A Psychologist's Tips To Find Meaning - Dr Clay Routledge | Modern Wisdom Podcast 366

Dr Clay Routledge is a Professor of Management at North Dakota State University and an author. How to find meaning in life is a question that's been grappled with for thousands of years. As an Existential Psychologist, Clay uses modern methods to answer these ancient questions and provides an awesome overview of our current understanding of what meaning is, why it's important and how to attain it. Expect to learn why nature would design a creature that requires meaning to feel fulfilled, the most robust ways to add meaning to your life, why religion might have answered a lot of the questions we're now asking, Clay's views on the importance of nostalgia and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Clay's website - https://www.clayroutledge.com/ Follow Clay on Twitter - https://twitter.com/clayroutledge Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #meaning #existentialpsychology #mindset - 00:00 Intro 00:38 Existential Psychology 04:47 What is Meaning? 17:43 The Importance of Purpose 28:48 Predictors of Meaning 36:17 Is There Meaning in Isolation? 42:30 Guaranteed Ways to Add Meaning 52:31 Insufficiency of Empiricism 59:35 Are Humans Inherently Spiritual? 1:13:36 Where to Find Dr Clay Routledge - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What we're referring to as existential agency. Existential agency, we define it as people's belief in their own ability to guide the meaning in their life, to have a meaningful life.

• 0:14Chris Williamson?

  Clay Routledge, welcome to the show.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  For the people who aren't familiar with you and your work, how do you describe what you study?

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Well, I'm what's called an existential psychologist, and that probably sounds like, what are you talking about? So obviously, I'm a psychologist. I'm not a clinical psychologist. I don't see, I don't see clients or patients. I'm a, I'm a psychological scientist. I do, I mainly do research. And so the existential part is what I'm really interested in is the uniquely human capacity to ask big questions. Why am I here? What purpose do I serve? Does, you know, does my life have any meaning that transcends my mortality? What does it mean to be free? You know, the idea of free will, agency,

• 1:06Speaker 00

  curiosity, creativity, you know, there's just all these things that we can do because we're intelligent and we're, you know, we're clever, we're imaginative. And so everything kind of wrapped around that idea, the big questions is what an existential psychologist is interested in. And then, of course, more, you know, that sounds very, very philosophical. So more concretely and practically, how does that connect to human wellbeing? Like, how do my concerns about meaning in life influence my goals, my ability to be mentally and physically healthy, my relationships, the types of beliefs I have? You know, so everything in life that, you know, that's really important to navigating,

• 1:48Speaker 00

  you know, the world and society and, and families and cultures. How does that connect to these deeper questions of meaning and agency? That's pretty much in, you know, in a nutshell, what I'm into.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  Why does any of the psychologists not study that? Because that sounds absolutely fascinating.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think a lot of it is, it does, it sounds intimidating in some ways because it's so, it sounds so abstract. And so, one of the challenges we have as, you know, scientists is trying to, you know, trying to connect these broad ideas to empirically testable hypotheses. And so, I think a lot of, a lot of psychologists, they're just, you know, they're just understandably interested in very specific things like depression or schizophrenia or, you know, those types of issues. Um, and, you know, those are, obviously, those are important, very, very important issues.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  But I'm into these kind of broader questions, which I think have implications for those, for those issues. Um, so, but, but I do think a lot of people are like, well, you know, that's too fuzzy. Um, and it's, it's hard, it's hard to get at. But it is, I, I think it's a growing area, a growing area of interest. I think there are more and more people that are interested in psychology. And I think a lot of that is driven by an increased awareness that clearly humans want their lives to be meaningful. Um, we're not machines and we're not just, we're not just driven by money

• 3:26Speaker 00

  or practical security concerns, you know, like being, having shelter, um, having, you know, having food. Um, we want something, we want something more than that. I mean, the, the simplest, you know, example is like, you could think of it, what if you were like, you know, filthy rich? You had everything you wanted, like you had a mansion, you had a yacht, you had, you know, um, the access to the best medicine. Um, that wouldn't, you know, my guess is that would be pretty cool. But that wouldn't necessarily, um, be totally fulfilling. I mean, you, you might be bored, right? You might be like, well, what's the point of all this?

• 4:06Speaker 00

  And so, I think even if you control for all these kind of basic security needs that people have to feed themselves, to feel safe, we long for something, for something more, to have an impact on the world. And so, I think more and more people are realizing, realizing that's, that's actually a really important driver of human behavior.

• 4:28Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by meaning? How do you define it?

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's a really good question because there are different ways to define it. I mean, I think that the simplest way to define it is people's subjective sense that they they matter, that their lives have value, that they, you know, people, that they're significant, that they make a difference. So I think that that element of significance and mattering. But when you get into, you know, deeper into into the research, you can actually think about meaning at multiple levels. And so you can think about meaning at the level I just talked about, which is pretty high level. Like, I want to matter in the world. I want to make a difference. I want to be significant. But you can actually think about it and study it at a much lower cognitive level.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  And what I mean by that is part of meaning is just perceptual patterns, which is, you know, the visual world making sense. And so if you go into like a a modern art museum and you see like this crazy modern art, you know, this absurd art, right? And it doesn't, the whole point of a lot of it is to be like, this is not what you normally expect. These patterns violate your expectations. And there's something that is kind of cool about it, but also is a little bit jarring, right? It's a little bit like, well, those things aren't supposed to go together. And so, you know, and so that that kind of effect it has on us is is in part because our brain is about pattern, making sense of the world, about patterns. And we need patterns to, you know, if you didn't get up every day with a certain level of

• 5:59Speaker 00

  consistency that you know what's gonna happen, right? That you know roughly what the weather's gonna be like, how other people are gonna behave, then your life would be chaotic and you'd be stressed out, very, very anxious. So we're constantly trying to make sense of our reality. And so if you think about that low level of of meaning, of just the world making sense, you can even think of meaning as not even uniquely human, right? You can say, well, my dog has expectations for for the world making sense, right? My dog thinks that. In fact, my dog magically knows that it's six fifteen in the morning and it's time to get me up, regardless of what I want. And so.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  We're not the only organisms that need to make sense of our environment. But what happens is the more intelligent the organism is, the more high level that becomes. So we don't, as humans, because we can self-reflect, we can think about our own existence and what that means, and we can ask these big questions I was talking about. We don't want to just make sense of our physical environment, of the world around us. We want to make sense of our own lives. And so it's that ability to turn inward, to introspect about our existence, that makes meaning this higher level issue of, I don't just want the world to make sense, I want my life to make sense.

• 7:18Chris Williamson?

  Is that what you mean when you talk about cohesive meta-narratives?

• 7:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, if you, so you could think about the pattern perception thing, right? You can think about just the simpleness of like, I want the physical environment to make sense, but we live in a symbolic world as humans, right? Because we're smart. And so it's not just that I want to be able to walk around my city and there be some order to it physically, to the physical environment. I want there to be some order to the rules, the norms, the, you know, the customs, the traditions that we have. And so there's this, there is this cultural narrative, or what we often refer to as cultural worldviews, of that we think, that order our, order our lives and help us say, well, this is what we think of as good behavior. This is what we think of things we should aspire to do, things we should avoid doing.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  And so these, these cultural narratives are very important and they, they really add the parameters, you know, they add the structure, the scaffolding for our personal meaning system. Because how do I know what's meaningful or what it means to make a meaningful contribution to society? Well, a lot of that is derived from the, the cultural worldview that I, that I've adopted and the cultural world that I live in.

• 8:31Chris Williamson?

  What's the biological driver behind our search for meaning? Because it, like, if lacking meaning can be a huge cause of suffering to people, it doesn't seem very adaptive that an animal requires all this extra work to just be able to flourish. You said, like, the solution to your dog's problem is to make sure that he's up and out for his walk at 6:15. The solution to giving a human meaning is this huge question that's been wrestled with for millennia.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's, there's a lot of debate, a lot of debate around, around that question. So there, there is one theory, and I, I've done work in this theory. I don't, I don't do as much now as I used to, but there's this theory called terror management theory. And the argument according to terror management theory is that humans are uniquely aware of, of our mortality. Right? We're, we're the one species that fully understands what it means to live and die. And so as a result of our intelligence, I can look forward into the future. And that can be cool because I can imagine all sorts of great things that might happen. But that also renders me aware of the fact that no matter what I do, no matter how often I go to the gym,

• 9:42Speaker 00

  no matter how many, you know, healthy shakes I drink and go to the doctor and do everything I'm supposed to do, I'm still gonna die, right? And so according to terror management theory, that unique awareness of, um, that just kind of comes with being intelligent, right? It's not, you know, it doesn't, it's not for like a specific reason. It just comes with being intelligent that we're aware of our mortality.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Causes a unique anxiety for humans. Like every organism faces a certain level of anxiety related to the threat of death. But for other organisms like a rabbit, like it has this fight or flight response. There's a predator and it's like, it's got a very brief moment of terror. And then the threat goes away and it can go back to business. But humans, we can think about that, we can ruminate about that. And we understand that that threat is coming someday for us, no matter what. And so according to terror management theory, this, this unique intelligence comes with a great deal of anxiety. In other words, like with great intelligence comes the, the potential for great anxiety. And so according to that particular theory, what meaning really is, the function meaning serves

• 10:51Speaker 00

  is to help regulate that anxiety. So the response to, um, understanding that no matter what I do to take care of myself, I can't avoid death forever is to feel like, well, but part of me doesn't die. I'm not just a physical organism, I'm part of something bigger than myself. And obviously you can think about that. Quite literally, in terms of religious traditions that offer some hope for life after death. But even if you reject that, you can think of immortality as being symbolic, right? You can think that, well, as an individual organism, yeah, I'm gonna die, but I'm not just an individual organism. I'm part of a family. I'm part of a nation. I'm part of a culture.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  And to the extent that I can make contributions to that, yeah, I'm not real excited about dying. But I'm not just totally snuffed out, like part of me continues, continues on. So, you know, that, that's one, that's one theoretical perspective, that meaning is a response to the awareness of inevitable mortality. There's other theories that, that take that idea and say, okay, well, that's mortality is one threat. But there are other existential threats. It's not just like, I'm worried about dying, but I'm, you know, there's, there's threats like worried about being socially ostracized, like what if, what if I don't have anyone that cares about me?

• 12:21Speaker 00

  Loneliness is, you know, is a major concern. So fear of rejection, the fear of uncertainty, like not only am I gonna die, but I have no idea what that means, what's gonna happen, is there any, is that it? Is it gonna be painful? What about the people I leave behind? Are they gonna, you know, are they gonna be devastated? So, so other people have made the argument, well, there's a whole bunch of anxieties that are related to, to mortality and other potential existential threats. And so what meaning is, is a response to that. But in a lot of these theories, a way to, you know, to kind of maybe connect them all is to say, they're all about some type of threat regulation, right?

• 13:02Speaker 00

  That, that we face threats, things that make us anxious, things that make us scared, um, things that maybe demotivate us, because another, another response isn't just to be terrified, but to feel like, well, what's the point? Like, why should I work hard and do stuff to contribute to society when I'm gonna die? And then everyone's gonna forget about me anyway? And so the, the idea is to be an organism as intelligent as ours requires some kind of motivation beyond this, beyond the self, or to grapple with the transience.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Of the self. Um, there are other perspectives too. Um, you know, you could imagine it's similar to that regulatory thing, but you could imagine it without even thinking about the threat component. You could just imagine, well, you just need some kind of inspiration in life because life's difficult. And, and so if you get up every day and you're just kind of like focused on like the immediate, well, I'll just get food in my belly, then our civilization doesn't really flourish. You need people to want to create works of art. I mean, some of the, you know, some of the biggest contributions to, um, you know, to culture and to architecture and to religion, you know, have been projects that have transcended one individual's lifetime.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  So somebody might be working on something and be like, this might not even be completed when, you know, before I die, but I've made it, I, I, I'm part of that. So I think there's something about our ability to step outside of our physical selves that, um, that has been, you know, that's very, very adaptive, right? That has allowed us to say there are projects bigger than me. Um, and because if you just focus on like my, you know, if you're just like, I just have to focus on making sure I stay alive and maybe my kids, because you know, like, you know, my, you know, my gen- you know, genetic continuity, right? You know, I'm wired to protect my offspring. But there's just so many, so many challenges in, in, in society that require self-sacrifice, right?

• 15:04Speaker 00

  That require you to look beyond yourself and to have a vision well into the future. Say, well, you know, I want to, I want to care about making an impact. So from that perspective, I think you can imagine meaning as not just about protecting you from your anxieties, but inspiring people to, to, to, for, for big, for big goals and bringing people together for big goals. Um, so that's another theory. There are others, but you know, that kind of. I think that's kind of sums it up.

• 15:34Chris Williamson?

  It's pretty compelling, man. Like, life's hard. The desire to overcome suffering requires something more than just... If it wasn't for the fact that there is meaning or some sort of ability to transcend, all that you'd be doing is saying, "Well, I'll get past this suffering today so that I can get on to tomorrow's suffering tomorrow." That's not a very compelling argument.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:55Chris Williamson?

  That doesn't sound like a very fun life. So yeah, I understand. It's interesting that it's kind of like a defense mechanism, that it's there in a lot of these theories as a way to assist us with the inevitable vicissitudes of life, as opposed to enhancing life and making us better. And I think that probably that would be explained by the fact that we're built to be effective, not happy. It doesn't really matter whether we're that happy. All that matters is, do we survive and reproduce? And if you can be potentially sold some sort of transcendent lie by your own programming, that this thing that you're contributing, this podcast that you're recording, really does matter in the wider scheme of things,

• 16:39Chris Williamson?

  make sure that you keep going until you have children. This football team that you play for, really, you know, the religion that you attest to, all that sort of stuff. So yeah, I'm quite sort of seduced by the idea that it's a byproduct of being very clever, that you have humans that are super intelligent. Well, they are super intelligent compared with everyone else that's around. And a byproduct of that is this ability to consider our own death. And when you have that, you think, oh, maybe the intelligence is worthy of that. Maybe being intelligent is such an advantage that the fact that we have to deal with death is just a small price that we need to pay, but we still need to be able to compete with it. And the desire for meaning and...

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  And transcendence is one of those. Does, how does purpose relate to meaning? Is purpose part of this? What does it do?

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So certainly, among the researchers who study this, they consider purpose kind of a subcomponent of meaning, because like I said before, you can think of meaning at this very, very abstract level of things ranging from just a coherent environment to my life having direction. And that self-part, that my life having direction is often what people refer to as purpose. Like, so purpose is very goal, is a very goal-focused way of thinking about, about meaning. Like, I have a purpose. And in addition to that, you know, a new area that I've been, you know, that I've been working on with some colleagues to develop, and this is very, very new, very, very new research,

• 18:14Speaker 00

  is what we're referring to as existential agency. And it relates to purpose, but I, I, I think it's different in an important way. So purpose, you could say, is I've been given a purpose, right? Like, this is, you know, you can imagine purpose outside of your own decision-making, right? You could say, I'm, you know, my purpose in this world is to do X. Some people would say, no, I create my own purpose, but that's not inherent in the concept of purpose. Because you can have goal-driven behavior that you feel like you were, you were assigned. Like, you could say, my purpose, well, like you said a minute ago, my purpose is to reproduce, right?

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Existential agency is, you know, we define it as people's belief in their own ability to, to guide the meaning in their life, to have a meaningful life. So you could say, my life is meaningful because I have this religious belief that, you know, that says all, you know, all life is meaningful, and I've been given this purpose. But within that, you need some kind of draw, like, you need to feel like you have the ability to take action and to do things, not just be passively pushed around and to say, well, I guess this is my meaning, or I guess it's not my meaning. And so there seems to be this, this more self-regulatory dimension of meaning,

• 19:37Speaker 00

  and that's what we call existential agency. But it is connected to purpose.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  And people who, you know, like I said, this is very, very early work. But it seems like people who have a strong sense of existential agency, even if you control for how, you know, how meaningful they see their lives. It's the people who have a really strong sense of agency that are the most motivated. They're the most driven, they're the most resilient, and they're the most entrepreneurial, you know, so they're the most willing to take risks. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that they see themselves as responsible for their own meaning, right? They feel like when life feels meaningless, they can change it. They can do something about it. As opposed to people that, you know, maybe are just more like, "Well, I guess it just wasn't meant to be, and I'm not, you know,

• 20:30Speaker 00

  I can't do anything about this, or my meaning is really contingent on these other external forces." And so I think that that's, and I think that's a, part of the reason I wanted to to really start to figure that angle out was because I feel like we increasingly are living in a society, at least here in the, in, in the US, and I think this is the case more broadly in the Western world, where people are acting like you're not in control of anything, right? There's all this, you know, there's all these concerns about like systemic oppression and things like that, and you know, this isn't to take away from real structural challenges that people face.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  But the point being is, if we're only talking about those things that are, we think of as outside of people's controls, or neglecting the fact that humans have all this cognitive horsepower up here, regardless of what situation you were born into in life, and again, clearly there are privileges and advantages and differences between people. But regardless of that, there, there's something going on within the, within humans that gives us a great deal of cognitive freedom if we choose to act on it, right? So I could get up tomorrow and say, you know, "I've been kind of lazy every day, and, but this is gonna be the day that I, you know, I get my act together."

• 21:54Speaker 00

  And people do this all the time. You know, people set goals, all the, the people change their, for all the failure things we hear about, like barriers to things, people all the time absolutely take action based on goals that they set. And priorities that they make in order to take control over their lives. So I'm really interested in that agentic component of meaning.

• 22:18Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about why anyone ever gets seduced or finds it really sort of emotionally fulfilling to see those transformation photos of some guy, Ethan Suppley, one of my buddies, the guy that was in Remember the Titans and Donnie Darko, a bunch of, a bunch of films. And he lost like 350 pounds. Like he, he lost two humans off of himself. And the reason that people love that story is that you see someone that you thought was going down a particular path that had a meta narrative that they were attached to and they were on the rails, but through force of will and effort, they've managed to change their cart onto a different set of railway tracks and they've

• 23:01Chris Williamson?

  done that through their own agency. So I think that people intuitively are aware of this. It's, I think you're correct to say that the victimhood mentality that we're seeing at the moment, completely outsources existential agency. And if man can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, then your ability to interpret how the world is talking to you and how you are experiencing it is more than 50% of the battle. Now you have people that are in like terrible, terrible situations who are able to be relatively fulfilled and people that seemingly have everything, lottery winners that kill themselves. So, you know, your material situation is an influence,

• 23:45Chris Williamson?

  but it's not a determinant. You know, you would say maybe it predisposes, but it doesn't predetermine. So, yeah, I think that framing things in that way and allowing people to understand and encouraging them toward, look, take advantage, take control of the, of the direction that your life's going in. I think that's a smart area of research.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, thanks. No, you summed it up perfectly. I mean, and it doesn't even have to be, because people tend to think of, your example's a good one, and a dramatic one, but even little, even little things. So, you know, people do, you know, like you'll see research on like even just increasing the amount you walk every day. So, you know, even people who aren't like, "I'm gonna make some gigantic transformation", but it's a choice just to say, "You know what, I'm gonna take the stairs" instead of the elevator, or I guess you would say the lift, right? Like, I'm gonna, I lived in the UK for two years. You remember it. I think I remember the word still. Um, but there's lots of little things that people do every day.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  And even if, even if there are, you know, because again, you know, and you made this point and it's true, like even, even if you start out with certain vulnerabilities. So, let's say, let's, to use an example, think about like a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism. Right? Some people, just for whatever reason, um, can't handle drinking. A lot of us can. A lot of us have no problems just saying, you know, like, "I drink, you know, sometimes a lot, sometimes hardly at all, and I can turn it on and off at will, it's no big deal." Other people, they just, they can't crack the bottle. They really can't. But, what, so, so one, so the victimhood narrative, as you described it,

• 25:35Speaker 00

  which you see a lot is, "Well, alcohol abuse isn't really a choice, because it's a genetic disposition, and it's a disease, and it's, you know." Um, but, and, and so what's funny is the more we learn scientifically about that, the more people intuitively seem to think that, "Well, you have no control over it." But another way to look at it from an agency point of view is thanks to our scientific understanding of genetic vulnerabilities, you've just armed somebody with information. So now they can say, you know what, I know I'm the type of person that can't be at the pub, that can't have alcohol in the house.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  And those are choices to set up your life based on information that you now have. And so, you know, and it seems so obvious, but just that simple difference of looking at it from, oh, this is a genetic predisposition, I'm hopeless, to know, learning, learning about genetics actually gives me information about my personality, about my vulnerabilities, things, you know, things that tempt me, things that bring out the worst in me, things that, things that motivate me, what is it that inspires me to be at my best. Like, so the more you can learn about these things scientifically, those aren't like determinants. That doesn't mean like, you know, your life is just being, you're just being pushed around by these, by these external causes.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  They're information that can help you make choices to, you know, to live a better, a better life. So I actually think that as, as we learn more and more about, you know, you know, the science of the brain, that doesn't mean we're less in control. That's giving us more information about how to, how to regulate our own behavior. But my feeling is that's kind of a minority position in the modern day scholar, you know, Western scholarship. Instead, people just seem to think, well, here's another excuse, here's another reason why you're not, it's not your fault. And I'm like, well, no, here's more information that, that arms you with the, with the ability to make better choices.

• 27:43Chris Williamson?

  The presumption that knowing more about the way that you operate forces you into a tunnel, I think has got everything backward. Does this Ken P. Rinpoche quote, where he says, "The choice in life is between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of being ruled by them?"

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 28:03Chris Williamson?

  You're like, look.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  That's a great quote.

• 28:05Chris Williamson?

  There it is. Like, look, this is going to happen whether or not you want to know about it. Like, your genetics are your genetics. If you decide to read Robert Pluman's blueprint or not, it's still, they're still there for you. They're still controlling your behavior. So do you want to become aware of them or do you not? And then do you want to, do you want to take control of them or not? Because you can either be at the mercy of them, or you can try and account for them. And that's really, that's really all that we've, all that we've got. What about, um, what is some of the predictors? What are the biggest predictors of having meaning in life?

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the, the, the biggest one, okay, well, let me say it this way. If you ask people what gives their life meaning, which is some research we've done. And we've asked, we've asked people who are, we've asked people who are religious, who aren't religious, of different ages, of different, you know, belong to different groups. Overwhelmingly, everyone says relationships, like family and friends. So meaning appears to be very, very social. So that, that's a first, that's, that's one piece of information that's important. Now, what I think the mistake that sometimes people make is they turn that into, oh, so meaning is just about being liked and being included.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Well, no, I don't think that's, that's what it is. What it means is meaning, what it really is, is if you look deeper, meaning is about mattering to other people. And, you know, getting back to the idea of, you know, you're talking about how we evolved and, you know, ways of thinking about it from a more perhaps evolutionary point of view. If humans are a tribal species, and if you look back, you know, certainly in the modern world, we have lots of advantages, you know, advances now that kind of allow, we still need people, but you can, I can like pay somebody to mow my lawn or. You know, we can, through trade, we can make all sorts of arrangements, even if no one likes me.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  But if you look back, you know, in our ancient past, and when life is more dangerous and we lived in small groups, then it was really important for you to have a role, right? For you to be like, you know, here's what you're good at. Here's how, you know, here's how you matter. And so it is social because you have to, you know, you don't, the tree or a rock or the ocean doesn't care about you, doesn't care about you. Other people care. And the reason other people care is, in addition to like, we're kind of naturally social, is we need each other. And so it really, it's that feeling of like, my family and friends need me. And so I often use this example, and it's silly, but I think it illustrates it pretty cleanly,

• 30:45Speaker 00

  which is imagine a situation in which you're part of a team. This can be a work team, or you know, any kind of group you're part of. And everyone in your team is really, really nice to you. Very inclusive, never says anything bad. You're great. Everyone thinks Chris is wonderful, right? But when it comes time to actually, for the team to do something, you're like, okay, well, what's my role? What am I gonna do? Imagine if your teammates were like, oh, well, we don't need you to do anything. You're just, we just love you, Chris, you're great. You just show out, you're fine. We don't need you to do anything. Now, that situation doesn't sound very meaningful. It sounds like people are being nice to you, but you're sitting there thinking,

• 31:26Speaker 00

  well, why am I like a loser? Like, I can't, you know, I don't have anything to contribute? Now, in real life, you know, the other situation, oftentimes our relationships are a little bit more messy, right? They're not, everyone's nice to you all the time, because we have all sorts of motives and vulnerabilities and insecurities and, you know, conflicts and things like that. But what matters for you to, you know, to feel socially valued is that your team actually needs you to do something, right? That Chris is good at X, or, you know, Chris can deliver on this. And so it's not, another way of thinking about it, it's not just being liked. It's serving an important function.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  And it's easy for us to see, or it's often easier for us to see that with, we care about it more with our close family and friends, because those are the people we matter to. Those are the people that count on us. And so this connects to something that I'm actually... Think might be a growing concern, you know, in our societies is you have people, you have this, you know, supposed loneliness epidemic that people talk about. But the funny thing about loneliness is you can, and this has been documented in, you know, some of the early research on loneliness is people can actually feel lonely even when they're surrounded by others. So you could get up every day, you could have a roommate, you could have coworkers, you could have schoolmates

• 32:51Speaker 00

  around you all the time, but you still feel lonely. And how's that possible? Well, it's because you don't really feel like you matter. You feel like you're, in fact, people who have been ostracized, they often, if you just ask them to describe the experience of ostracism, what they'll say is it feels like they're invisible. And in a way, it's been described by, you know, by researchers as ostracism is like social death. It's an existential threat, like we were talking about before. You're still physically alive, but you're invisible. You don't matter. And so the biggest predictor of meaning is really mattering. It's like, it's like, it's a social thing. You have to, you matter to people.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  But it's more than just people being nice to you. And I think that's important because imagine a lot of our, imagine some of the things we care about, like in schools and education, where anti-bullying and, you know, all these, you know, these, these campaigns for, for kids to be nice to each other, not to be cruel, which, you know, that's great. Obviously, we don't want people being cruel to each other. But people need, even children, they need to feel like, not just that people are being nice to them, but that they have a significant role to play in the group, that they, that their contributions matter. So we could have a very, very polite and kind society that's superficially social.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  But a deeper, you know, I would rather you yell at me, Chris. I'd rather you and I have a conflict, but it's because we're, we're, we're both doing something important. And we realize that sometimes important things come out of challenge, adversity, as opposed to, well, we're never going to say anything mean to each other. And we're always going to just be really, you know, kind because we don't want the one's feelings to be hurt. And, you know, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but, you know, to the extent that we go in that direction. Let's not, you know, let's just make sure everyone feels safe and comfort and, and, and, and love. Um, if it's, if it's at the cost of people actually having something to do to make a difference in society.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Um, then that's a, you know, that's a, I think that's a worrying trend.

• 35:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, this sort of, what would you say, like dictatorial meaning? It's like bureaucratically bestowed top down. Like, that's not, that's not a thing. I mean, we saw this last year with, um, the Black Lives Matter Black Square. So if you didn't post the Black Square.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:28Chris Williamson?

  There was, there was something implied around what that meant. And people were much happier to see somebody be coerced into posting something they didn't believe. They would have, they would have been more comfortable with a comforting lie than an uncomfortable truth. Or even just nothing, let alone truth, like, truth sounds like people were, would have been going against it. It's like, I, I just didn't post it, but that wouldn't have been enough. And I, I think that, yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting to think about how meaning relates to the social side of things. Does that mean that, does that mean that meaning in isolation kind of doesn't exist?

• 36:12Chris Williamson?

  If you're an isolated individual?

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, that's a good, I, I think that's a good way of thinking about it because why do we care about anything? Um, and if you were the, so if you were the, if you were the last person uh, on earth, right, if you were the last person on the planet, then it, yeah, it probably would, unless you felt like you had some way of rebooting the species, right, it would, you know, you probably would feel very meaningless, right? Like, what's, what's the point? In fact, this is one of the, um, I think this is actually an issue that people who are concerned about things like climate change should pay a little bit closer attention to because if you want to motivate

• 36:57Speaker 00

  young people to make the world a better place, it's not a good strategy to take this apocalyptic worldview of, well, we only have, I don't know, it depends on what week it is, how many years we have left, but you've probably heard all this before, like this, this total apocalyptic, you know, you know, terror of, well, what's the point? Like, we're all, we're just, it's too late. And you see that kind of wrapped up with the antinatalism, right? There's no point, you know, we should just quit reproducing, humans, we're a mistake, we're destroying the earth, and it's not going to be inhabitable in 50 years, or 20 years, or 100 years. Well,

• 37:38Speaker 00

  that's a very demoralizing position to take. That's not going to inspire people to make any sacrifices. In fact, if anything, it might have the opposite effect, which is it might make people more hedonistic, and more greedy and selfish, because if you're like, well, there's, you know, there's no point, there's no future, you might as well go out with a party, right? So you might as well just, you know, be like, well, I'm just gonna look after myself and enjoy my life. But if you think there's some kind of challenge or threat coming in the future, but one that's, you know, that we can manage, and through science and engineering and, you know, you know, other types of, you know, goal-directed behavior,

• 38:23Speaker 00

  then you're more likely to get people to, you know, to say, okay, well, you know, there's things I would like to do, but I'm not gonna do this because I'm serving, you know, I'm serving this, this higher good. But I see a lot of, and there definitely are, I mean, if you look at like techno, if you look at innovation and entrepreneurship, and certainly in the business world, I think there are a lot of people, and a lot of companies, and a lot, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs, they're trying to come up with new types of technology, cleaner energy, ways of just, kind of calibrating our life to manage.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  The fact that, you know, there, there, there might be changes in our, in the climate, right? And not being like insane about it, but just saying, hey, this is a challenge and humans, we're clever. We've overcome challenges before. We can do this. There are people doing that, but then you see this and, you know, they're just doing it, I think, and, you know, and largely in the business world. But then you see like these activists that are, not all of them, I mean, I'm, I'm not trying to, you know, over generalize, but that do have this more very like nihilistic, apocalyptic view. And I mean, I guess I just don't know what the purpose of that is.

• 39:41Chris Williamson?

  I think, I think the reason that people are doing that is they, they presume that because if they overshoot the severity, or if they give it the, the most grand seeming level of significance that they can, that maybe this is going to motivate people into doing it. But it sounds like what you're saying is that's based on a misjudged view of how human motivation works.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. No, you're right. I, I think so big time. I mean, you just, people have to have a, people have to feel like there's, there's a reason to try. And, and it, so you could, I know that some people have argued that this apocalyptic environmentalism is like a meaning system. Like they're doing it because it's like gives their life, life meaning. But this gets to, I think, the question of, well, not all meaning worldview, existential related worldviews are, are the same, right? Apocalyptic ones that act like, well, you're, you're the last one, you know, you're, you're the righteous, you know, chosen few, which some of this does have like a fundamentalist

• 40:47Speaker 00

  fervor, you know, again, not all of it, but some of it definitely does. Well, that might make somebody feel somehow like they're part of some group and that's meaningful. But it's not really a solution focused, a future focused source of meaning. And so I would say that all, all meaning projects aren't created equally and it's healthier, not just for individuals, because obviously like people are, I mean, there are people, I mean, some people I think are being over the top, but I do think there are people that are legitimately like. Completely terrified. And they're very, very anxious and they're mentally not healthy. And that's not, that's not really a way for them to live and it's not really helping.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  In fact, it's hurting for, you know, for, you know, because it's it's de-motivating the people who would care and it's making other people feel like this is, you know, these people are just being ridiculous. They have nothing to offer. And maybe they do have something to offer because like you said, maybe they're overshooting. Maybe they just throttled back a little bit and said, okay, well, here are some things that we can do. Can we come together as reasonable people and, you know, and try to moderate our behavior in some way? Or come up with some new innovations and technological innovations that can, you know, that can help us take this, take this problem on.

• 42:10Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the most robust ways that people can actually add meaning to their life then?

• 42:16Speaker 00

  So I think what, you know, the, one of the best ways you can do it, or one of the things, again, this gets back to the social element of meaning. It seems like the more people feel like they're giving, they're looking beyond the self and helping others, the more they feel meaning. So pro-social behavior, so helping, you know, taking care of family, helping out, you know, in your community, working on, you know, not every job. Here, here's another, here's another thing that I think is interesting is that we often think about like, well, your work, you know, we talk about a lot and, you know,

• 42:56Speaker 00

  I'm in a department of management in a business college and we talk a lot about meaningful work. And I think that one misunderstanding about meaningful work is, is people think, well, I have to feel like every day when I go to work that what I'm, that tasks I'm doing feel meaningful. But a lot of times at the lower level, what we're doing doesn't feel that meaningful. It's just boring stuff.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  But so what people, what helps people actually have meaning is if they can attach it to something higher, what we call higher order goals. So, you know, this is, you know, to use a, an example from like physical training. If you're training to run a marathon, like, and if you're, if you had the goal of like this higher order goal of training to run a marathon, that feels like a pretty, pretty big accomplishment, right? Um, but that goal is actually made up of a bunch of sub-goals, right? And those sub-goals are things like train, you know, going on, you know, increasing the distance I run, you know, fluctuating on, you know,

• 44:03Speaker 00

  coming up with a training schedule, increasing my caloric intake, eating the right types of foods and things like that. So those, but that's not like, that's, doesn't sound super meaningful. Um, like if I'm, say, like writing a book, that sounds pretty cool, right? But that's made up of things as low as typing words on a keyboard. That doesn't sound particularly meaningful, right? That sounds kind of boring. And so I think one of the things that people need to be able to do to really achieve meaning is to be able to attach even their mundane, kind of ordinary, day-to-day grind to bigger, longer-term projects and goals.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Especially ones that are oriented towards serving others, serving your community, helping, you know, helping build something beyond yourself. And this is why it's good for organizations, this is helpful because it's good for organizations to think about that. Their employees don't need to feel like entertained all day long and need to feel like everything's, you know, the big epic thing. But it helps if you feel like what you're doing, even if it's small, even if it's just, you know, cleaning it, cleaning an office, that that's actually, you're a meaningful member of the organization. You're part of a team that's working towards a mission, a certain cause, or, you know, some purpose. And you play a significant role in that. And sometimes those things are going to feel, you know, inspiring and interesting.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  And sometimes they're just going to be like mundane chores that we have to do. Um, so I think that's, that's important. And again, a lot of those things are about, are about relationships. They're about like feeding my family. Um, so again, a job might not be exciting, it might be boring, but where people might get meaning from that job is, is not the particular duty, but the sense of like, I'm taking care of people, like I'm doing something, I'm putting food on the table. And I think that's, um, that, that's really important.

• 46:01Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me like a lot of these questions had already been answered by religion and tradition.

• 46:10Chris Williamson?

  Am I wrong there? Like, is it, it seems to me, have a community that you feel like you're contributing to, have a local group of people that know who you are and that you have a role within it, build a family, have a job, you know, a lot of this, a lot of this was probably already fixed.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Right. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, there's tons of things that we do and, you know, and this is picking on myself a little bit because I'm obviously a modern empirical psychologist. There's tons of things that we do that are just rediscovering like old wisdom. You know, I was listening to a podcast a while back and, you know, they were, they were, you know, they were talking about this idea of, well, what if you took a portion, a percentage of your salary? And don't, you know, it's like they were rediscovering the concept of tithing, right? It's like, it's like, and then they settled on, well, what if it was like 10%? Like this whole idea of like altruistic giving. And it's like, again, not to, you know,

• 47:10Speaker 00

  not to take away from, from those rediscoveries, but it's like, yeah, those are, you're right. Those are old ideas. I mean, a long time ago, you know, people came up with, you know, figured these things out. A lot of this is rediscovering old, old wisdom, I think. But, you know, getting back to an issue that you raised about culture. I mean, I think in any given time, a society, a culture has to make things like speak in their modern way. So now, you know, we care a lot about science, right? We want things to be empirically tested. We, you know, that, that seems to be the guiding cultural narrative of the, of the modern West.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  So in other words, we might be, we might be like revisiting old ideas, but we're scrutinizing, I'm using new techniques and tools.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Of science and then we're putting our own, our own spin, you know, kind of our own spin on them. And so I do think, you know, rediscovering these things is just part of, you know, part of culture. Looking back and seeing like, well, what worked and what didn't. And then, you know, you, cultures forget, right? They rediscover things because they forget because, you know, it's easy to, to go in one direction and think, oh, this is really cool. This is the way we should go. And then for things to get stress tested a little bit and then be like, you know what? Like, we should get back to, back to this way of thinking. That actually connects to another area of research I do and, and existential psychology that's focused on nostalgia. Actually that, I don't know if that's something you want to talk about.

• 48:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's it about? Also, it makes me think about a Shane Parrish quote where he says, "The wives of every generation discover the same truths."

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's a good, that's a good quote.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I, you know, I do research on nostalgia and typically when people think about nostalgia, they just think of like silly marketing.

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  Sports memorabilia.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Sports memorabilia or, you know, vintage clothing, old music, things like that. Um, well, it turns out what a, a big aspect of nostalgia that, that's existentially helpful is nostalgia really is about the memories that we cherish, the things that we find meaningful. And often they are connected to these, these things that seem kind of silly, like, um, like sports memorabilia and old movies and music and things like that. But those connections are usually because, um, that was, that was, those objects or experiences are connected to memories, you know, to, to specific times in our life that something seemed really important.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  And so nostalgia seems to be, or a big part of nostalgia seems to be people's ability to reach into the past, to, to find the lessons. That helped them move forward. So for instance, you might be really busy right now. You got lots of stuff going on with, you know, with your career, with, you know, other things. And, and it's easy to forget like how important relationships are. Time goes by really fast. It's, it's easy, you know, you often hear these anecdotes of older people saying, wow, like looking back, I wish I would have spent more time with my kids or, you know, doing, focusing on this. I was so worried about it being successful at work or accumulating money or whatever. And they look back on these things.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  What nostalgia does is it kind of helps, it helps direct you because you're like, oh yeah, these are really, this was really important memories that I have. And I'd like to have stuff like that again. And so it's, it's kind of like a priority check.

• 50:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So you use the past as a forecasting tool to project the future.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Right. And the what, and the things that you want to spend your limited, you know, time and energy on. And so in a lot of ways, I actually think nostalgia is a very future, is a future oriented experience because it's reminding you of what you care about. Even like the silliest example of going on holiday where you're like, you know, oh, that was a really cool trip. And then you kind of forget about it. And then maybe 10 years later, you're like, oh, I haven't done that in a long time. And that was awesome. Like, I really need to make that, something like that happen again. And so it does have this kind of guiding effect. And the reason I brought that up in, in response to the rediscovering old truths is nostalgia

• 51:38Speaker 00

  is, there is this intergenerational component to it too, where we're passing down traditions and religions across time. And so there is this, this, this aspect of nostalgia that is, I think, encapsulating some of these old ideas, especially around the importance of, like you said, community, having a community, having a family, focusing on those things. A lot of nostalgic memories are, are very much about rites of passage, important family in religious traditions and things like that.

• 52:11Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered what happens if we're now kind of fighting the tide as humans? Like if trying to create some sort of cohesive meta-narrative that ties everything together is essentially impossible? Like what if our brains are overclocked for what we need and the clash between what we need and what we've dispensed with as we developed as a culture and created science has just left us in this sort of uncanny valley? We can't go back. For most people, I think it's more than 50% of America now describes themselves as non-religious in one form or another.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:46Chris Williamson?

  So we can't really go back to that sort of a situation. We're now praying at the altar of science and rationality. But it would appear, I think I've seen you quote about some global trends over time with regards to meaning, that there is a little bit of a meaning crisis at the moment. What if we're just stuck in this sort of U-bend?

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Well, I'm by nature an optimist.

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'll balance you out quite nicely in that case, Clay.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's good. And we need both sides, right? So I think, I think one thing that that is possible, and it relates, again, it connects to that idea of rediscovering ancient wisdom, is that, yes, we are in a, we are in an unprecedented time, especially with technology and the way it connects us, that I don't just live in a little community and, you know, I'm worried about, you know, I'm worried about being liked and successful and everything within my little group. Like, I can get online and see what other people are doing all over the world.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  And now we just have, we're just bombarded with so much information. And even with the, even with the supposed rise of science and rationality, and the reason I say supposed is because people often talk about things using scientific jargon and, you know, using words that sound rational, but really they're just expressing their feelings and their intuitions and their beliefs, and they're just decorating them with scientific terminology. But I do think it, because I do think you're right, it relates to the fact that science has become like, almost like a religious... Like movement, even though really it's a methodology, right? It's a, it's a set of tools used to interrogate nature in reality.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  But people have turned it into this, um, this bigger i- identity. But our brains haven't changed, right? We still have the brains we had for the way things used to be long before the, the, long before the, the Western Enlightenment, long before modern technology and our interconnected world. But what I think is possible is that, well, you know, we'll figure it out. Like, well, well, you know, we'll learn to, you know, again, maybe through science ironically. We'll learn that, well, you know what? It's not science and ration, empiricism isn't enough. There's something, magical's not the right word because there is a neurological explanation,

• 55:26Speaker 00

  but there's something that feels magical about the human experience that can't be just summed up by being, acting like we're robots or like we're, um, what's, I don't know if you're a Star Trek fan, um, um, you know, there's like Data, the, he's the robot.

• 55:45Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Or the Vulcans, they're, they're not, I mean, they're, they're human-like, but they supposedly, you know, um, suppress their emotions and, but we're not like that, right? We, the things that give us meaning in life, that's, this is another element of meaning is there's a cognitive component of meaning. The things that give us meaning are intuitive, then that is, feels meaningful. So if you go out in nature and you have an experience that induces awe, um, that's an intuition, that's a feeling, nothing, you know? If you are listening to music and you just let the music move through, if you're not a music critic who's putting on your empirical brain to, to, you know, to scrutinize, you know, every element of it, you're just in the experience.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  So meaning is very experiential and yeah, there is a, you know, there's a crisis now and yes, religion's in decline, um, but I'm actually not as convinced as, as some people that it won't come back, not as it was before.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  But as the, that people won't figure out that there is some aspect of the human condition that is spiritual. And that that is something that people, that really makes life fulfilling. And I do think that we're especially bad at this in, in the West. I mean, if you go to, um, you know, more, um, like in East Asia, you know, yeah, there's a lot of, um, there is a lot of like non-religious people, um, but there is more of a sense of, it's not weird to kind of be dualistic about these things. You can be a scientist and be spiritual.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  Like, there seems to be something about the individualistic West that's more like, well, you have to be one or the other, right? Like, you have to, um, you're either committed to the project of science and reason, or you're like some kind of weird hippie spiritualist or religious fundamentalist. And, um, and a lot of the world, it's not, um, you know, some of the, some of the, you know, most successful scientists are religious. And so I do think that there, I think maybe we'll kind of figure out like a more holistic path back to, you know, there, there is something about, we, we do need to nurture our spiritual side.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  And that's not hippie or weird or mad mystical or, you know, that's just part of the human condition. And a lot of the cool things that we do that are, you know, artistic and inspiring, um, very much tap into that side of our, you know, those dimensions of our, of our brain. And so, you know, I think, I'd like to think we'll, we'll figure it out.

• 58:36Chris Williamson?

  I have a couple of buddies that call themselves cultural Christians. So they, they don't necessarily ascribe to sort of the, the higher powers and stuff like that, but they really enjoy the experiential side. They like going to church. They like sitting down. They like being able to contribute to the community and doing stuff for whatever it is, autumn farm giving and, you know, all, all of that. And to be honest, the more and more that I've thought about it, especially this year, that really, really sounds quite appealing to me. I'm asking, I'm going to try and get myself to go at some point and say, look, man, like I, I'd love to go along and, and see what this is like. You said that.

• 59:18Chris Williamson?

  A part of human nature is inherently spiritual. What do you mean by that?

• 59:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, when I say that, I mean, I mean, you can, you can think of that in a totally materialistic paradigm, I think. So, because a lot of times when people say spiritual, what they're, what they're, they mean that there's something beyond the biological, something beyond, you know, the laws of physics. And I'm not saying there isn't or is, I'm as an, you know, as a scientist, that's beyond my scope of inquiry, right? Like, I can only study things that, you know, are bound by the laws of nature. I'm not a theologian, or, you know, right? But that doesn't mean that there isn't, experientially, there isn't something

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  spiritual. And I can be agnostic about, you know, that can be someone else's problem, whether there's something beyond the material. But within our, housed within our brain, right? The cognitive processes that drive human behavior, very materialistically, involve intuitive cognitions, right? We have, and you can study this in brain studies, right? You can look at, if you, there's different brain activity going on when people are like, focused on using rational thinking to solve a math problem, than when they're just using their emotions and their intuitions, right? These, in fact, there's an argument that these

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  things are antagon, these processes are antagonistic to one another. And what I mean by that is that it's very difficult, if not impossible, to simultaneously do both. And so you can either use your math, like, you know, you can either be solving, you know, logic problems, or you can be feeling and experiencing something. And you can switch between the two, but you can't do, that they're, that they're actually antagonistic to each other. You can't do them at the same time. And so, in other words, like, you can put on your intuition hat and say, you know what, I'm not scrutinizing, I'm not trying to, like, tear this apart logically, I'm just experiencing it. And then you can put on your science hat, and your, you know,

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  your rational hat, and say, like, well, this happens to be the type of decision that really needs to be informed by evidence and reason. And I think people... Do this all the time without knowing it. And it's a classic example of like the religious scientist, right? So somebody can go to church on Sunday and say, "Well, in this particular space, I'm not a scientist, right? Like, this is an experiential space where I'm having a spiritual encounter. That's about ritual, it's about community, it's about, you know, like a leap of faith, like letting go a little bit. It's like a humility. I don't know everything.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  There's something, you know, maybe there's something beyond my, you know, my ability to know, you know, everything empirically and just to have that experience. And then you can, Monday morning, you can go to your laboratory and be like, "There's no space for any of that kind of stuff here." Like, everything has to be extremely methodical and empirical. And I think people do that all the time, not just with the religion, but we do that with the relationships. Like, people would probably think you were weird if, when you, you know, if you have a significant other, and that every day you were like checking a checklist of, "Here's the things, you know, here's the pros and cons of this relationship," and you were just making constant like empirical evaluations.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  And then you were told to your spouse, "Well, here's the 10 things that you suggest I should like you, and there's only eight that suggest I shouldn't, so I guess on the whole, I love you." Like, no, you don't do that. It's a feeling, right? You, love is an intuition, it's a feeling. And not that it's not influenced by empirical data gathering, but when you experience it, like, you'd be weird if you took that methodical approach. You probably would be single pretty quickly. So we do this all the time, right? Where we switch between...

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  Just throwing caution to the wind, taking a leaf of faith, like trusting our intuitions and having, you know, having experiences versus now's the time to really marshal all my rational capacities because I need to make an informed decision. Does that make sense?

• 1:03:46Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. Do you think that at the moment we're seeing people be too reliant on cerebral horsepower and not enough on this sort of embodied intuition?

• 1:03:54Speaker 00

  I mean, I think it, well, I certainly think people think they're more reliant on it than they are. And this gets to, you know, issues that, you know, of, I think, maybe group think and bias. And I think there's a lot of, certainly in my world, you know, I'm an academic. I think there's a lot of people and especially in the behavioral and social sciences, but in the physical sciences as well, who act like because they have this role of scientist, that they're just wholly empirical and all the time, right? That this

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  is, as opposed to, well, no, in this one specific area of work that you do, hopefully a good portion of the time, you're able to kind of overwhelm your biases and your intuitions and you're able to rely on the tools, the objective tools of science to do that. But you're not doing that all the time, right? You're, and, but I think people are, so I think people are overconfident that they're, that they're using these tools and, and because we have this culture that's acting like that's everything. Like you're an idiot if all your decisions aren't guided by science. But I think a lot of that is actually just, it's

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  just a narrative. It's just a story. It's like a lot of things that people do are not guided by evidence. They're guided by, you know, experience. They're guided by habit. They're guided by personality. They're guided by intuitions. And it's not the case that people aren't, are making, you know, aren't making choices, but this notion that every single choice that they're making is, is based somehow on a rigorous interrogation of evidence.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  You, I don't think you just make it very far in life. If you, you'd be paralyzed by, by, by indecision. And there are some things that really it's just, they don't, it doesn't matter. Like it just should be like, well, this is what I wanna, you know, this is what I wanna do. And this is what I'm into and, and that should be, and that should be fine. Um, so yeah, I think maybe if we did a better job of, like I said, hopefully we can get back to this. If we did a better job of carving out a space where we said, you know, there's a lot of life that is just, um, us trying to figure it out and explore ideas and have experiences. And you know, you talked about this with the, with the, the kind of totalitarian, like everyone needs to have the right,

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  show the right, do the right virtue signaling and show the right response. It's like if we just had more tolerance for, like people have, you know, people are into different things and they have different opinions. And they're not all like driven by like, this is the, you know, the science says this right now. And if you all don't fall in line, then what, you know, what kind of idiots are you? But a lot of it's just more messy than that. So I know people are figuring things out and they have different, they're legitimately subjective opinions that, you know, that there's not a single right answer, right? It depends on what people care about and what, you know, what risks they're willing to take. And so I think we could, you know, I would like to see us get to more of that.

• 1:07:10Speaker 00

  And I, I think a recognition of our, you know, of our spiritual or intuitive side would go a long way in helping us get beyond this. Like everything is just cold calculations. And if you're not making the right ones, then you're an idiot. Because honestly, I think a lot of people, you know, even the people that claim to be doing that, I think a lot of the times they're just not. They're just as biased and intuitive as everyone else.

• 1:07:34Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I think that. The most interesting thing, and one of the most interesting things is the implication that this has for people's confidence in their own word. Because if you think that the standards, the rigorous scientific rationality standards, where you need to know the name of every cognitive bias before you can set foot into the world, you're inevitably going to question yourself so much more because you understand there's this big chasm between where you're operating at and where you feel like you should be operating. Like, if I haven't imbibed the entire rationalist movement and I like be able to recite it word for word, then always I'm going to be making a lot of mistakes in my life. Whereas if you look

• 1:08:16Chris Williamson?

  at, you know, some of the simplest people that you know, your friend that's just really, really happy being a young dad, or your friend that's just really, really happy being a carpenter, whatever, he's like, you know, I've got friends that are DJs and they don't think really too much about higher meaning. They really love the job that they do. They love playing music. They love making people happy and that's it. And they live this sort of party boy lifestyle and they're having a great time. And then reinventing this and the, yeah, the comeuppance of the scientific movement has been that when people on an individual level have taken this in, they've thought, right, well, I need to be able to justify to myself rationally, scientifically, all of the different actions that I'm going to take. And you go, well, how do you think

• 1:08:58Chris Williamson?

  we got here? For like thousands and thousands of years, people weren't able to do this. And I understand that if there is a best way, if there's an optimal strategy for achieving anything, then trying to get closer to that should result in you operating more efficiently. But not if the chasing of that efficiency causes you to suffer so much during the chase that it completely negates any of the gains that you're going to get in any case. And this is, this is the virtuous mean, right? It's, I want to know the things that I want to know, but I need to also be aware of the fact that I'm fallible and I'm this weird phenomenological creature that's just going to feel things and just kind of have faith in my, in my embodied self. And this is, yeah, this is something that I think when you dispense with religion,

• 1:09:44Chris Williamson?

  There's no, there's nothing for people to fall back on. They can't just have faith in the fact that they're doing things right and God will step in if I'm doing it wrong. There isn't any higher power. The cold, harsh, gray truth of rationality is that existential agency is purely mine to find, to create. It's my inertia to overcome. It's my momentum to maintain. And if I don't do it, then, oh my God, maybe my life's not worth anything. And that's where we end up.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's an interesting point. I mean, and to be clear, that, you know, obviously, science and rationality have dramatically improved our lives. But, and we all can, we all can contribute to that. But that brings up the point of, it's not, science is not an individual accomplishment, right? Science is a set of tools that people can add to their toolkit of how to do things. But it's just part of the, it's just part of the, part of the story and part of the solution. So I think you're right. Like, you have to have, or it helps

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  to have these, to embrace the fact that there are other aspects of the human condition that aren't purely empirical and that aren't purely scientific. And oftentimes, those are the things that make life worth living. And it doesn't mean, it's not like a black and white. It doesn't mean like we should reject science. I mean, I think we're very, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation over the internet, you know, thousands of miles apart, if it wasn't for advances in science and technology. And so I think you can simultaneously appreciate that and champion that, and also recognize that that's just part of the, part of the picture.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  There's a fuller picture, and one that involves, you know, the head versus heart metaphor is a good example. It's like, we need both, right? The head, you know, this is a metaphor, obviously, because all of our feelings and stuff come out of our brain too. But people naturally understand this metaphor. They say, "Follow your heart," or, you know, "Use your head, follow your heart," kind of, this kind of metaphor. So, we, you know, it's worth recognizing that both are important. The heart makes life worth living, you know? It makes science worth pursuing, right? It makes, the heart is what makes you say, "You know what? I want to cure diseases. I want to make the world more comfortable for people."

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  But if it's just focused on, you know, if you're just entirely focused on science and not the value that it, that it provides to making actual people's lives better, then I do think you lose something. And again, I just think a lot of people, they have this identity, like it's an identity, like, "I'm a science person." And I, I, I think it would be helpful if we got away from that. It's like, no, you know, like, it's not, it's not a defining characteristic, like, it's a job. And science is a set of tools. It's a methodology that we use to interrogate nature and reality.

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  It's not, it's not like a personal identity that, you know, that, that just makes every decision you, you've ever made rational. It's just part of what, it's just part of what, it's part of the toolkit of what we do to, to advance human progress and to, you know, to make life better.

• 1:13:13Chris Williamson?

  Clay Routledge, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for coming on, man. Where should people go if they want to check out more of your stuff?

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  Well, I have a website, that's just clayroutledge.com. They can check there. I'm on Twitter, I think it's just @clayrutledge. Yeah, those are probably the best, the best places.

• 1:13:33Chris Williamson?

  Thanks very much for today.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  Thank you. It's great to have this conversation with you.