rules and the kid says, well, I don't want to. And they go and they smoke and they drink. And there's like a prodigal sun moment of return. And they're like, oh gosh, yeah, that was a terrible idea. You know, can we see

the traditions of Sartre and particularly Camus in a similar kind of way where there are these systems that they reject and they say, no, no, no, we're just going to sort of protest against all of this. But looking at it from the outside, you know, the mature, philosophies that have been around for thousands of years might say, okay, you know, kid, we've all been there, but you need to mature a bit. Because, like, I suppose what I really want to get at is, does the solution work? I mean, you've talked about some of the ways that Camus sort of disagreed with existentialism, and we've talked a little bit about why creating your own meaning is a bit weird, and Camille agreed with that. But he writes this text, the myth of Sisyphus, and we haven't yet

explained, you know, who Sisyphus was or why his name is invoked, but people will probably be vaguely familiar. And the purpose of writing this, I suppose, is to give people almost a kind of consolation. A lot of people find the myth of Sisyphus quite comforting, and I think the reason for that is it famously opens by just saying there is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide, just tackling head on this thing that a lot of people maybe thought, I didn't realize people talked about it so bluntly. And by the end of the book, you get this famous declaration that, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. And I can sort of tell that narrative, but why is it that that's supposed to help anyone? Like, what is it that's going on with Sisyphus? Why do we imagine him

happy? If we do imagine him happy, is it just like, is he essentially just like deluded? Is it a massive cope? And how is it supposed to help anyone? What is Albert Camus solution to the problems that we've been discussing in other words? Yeah, that's a very good question. And I think, like, you know, just at the very start you were talking about kind of this is authenticity naive. And that's very much, like, I'm kind of borrowing from Mueller and D. Ambrosio's work on prophylicity where they, they argue that there's kind of a new identity sort of building thing that's really just based off of like exhibition value and profiles. And authenticity has now kind of gone the way of the dodo, even if we still feel like the essential self is important. And there's a lot of psychology research that shows that authenticity is really hard to cap. And it usually, it's a signal of social desirability, it's not, which is ironic, but it's usually

people, they think something is authentic when it's also, it happens to coincide with kind of being cool. So it's maybe not really reflecting an authentic self, but that's just like a digression. Camus in his myth of Sisyphus, I think partially why I like appreciated it and also grappled with it is because I was never fully satisfied by it. And I think like, at certain times in my life, I would be like, oh, no, this actually makes a lot of sense. But then other times, it just seemed, it does seem like a cope. Now, Camus says, Cicephas, one of the most important things is that he is not diluted. He has lucid awareness, that this sort of rebellion through embracing your suffering,

your circumstances, involves, like, literally lucidity. That is, he uses, he evokes that word quite often. you were completely conscious of what's going on. And I think there's two things here. One of them, I think he's really invoking a sort of kind of mindfulness or he was a huge, he was hugely influenced by Simone Ville, who was kind of a mystic existentialist, like proto-existentialist. She really believed in attention.

Attention almost had spiritual qualities to it of you are really directing all of your sort of cognitive energy and efforts. to this one thing and you kind of become this one thing. And you almost see kind of a phenomenal logical, this beautiful writing on kind of consciousness and the embodied self. And that, I mean, he talks about it. Cisippus becomes the rock. He becomes the mountain. He becomes all of like the world that he's inhabiting, which is an interesting thought because because up until that point, there's that distinction between your search for meaning and the silent indifference of the world. But through this lucidity, this sort of, like I see it as kind of

mindfulness, you are kind of becoming one. There is a sort of union with, with this world. So that's a bit of a resolution. And then the other thing is, is when he's talking about one must, one must imagine system is happy, this isn't like, you know, dancing, super ecstatic, everything's awesome sort of happiness. From my understanding and how he portrays, you know, kind of absurd heroes and his novels such as Dr. Riu and the plague is it's an equanimity. It's a sort of peacefulness or tranquility that he finds. This isn't a you're going to be like telling depressed people like you're going to be doing awesome all the time.

It's more of a confidence that regardless of what happens next, you, you can get through it. And not only get through it, but you could potentially extract some gold or you can find some bliss or peace with life itself. And, you know, I do talk about acceptance and commitment therapy. It's maybe not my favorite therapeutic approach, but I actually think that it offers like a system that makes a lot of sense when we're talking about system. Like, you are accepting what's going on and you are also committing to a specific task. And that's what these are really just kind of two elements that almost contrast with the sort of contingency and arbitrariness of things. They're almost

like the two solutions. And, you know, similarly, I love the, you know, Sartre's phrase of freedom is what you do with what's been done to you where you're simultaneously accepting the situation and you are nonetheless moving forward. And, and this is also a confusing process, but Kierkegaard's idea of, you know, life must be lived forward and it can only be understood backwards really speaks to this, is that we are usually most of the time stumbling in the dark and it's only like when we can stop and actually reflect and think about things, you know, extract some sort of wisdom from it. Can it inform further crawling in the dark or further pushing the rock up, knowing that it's going to roll back down and accepting that

and embracing that? And I think it's a satisfactory answer to a certain degree. It's in a very short section at the very end of the book. And I do think that it could 100% be seen as just a sort of comforting kind of a piece of text. I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. I think, you know, when people are going through things, it's more about whatever they can find that's like within reason and healthy that can kind of get them on their feet and get them going somewhere and get them, you know, to keep pushing.

It doesn't always have to be super intellectually sound because as Camus and the existentialists point out, the human condition and human existence might not be the most intellectually understandable experience. Okay. So now, Camus is talking about this Sisyphus character who is condemned to push a rock up a mountain for eternity. And when he gets to the top of the mountain, it falls back down again, and he has to push it up again, and this goes on forever.

And there's a kind of brutal meaninglessness of this task. and Camus is trying to compare this to the brutal meaninglessness of our everyday reality. And whenever I talk to people about this, they sort of say like, like you just say that by somehow just finding satisfaction in the task, just sort of accepting your circumstance and committing to the task nonetheless, I suppose when someone comes to this, they're kind of asking how to do that. It seems as if there's somebody saying to Camus, you know, I've found myself in this situation. How can I just accept this? How can I get on with my life? And Camus says, well, what I would recommend is that you sort of accept your situation and then just get on with your life anyway. And it feels like there's not much of like a mechanism because that's the very problem is I can kind of imagine, you know, Sisypha's happy.

But I sort of say like, well, good for him. I'm glad I could do that. But, you know, if it were that easy, in other words, wouldn't we? all just sort of choose to be happy in the same way. Like, what is, is there much more that Camus can offer in terms of the mechanism of, like, how to get there? No, like, Camus was not a very thorough, like, writer when it came to give a, you know, practical advice or anything like that. And, and I do think, like, his characters that he uses in his novels, they, like, I always think of Dr. Riu as a, as a great example. In the plague, like, there is, uh, there is, uh,

you know, a plague befalls this small town and there's a doctor and it just looks like things are just getting worse and worse and they kind of just do. And the book even ends with it kind of saying that there's just going to be another plague. It's very Sisyphian, like it's, which is the life of a doctor, which is, you know, you're going to keep combating this illness and trying to save people and so forth. And he's really a character where he's atheistic. He doesn't have any sort of real abstract attachments to anything. So he's a real like a Camus kind of stand in almost. But he really is just doing the right thing. And this is like almost a bit of a like it's an ethical argument. It goes back to some religions where if you're doing the right

thing, if you have some sort of ethical virtue, which is usually you're extracting meaning like what's usually referred to as like autotelic kind of feelings from an experience. There's an intrinsic feeling there. That in itself, like if you can find stuff that justifies things in themselves, you've got it made. Like it's when we start living kind of instrumentally. Like we started thinking, oh, I do this, then I'll get that,

then I'll get this, and I'll be happy. This is more often than not really, really draining because like I think we've brought it up a few times, examples where a person's life is just instrumental where I'll do this and I'll do that and I'll do this and that. And there's some kind of blurry way off in the distance and the horizon, this idea of salvation or eventually you'll reach it. I think what Camus is really challenging is no, it's better to cultivate this mindset of the here and now. And at the same time, I don't think he's advocating for inaction. I think like what he's potentially going for here is something

that, you know, you see it in the stoic tradition too, which is you accept the things that you can't really do much about and you try to change the things that you can. And this is easier said than done. Maybe the best approach to this is just through cultivating wisdom. And through cultivating wisdom, I mean, that involves usually making a lot of mistakes and actually going out and living and having the courage to stumble in the dark and mess up. But this is something like in therapy that we struggle with a lot is a client comes to you and, you know, if they're an abusive relationship or they've had some significant trauma, we cannot do anything with regards to that specific situation within reason. There are, you know, ethical things or if it's a,

you know, really, really awful, you know, then you can, you can call like an emergency line. But yes, I think like trauma, trauma is a good example. Like, that's something that happened in the past and you can't change what has happened to somebody in the past. I think eternal sunshine of the spotless mind does a great job of like, you know, when people want to break up and they literally want to just get rid of that, like those memories. And the tragedy of that, it just seems like it will just always come up no matter what. And it's it's teaching the person not to get over it. I think that's the worst thing you can tell somebody, especially if they have trauma, But to teach them how to live with it, to nonetheless pursue their life, despite this happening, and maybe even extract some sort of growth or meaning from it.

And there's like the concept of post-traumatic growth that I think is still a bit nebulous in terms of like research. But but I think it's like, you know, it's an important thing to bring up, at least in this discussion. it's it's teaching somebody to you know do you to recognize what's been done to you and then nonetheless kind of endorse that freedom that like sartre was talking about like freedom is what you do with what's been done to you and that involves that lucidity that this isn't diluting yourself like you are you're not dissociating which is also yeah like that's one of the primary symptoms that you see with people that go through a traumatic episode is that they dissociate they they lose meaning they don't know what happened it's usually like sensory details

that they can remember and then their life you know the sleep issues interpersonal issues they all crop up from this it's like how okay these are the inherited problems these are the this is the situation how do we navigate this this is just it's it's situational it involves you know multiple people like i always think it's important that it's that you're not struggling alone that people are actually like looking for help there um and it's it's it's the process itself which can actually be quite fulfilling and it can lead to some sort of meaning and and uh you know this is a lot of i'm i'm definitely like pulling a lot of uh stuff that camus has never really specified specifically because yeah i don't think camus was very adequate in in um offering offering a

philosophy or, you know, self-help advice that is useful necessarily. But I think he was onto something. And I think I see it in a lot of other kind of across other fields and disciplines and thinkers. Do you think that someone can be a happy nihilist? I think that when we describe nihilism, it's got something to do with a recognition of a purposelessness to existence. And oftentimes, this is tied up with the concept of suffering. But these can at least be intellectually distinguished. You can imagine, you know, like Chatch E.P.T. becoming conscious and being a bit of a nihilist, but not like feeling pain in any sense. And I wonder if somebody can, I mean, typically people become nihilist when they're depressed about their lives and they don't know why they're doing

it all. But conceivably to me, someone could be like really happy, having a really great time and be like, but I don't think there's any meaning behind this. I'm just sort of having a good time. And it seems weird to call them a nihilist because they're so happy, but I don't know, do you think that they can be distinguished in this way? Yeah, I mean, like, it's hard to kind of imagine that specific mind that they don't have any sort of value system necessarily, but they're also like kind of affectively happy. It does make me think of like, yeah, when you hear about like notions like Nirvana or Enlightenment or something, where it's a person is just kind of just existence itself is is justifiable and then likewise there's a sort of comfort with death like it's not like they would hold on to their life very much too um maybe like taoism kind of does a fairly adequate job of if you wanted

to think of somebody who could potentially be a nihilist in the sense that we're using it like the Wu Wei especially where they're kind of going with the flow and they're recognizing the signlessness of reality that, you know, binaries don't really exist in a kind of metaphysical sense. And if you can somehow inherit that idea into like how you're actually seeing things, I mean, I just watched, I happened to see that video from like a long time ago where there was, I think, a Tibetan monk who very famously self-immolated in protest against a government who was prosecuting their sect. And yeah, like when he goes up in flames, he doesn't flinch.

He doesn't do anything. He just kind of burns and dies. And it's kind of a horrifying video on some level. But there is something a little bit kind of like, that's truly super. And that is almost like a potentially a happy nihilist is somebody who could be happy in a meditative state, you know, in a temple and also happy burned alive, not even like flinching because they know, I mean, he's maybe not a great example because he's still actually perhaps valuing something. And that's like, I think that's the hard thing to grasp is how what is the motivational behavioral patterns of somebody who has. no value system that's a little it's a little hard um but this is like maybe the closest that i i can kind of think of i i think it's it's potentially possible um but i'm imagining literally someone who just like who just if i think a lot of in particular young people are a bit

like this they sort of say like you know we're all going to die you only live once so let's just go and like have a great time that's kind of an embodiment of nihilism like the justification for the pursuit of hedonic pleasure there is the fact that there is no overarching narrative here. There's no God. There's no afterlife. You're here for a short time and that's just it. There's no, there's no teleology. So what more can you do except drink wine and be merry? Like, go and have a good time. And it's almost like this, it's almost like if you're depressed, it can motivate you into nihilism. But if you're a nihilist, it can motivate you into just pursuing pleasure. And at least that won't probably bring like long term fulfillment, but someone can be

happy doing that because imagining Sisyphus happy, I think doesn't mean that Sisyphus isn't like, is no longer a nihilist. He could just be a kind of a happy nihilist, someone who recognizes the the meaninglessness of it all, but kind of gets along with it anyway. Like I don't know if in this image of Sisyphus happy, we're supposed to imagine someone who is finding meaning in the task or someone who's still finding no meaning in the task, but is just kind of happy anyway. You know what I mean? yeah I mean like I think because you could argue that I feel because I feel like we've had this conversation before like the happy nihilus that you're characterizing it sounds like there's still some even if it's just like base level biological just drives of pleasure where there's still like a motivational state of pleasure and to go away from pain which in this example is they're going to drink and they're going to do drugs and stuff but then like you there's kind of like two extremes of that if they're truly like if we're defining not nihilism as just nothing more than this base level drive towards pleasure and maybe a version from pain, there is kind of the maximalist perspective of like, why wouldn't they just

do an insane amount of like heroin all at once and then die? Because their life doesn't mean anything and they get to feel the most pleasure possible. Or maybe this, you know, alternative other extreme example where they really really trying to live like I'm just imagining somebody where they just really maybe I fall into this camp

they really dive into like psychological research and philosophy of like what are the things that actually derive the most happiness in the more like eudamonic sense like what how can I actually possibly how can I like maximize my feelings

of like of pleasure because you know there is the argument that it's it's uh like you could somehow derive like like a more substantial long term feeling of of pleasantness and pleasure if you're like living in a sort of like Epicurean garden where everyone got along and it wasn't you know you're not just doing like drugs in an alleyway and you die in like a day or something like that so it's it's like there's still i think that's where i'm struggling is just

what would this person look like um if there's still that drive for pleasure like and that aversion to pain and that's where I do start thinking of more eastern schools where they see that cycle in itself as where suffering comes from and also where our idea of like the binary like they think that there's pain and pleasure and pleasure and pain and this aversion and grasping is very much interrelated and they back away from that and they're able to find this equanimity that I think is also related to kind of the Sisyphian or like Camus conception of the Sisyphian struggle where there is suffering, there is pain, they feel it all, but they know that that is just kind of a passing cloud, that's a passing wave, they're just doing something, they're

continuing to, I mean, Lecon, if we get into psychoanalysis, like subjective destitution, where you've kind of lost this sense of self. I mean, nihilism broadly to define it here is, is maybe a kind of a non-being or a lack of self that you've achieved on some level. It could be like this nirvonic embodiment also. I don't think it needs to necessarily turn into this hedonistic example. And I do think that, you know, these a lot of young people when they say they're nihilistic, I don't know, I mean, I wouldn't challenge them on this. People are allowed to label themselves as whatever they'd like to be.

I still think they're valuing something. I think even labeling yourself as a nihilist, like you value social, signaling in terms of your own identity. What's the purpose of telling somebody that? You want to feel that your diagnosis of the meaninglessness of things is affirmed by others, or you want to, you know, at least warn people or something. Like, it's hard. Like, it's hard to, I think, on an intellectual level, you can talk about being a nihilist. Like, you know, metaphysically nothing matters inherently. But if we're using this more kind of, you know, meaning is at least an emergent property. of human consciousness, then it gets tricky because, you know, we're humans.

Can we actually get outside of this, this meaning-making capacity? I think there's, you know, philosophy and theology, there's some potential tools there. But, yeah, I don't know. It's a good thought experiment. Well, what are we missing by neglecting Eastern schools of philosophy? I mean, you said a moment ago that Camus had plans to go to India, and he, he never did. And this almost serves as a metaphor that Albert Camus should go to India, that this line of thinking that grapples with desire and suffering and like the cyclical nature

of it all, that if only that would like go to India for a bit, but there's probably something to draw there. And there's this weird sort of convergence of philosophies that happened. I mean, it's not like these problems spring out of nowhere. Like this is part of the human condition that people are addressing. And so, of course, other people will have thought of this before. If you're part of a Western tradition, then if somebody has already written about the kind of stuff you're feeling, you're likely to read their work and build on it and engage with it. But it's almost like you've got these separated evolutionary branches, like different species of thought that share some common ancestor thousands of years ago, which split off, and you get

the Indian tradition, the Chinese tradition, the Western tradition. And so at the top level where we are today with the Western tradition, you get like your Camus and your Sartre. But at the top level of your Indian tradition, you'll have a completely different sort of system of thought, but which is reacting to the same condition. And naturally, we neglect them, as I'm sure they neglect us. But I don't know, what do you think is the value in reaching over there? And what might people expect to find if they do? I love the, like what you brought up that there is these, regardless of how different they appear nowadays in terms of like the West East tradition, It seems like they were grappling with very similar issues in terms of the human condition.

And Stephen Batchelor is like a Zen scholar. He went into like a real like historical exploration of, you know, to what extent did Socrates and, you know, the Buddha example, the Buddha, for example, they kind of, yeah, I mean, they were around at the same time. And somebody who followed Socrates or somebody who followed the Buddha could have potentially interacted. with these ideas pretty early on. And there's some argument to be made that the Hellenistic philosophers, like the Epicureans, the Stoics, there's some influence there from the east

because this was around the time when, you know, the Alexander kind of brought them as close to India. And there's actually like the Buddha before the Greeks visited. They didn't have like an actual statue of the Buddha figure. But this comes from the ancient Greeks

kind of love of creating these beautiful statues of like reverend figures. I never do that, but I guess that that's kind of where this developed. There's already that influence there. And the Hellenistic period in ancient Greece was characterized by uncertainty. There was a bunch of rulers that were kind of killing each other

and there was like constantly like fighting politically and between cities and civil wars. and the Epicureans, the Stoics, like they develop their own sort of systems of how do we grapple with this uncertainty? And it's usually what you hear, like when people bring up like cognitive behavioral therapy is that it inherited traditions of stoicism and Buddhism,

which, yeah, it's usually this kind of what we were talking about before, where you're accepting what you can't change and you're going to change what you potentially have some effect on, where it's, it's, you know, they had their own kind of, of metaphysical beliefs that were kind of characterized by the time. Like I think like the Stoics, they really talk about kind of this divine nature, for example.

But the ethical components of it, very related. And it's kind of funny because, yeah, then all of these, I mean, Socrates was very much into Aporia and not really coming up with any concrete answers to things. But Plato and the Neoplatonists, they really started to believe in this sort of like, there's a real more real reality and like you know we really need to rationalize things and um they did start kind of creating this this they laid the groundwork for like idealism transcendental idealism and like cons idea of uh these like inherited cognitive capacities that inform our ethics and everything and i i mean like you could make the argument that that's where we maybe lost the plot if you're

an eastern philosopher where it's like this is like this is too much and cartesian dualism it's like a very clean example of like there is the spirit and then there is like the physical world and then they interact through I think what I think he said it was the pituitary gland or something and it's just like what like yeah like what are we doing this is kind of maybe getting a bit too you know obviously these thinkers brought a lot of amazing things to the table but just in terms of like trying to figure out the good life and and what meaning is what value is there's something I think useful about the non-binary kind of endorsement of things like emptiness, signlessness, the selflessness of, you know, the more eastern traditions, and the kind of

notion of interbeing of relatedness and and maybe less of an endorsement of individualism and authenticity. And I, you know, I think that this dialogue between the to is extremely valuable. And I hope that, you know, this newer generation of philosophers, they are willing to kind of go across cultural borders and explore these conversations and how they interact. Yeah, I mean, when people have engaged in Eastern philosophy, they tend to find that it chimes quite well with some of the things that they thought were unique to Western thought. like, I mean, Arthur Schopenhauer is a great example of someone who has all kinds of things to say about the Upanishads, the Indian Vedic scripture, and he loved them. He thought that, in fact, a quote here, he says, in the whole world, there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, and it will be the solace of my death. And in fact, even Schroeder, of Schrodinger's cat fame, liked the Upanishad. And he wrote, here's another quote. There is

obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness. Their multiplicity is only apparent. In truth, there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And like, when you start looking for it, you realize that a lot of what these guys were saying chime quite well with these other traditions, which you might say to that, well, okay, but like, what's the point then? If we're all saying the same thing, why would I bother relearning? It's like if I had to go and, you know, read Descartes in French. It's like, why am I going to bother reading the same thing in, like, a different language? But I suppose the point is that if you did actually go and read Descartes in French,

you might literally just come to a better understanding of what he was saying. Because if you, like, there's always interpretation in translation. And I suppose that what we're doing as philosophers, I mean, we as a human species, not you and me, is we're trying to, like, interpret, we're trying to translate our experiences of the world into language. So it's just like if you read a Russian novel, if you read that in two different translations, even though it's the same source material, you're going to have a much better grasp of what the text is really getting at. if you, like, read the world of philosophy through the translation of the Western tradition and the translation of the Eastern tradition, realize that a lot of the time they're talking about the same stuff in different language and then come away with a sort of a synthesized

understanding of what's actually there, you know, below all of it. I think as Schopenhauer said, there is nothing more beneficial and elevating than doing such a thing. and then he shoved that old lady down the stairs yes he did and he had some some choice words for women as well um i do you know i am interested though like in wrapping up here the extent to which you think these philosophers can be separated from their personal lives it's sort of like the separation of art an artist thing that happens in in the modern day with with singers and and you know authors and things but

we've got this tradition of thinkers who, like you said, Camus, was a bit of a hedonist, and he sort of serially cheats on his wife to the extent that she attempts suicide. And a lot of people, like some people will criticize philosophies by saying that they dictate the way that you live. Jean-Pulsartre was part of the many, the sort of long list of French intellectuals who signed a petition trying to get rid of the age of consent and allow adults to have sexual relationships with consenting as it were, children. Arthur Schopenhauer, as we've just seen, also had a bit of a dodgy personal life, and even in his writing, his polemical writings,

says things that a lot of people would, I think, understandably put a lot of people off. So are we able to just shelve that, or is there some legitimacy in the people who come along and say, okay, Mr. Existentialism, absurdism, and how beautiful it is, but look at the kind of lives and philosophies that this lives to. This is surely somewhere where you don't want to end up. Yeah, I mean, I think if we were to do a purity test on like the body of philosophical text that's been given to us, there probably wouldn't be philosophy. But I also really like this phrase of, you know, if there is a jewel in a garbage can, don't, you know, expect to get your hands dirty when you go to extract it, which is. I think like a lot of these philosophers, even if their philosophy is, it feels on the surface like, oh, this is actually quite nice and ethical. It's important to understand their personal life because I do think it very much informs their views. And I think it could potentially foreshadow or reveal certain consequences of totally following through with these philosophies and also investigating the extent to which they really lived coherently with this philosophy. I think Camus, for example, like, you know,

know part part of my skepticism with him as I grew older was the lack of ethics in his in his early work especially and how it related to his treatment with women like I think that that's something where you could if you really embrace absurdism it's not too far of a leap to embrace hedonism which is not too far of a leap to be kind of an asshole and you know sleep around a lot and it's it's and even like camu and sarcher like sarcher how he would talk about other people it's like hell is other people and it was like this awful kind of um this situation and um human relationships were kind of like gross and he he had you know in his own life he was he was reported to be quite insecure about how he looked camus was you know he's considered to be one of the more good looking philosophers and he really did not have trouble in his love life. And you can kind of see their two thoughts as also reflections of kind of their life situation.

Sartre was also a lot more culturally celebrated at the time. Like he really made it up to like high level of academic stature in France. And, you know, his funeral was attended by so many people. And, you know, he lived in like a normal family. Whereas Camus, he lived with his like mute mother in kind of, of a poor Algerian coastal town and he was really like a rags to riches kind of guy like there's um I think all it can do is just help your understanding of these works more and you know especially in terms of the ethical aspects of it I think it's it's good to be aware

of the the interplay between a person's thought and and where they come from their context yes we are after all just humans trying to do the same thing these aren't marble statues or renaissance paintings these are you know men and women of flesh and blood who are made out of the same stuff as us which is precisely why we can look to them to to help solve some of our problems but we're all kind of doing the same thing so i think we recognize the limitations of people's philosophy and the limitations of their lives and take things with a bit of a pinch of salt not expect to find a full solution and we'll probably have a better time. And that's what's represented well in your book. There we go, a wonderful segue in rounding off. So you're having an existential crisis. Of course, the link is in the description. And congratulations.

It's quite the thing to have a book out in the world. It must feel pretty gratifying. Yeah, no, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. And I look forward to in the future, if you ever do pursue potentially writing something that would be. I definitely look forward to that.

soon come one day one day i'm sure it'll be like buses you know it takes forever to come and then once one appears they'll just keep keep arriving i'm sure that once i get the bug for it i won't be able to stop so i better think carefully before committing myself to that lifestyle but soon come ben thanks uh thanks for coming on your channel sis for 55 of course is also links down in the description so yeah thanks for your time it's been fun thank you alex