Moment 104 - Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Unusual Explanation For Life On Earth

What is the meaning of life? Quite a hard question to answer isn’t it? This question has stumped history’s greatest thinkers, however in this moment one of the greatest intellects of our time, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has a theory. It’s too easy to pessimistically countdown your days left on earth and find yourself desperately running around and endlessly searching for a grand meaning to life,. Instead, Neil believes that it is actually right in front of us, as we can create our own meaning of life. For Neil that is his quest for knowledge and learning something new each and everyday, for yourself and other people it could be completely different. Whichever path you decide to take, Neil believes that as long as you help others along the way and follow your interests you will become wiser. Listen to the full episode here - ⁠ https://g2ul0.app.link/XMtuSSePMyb Neil: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/neildegrassetyson/?hl=en https://neildegrassetyson.com/ Watch the episodes on YouTube - ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  Happiness and meaning, where does that come from in your perspective?

• 0:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I have found is, is an urge people have to search for meaning.

• 0:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it under this rock, metaphorically, right? Is it under a rock? I'm gonna search, is there meaning there? Is it behind a tree? If I join this group, will I find meaning with them? If I, and I think, okay, go ahead. But what you're doing is relegating meaning in your life to a search.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Suppose you don't find meaning. That'd be a force of disappointment in your life. You're setting yourself up to be disappointed if you don't find meaning. So I have another idea.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I use this for myself, may or may not work for others. I recognized long ago that in a free society, where I'm not enslaved and I'm not, you know, an indentured servant, and I have some freedom of choice,

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that I have the power to manufacture meaning in my life.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can make decisions about my own life that create the meaning. For me, a meaningful life is learning something new tomorrow that I didn't know yesterday. Otherwise, it's a wasted day.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know the prisoner who puts X's in the boxes on the wall for the day they get out? I have that in my head, and the day that I get out is the day I die, all right? And what these boxes remind you of is every day you're alive, you're one day closer to death.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's one fewer days in there to accomplish something that you might have wanted to accomplish. So.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to keep learning about our world, about each other, about things I don't otherwise know about. And there are people who only read things that they agree with, or that they already know about, or that it's they're feeding some urge to be, what's the word, to be validated. I have books on my shelf, at my bedside. Every book is a subject that I either know nothing about, or I completely disagree with, going into the book.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, well, maybe it'll change my mind, learn new ideas. Okay? I once presented that list to the New York Times, when they said, because I, my book was doing well at one point, and they'd try to get authors to talk about other books, to keep the book wheel turning, because fewer people are reading today. So what books are you reading? So on your shelf, so I listed the books. One of them was a book in its 30th printing or something, it was originally written back in the early 60s, I think, maybe even the 50s. A book by Barry Goldwater, it's called The Conscious of a Conservative.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I'm reading this, and people wrote to me after they saw this list, they said, "I didn't know you're a closet conservative, I didn't know you're really a Republican, did you vote for Trump?" And all of a sudden, people were presuming that if I'm reading a book on something, that book must be what my whole life is about, rather than it's a portal to another place of how people think, and what people do. So that shocked me, actually, because that tells me that most people must have just books that continue to feed their own interests. And that is the best way to not grow in this world. So one of my measures of meaning is, how much more do I know about the world tomorrow than I did yesterday?

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because almost any path you take will make you wiser as a person. So I value wisdom that gives meaning to my life, a new perspective. It's not just knowledge, no. What is the arc? It's, it's, there's, there's data, data can become information.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Information on further study becomes knowledge. And after enough time, when you see how the knowledge plugs in and applies, it can become wisdom. Wisdom is the distilled essence of all the details. The wisest statements ever spoken to you generally have no detail in them at all, do they? It's, as I've heard it said this way, wisdom is what's left over after you've forgotten all the details. It's the distilled essence of it all. So I want to be wiser on the porch, on my rocking chair. I don't want to be the old curmudgeon.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "In my day, we did it best." No, I don't want to be that guy. No. So that's one source of meaning. Another, and it's directly traceable to my parents, but I'd like to also think it's traceable to common sense, is spend a little bit of your life lessening the suffering of others. I don't mean redirect your life. Some people do. They work in soup kitchens and start not-for-profits to serve. Yes, I'm not that person. No, because my, the universe is what calls me. But in my day, in a week,

• 6:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  do something that lessens the suffering of someone else. However trifling that gesture is. And that's an infusion of good. Yeah, I'm value judging it. I'm saying, yes, it's a good thing to lessen the suffering of others. Yeah, I'm declaring that. I try not to ever put opinions out there, but it's my opinion that if you lessen the suffering of others.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You make a better world. And don't we all want to live in a better world?

• 6:45Steven Bartlett?

  If your happiness were a recipe, right? Consisting of various ingredients that needed to be present in certain quantities for you to be a happy person. And under the assumption that, you know, no one is perfectly happy under any kind of vague sense of the word. What, what is missing from your list of ingredients at the moment? Or what could you have more of that would make you happy?

• 7:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think of life that way.

• 7:09Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, how do you think of life? Why is that wrong, that question?

• 7:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't say it was wrong. I don't value judge, okay? It's not what's right or wrong here. It's, it's, um. I don't live life that way. Because it means you carry with you the emotions. I could be happier if I were doing this and how come I'm not? And all of a sudden, well, then I must be miserable if I'm not as happy as I could be. No, I don't measure day to day. Am I happy or not? I, I, it's not the measure. Yes, it's, it's in there, but that's not the metric. The metric is, am I successful? At what, at what I'm doing? Am I, no, no.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not even that. It's, am I as good at this as I can be? If you're not going to try to improve, go home. Find something else.