Most Replayed Moment: Christian vs Atheist - Is Faith A Human Creation?

Do we find meaning in life - or do we have to create it ourselves? Join three guests in a meaning discussion: Greg Koukl, a Christian apologist and founder of Stand to Reason, Alex O’Connor, philosopher, writer, and host of the Cosmic Skeptic channel, and Dr K, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, mental health educator, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. In this moment, they explore what happens when faith, philosophy and psychology attempt to answer the same question. From our fear of death to the need for control and something bigger than ourselves, this discussion reveals some unexpected forces that may be shaping how meaningful our lives feel. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/p43YVx5X95b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/D5jelW9X95b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 00

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• 1:08Speaker 00

  Theistic, what does that mean?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  A personal god.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  A god.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  There is a personal god who is involved with the world. He made the world and he still maintains activity. As opposed to deistic, which just wound up the clock and let it go. Okay. So my view is God is still involved. In fact, so involved that he actually came to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to create a rescue plan. Now, what's interesting to me about this broader question, we can get into more details too, is that it's not, if there is a God who made the world for a purpose with meaning, people can participate in that meaning and purpose, even if they don't know God. They're not, they won't be experiencing what they were made for, which is to be in friendship with him, with the plan that he's made for their flourishing.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  But they still can flourish in some measure insofar as they touch on these objective features. But insofar as we are able, even without belief in God, to kind of get in that groove of the things that God made us for, the purposes that he intends, in light of being made like him in some way in his image, there's going to be a measure of satisfaction. But what they'll be missing is, is the ultimate. And that is that friendship with God and being restored in that.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Alex.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Same question for you about your, what you bring to this conversation in terms of your perspective, your experience and maybe some of your sort of personal journey.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Well, for, for my own part, I was quite swept up in the new atheism movement, which was a mid 2000s publishing phenomenon with the likes of the Dawkins and the Hitchens of the world, saying that religion is evil and terrible. And I think promising an alternative, a kind of secular humanist utopia, that if you'll only throw off these oppressive religious systems, you will regain your spiritual autonomy and be able to assert yourself and the intrinsic meaning that you have within yourself. People tried that and it didn't seem to work. And I think that's because the new atheist movement was quite philosophically shallow. It didn't seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  And I think that is why it exists. I think humans are in a strange predicament due to the mystery of consciousness. We find ourselves possibly uniquely amongst other animals in a position of being mortal, being physically embodied, being in a world, but also knowing those things. It's one thing to experience the world. It's one thing to be, it's another thing to be aware that you're experiencing it. Josh Rasmussen once said, there's a difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you've noticed a tree. We have this sort of second order abstraction that we can do. So we know that death is coming, for example, and death makes a mockery of everything that we do. It seems to just obliterate any sense of purpose or meaning

• 3:58Speaker 02

  because anything that we're building will ultimately, as far as we're concerned, be gone. And that may well be unique to human beings. And so I'm not the first to suggest that the principal motivating factor behind meaning infused activities that humans do is an engagement in death denial or some kind of immortality project. People literally, for fear of, as a result of the knowledge that this will come to an end, engage in what we might call immortality projects. They engage in things which will outlast themselves, which give them a sense of escaping this death. The most obvious example is in religious traditions, which literally promise immortality for your own soul.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  But if you look just practically where people subjectively report finding meaning, they find it in their children. They might find it in their job, but they're unlikely to find it in their job if they're doing something they don't really care about. They'll find it in their job, maybe they're a, maybe they're like a barrister and they find a lot of meaning in bringing justice into the world because they're participating in a system which they believe will outlast them and is bigger than them. So when people talk about meaning, we talk about transcendence, you know, something being above and beyond their own sort of material situation. And I think religion is the, is the archetypal example of this. And I think it's why it evolves in the first place. There is this idea that we are living in a meaning crisis that has cropped up maybe in the past hundred years or so,

• 5:27Speaker 02

  or maybe in the last few hundred years or so, as a response to the Enlightenment and the decline of religion. I think that's far too easy. I think that's way too easy. I think that if there is such thing as a meaning crisis, it is literally the human condition and the reason why these projects were invented in the first place. I think literally speaking, what people are doing in religious traditions is realizing the finitude of their existence and therefore trying to commune with something

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Can I add a thought?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Less finite, of course.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  We have this hunger. I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic explanation can explain the consciousness's hunger for meaning and significant, because that's all propositional. It's not molecules in motion.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  What's naturalistic mean?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Naturalistic just means nature and that's all there is, basically. So you have molecules in motion largely governed by natural law. There is no outside transcendent anything. There's no immaterial anything, certainly not an immaterial god that has started the process, that sustains the process and gives life meaning. There either is meaning objectively or not. Okay. If not, then it's up to us.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  For example, a moment ago, you said that if there is a creator god who brings us into existence, then you are designed and you are given purpose by God. And I think we need to investigate this a bit further. Because, for example, a quite sort of boring and overdone debate at the moment is the extent to which we are engaged in the production of potentially artificially conscious agents with artificial intelligence technologies. And there's all this discussion about whether or not these things can be conscious, like, you know, whatever. Let's just suppose for a moment that they were. Let's suppose that I created an artificially intelligent machine and I gave it a purpose and that purpose was to produce paperclips. And because of the development of artificial intelligence technology,

• 7:25Speaker 02

  it became conscious in a recognizable sense. It had an interior sense of self. It sort of had, say, feelings or emotions about the world. But it is just an AI robot whose entire purpose in life is to make paperclips. Now, I could say that because that AI was designed by a creator with a purpose that was explicitly given to it, that that life is meaningful. But I think it would seem to most people that a life whose meaning consists in creating paperclips is not sufficient, is not enough to address what people really want. It's not just some kind of purpose. It's not just even some kind of purpose which is given to you by an authoritative creative source.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Can I respond?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  It's something which is further than that. Yeah, but if I can just relate this to the God question. The problem that arises is that you have to answer the question of why God infuses life with the meaning that he gives it. It's either something which he has sort of arbitrarily plucked up and chosen to create, in which case we have this problem of arbitrariness. Or no, or in fact, there is some reason why God had to give us a particular kind of meaning that's endemic to the human condition, that he had no choice, but for that meaning, that more important kind of meaning to be given to human life.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  But if he was beholden to that, if he had to give us a particular kind of meaning, it seems like there's a standard of meaning which exists outside of God. So I'm not sure, in other words, the mechanism by which being created by someone who says this is your purpose would be fulfilling in the way that people want it to be.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  The reason the paperclip illustration doesn't match is because it seems to me that you're subtly taking the thing that's conscious that makes paperclips and comparing it to a human being. And for human beings who seem to have a different purpose, I would argue, be consigned to make paperclips, well, that's dehumanizing to them. But if you have, just to follow your illustration, if you have a creator that makes something for a reason that the creator has in mind, then it's fulfilling its purpose perfectly, you know? For a human being, that's not going to be satisfying making paperclips. And a lot of people who are making paperclips are not satisfied with it. Okay. I don't think it's arbitrary if God is making something for a purpose.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  If God decides that he wants to make creatures to be in friendship with him because this reflects his loving character and that purpose is to be in friendship with him, I don't see how that is somehow negligible or arbitrary at all. I guess you could have said that God could have done otherwise, but his love and desire for communion is seen to be an adequate explanation for that.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  This is fascinating. So my first question is, what's the point of this conversation?

• 10:14Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, so I think that the ultimate answer that we're looking for is it appears that the numbers around purpose and meaning are fluctuating at this moment in time. A lot of people are turning back to religion, as Alex is, we were just chatting about a second ago. And I guess there's two questions, which is, one, understanding why that's happening, why there's this fluctuation, why we're seeing a mental health crisis around purpose and meaning. And the second is to try and figure out if there's a truth one can arrive at, if there's an objective truth that exists.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So for y'all, I'm curious, when y'all show up here, like, what is the purpose for y'all showing up?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Literally trying to discover, like, it's the stated purpose, right? It's literally just artificially given purpose by being designed in a particular way. We're gonna get together and we're gonna have a conversation and see if we can figure out this, this meaning stuff, right?

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  And by the way, like, we're not gonna solve that problem. I think it's worth pointing out that, like, these conversations have to be exploratory and subjective. If anybody thinks that the four of us sat at this table are going to solve the meaning crisis and give people a five-step guide to finding meaning in their life, and that will be the sort of case closed, then they're delusional.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  I don't know if I agree that we can't find an answer, but we'll talk about it.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Well, this is what I wanted to speak to. Obviously, we're talking about this broader issue of meaning and purpose, all right? And as I mentioned earlier, there either is an objective one, or it's only subjective, okay? If it is an objective one, this is about the most important thing that anyone could ever find out about their life, if they were created for a reason. In my view, the reason I'm here is because I'm convinced that that's the case, and I'm willing to give reasons why, okay? But I don't think, I'm sympathetic to the concern that you can't sit around a table and in two or three hours solve the problem for any individual, because people going through the process of trying to figure these things out, it takes a long time as they put the pieces together. But I think there's a lot of people in the world that think they have put it together,

• 12:11Speaker 01

  and they've come to conclusions about ultimate meaning and purpose, and they don't come to my own conclusions, but many have. So what I would hate to do is leave people with the feeling like, we can all search, and the glory is in the search, but if you think you've found the answer, then you haven't. Of course, this, to me, is a nihilistic enterprise, then. I think it's possible to come to conclusions.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  I think so, too, to be clear, but I think what I'm trying to say is this will be something that one will experience for themselves and will discover for themselves in their own life. It's not gonna be something that, you know, there's that old, was it Linchi, the sort of the Buddhist koan that says, if you meet the Buddha, kill him? The idea being that, you know, if you think that the kind of enlightenment which is necessary to spiritual fulfillment can be found through some kind of guru, you're missing the mark. It's something that you need to do for yourself.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  But isn't that statement itself meant to be a truth about spirituality that you can actually count on?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Can I jump in? I just wanted to make sure I understand y'all's point. So you're saying that the search for purpose, first of all, is never gonna go away, like, is a human condition, right?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Like, so, as humanity, humanity will never find its purpose.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  I can tell you why, if you like.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  No, no, I don't even know why, yet.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  I think, I think individuals can, but humanity can't.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm just making sure I understand, right? So, an individual can find their purpose, but as humanity, it's never gonna be solved. And then, you said something about purpose being tied to, opposing to death in some way, so transcending death, that human beings basically look for purpose because death is inevitable, and if we can find purpose, then we can give our life meaning, but if death, if we die, and I don't leave something behind, can you talk a little bit about that?

• 13:55Speaker 02

  This is essentially a version of Ernest Becker's denial of death hypothesis, which famously suggests that the motivation for a great deal of human behavior is, at least human behavior outside of immediate sensory concerns, like eating and stuff like that, anything that humans engage in on a societal level, on an abstract level, is ultimately motivated by an apprehension of death. I think that's probably too simple, but it's definitely a contributing factor. I think that, for example, put it this way, right? Here's an example that comes from, I think his name's Scheffler, and he has this interesting thought experiment. Suppose, I don't know, maybe you're engaged in writing a book. Suppose you discovered, and this probably won't be the case for you because you believe in an afterlife, but suppose that you're an atheist for a moment.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Suppose it were the case that you discovered that after you die, a meteor is going to come and wipe out all life on Earth. Everybody's going to die almost instantly after you do, but you'll be dead. So you will live your entire life, as it was anyway, and suppose the rest of the world doesn't even know this is going to happen, but you're told this is going to be the case. Would that motivate you to write your book more or less? Most people say that it would seem a bit pointless now. What's the point now in writing this book? What's the point in having children if they're gonna die 30 days after I'm gone? What's the point in doing any of these things? What will they still do? They'll still do the sensory stuff, they'll still eat, they'll still have sex, they'll still sleep, this kind of stuff. But the typically meaning-laden activities of life, they would certainly be demotivated to do.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  And it's an interesting thought experiment to give us some insight as to the fact that what maybe this means, that at least in part, the motivation for these actions in the first place, is that they will extend beyond our death.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  I agree with so much of what y'all say, and I also, like, hard disagree with some of the fundamentals. So, let's say you have this example of, like, I'mma write a book, and then the world is gonna end 30 days later. And so you say, because a lot of what you're talking about is, like, what people say, right? So you'll say, like, okay, so, like, people would say that this is a waste of time, and I'm not gonna do it if the world ends in 30 days. And you're also saying people is an everlasting thing or struggling with purpose, right? You're saying both of these things. So here's my question to you. If you tell someone, you know, you're writing this book, let's say you write it, and then you die, because we'll simplify the example, and then 30 days later, the world ends.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Let's take two people, one who says, I'mma write it anyway, and one who says, there's no point. Which one of those two people do you think has a greater sense of purpose?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Probably the former.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So this is the key thing. Purpose is absolutely, because I love that you're asking about mechanisms, and I think maybe that's what I can provide. I think that's, that's actually the answer, right? So it's not that people believe, and I think you're right, that the reason that this is a perennial problem is because most people do not live a life where they understand how purpose works. And what I think is really fascinating about sort of like this scientific, clinical approach, like, if you ask me, can I help people find meaning and purpose? I don't know. But if you ask me, can I help a person? The answer is absolutely. And we have, like, particular scientific things, and this is where it's really counterintuitive.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  So a big part of, like, finding purpose is doing particular things, and if you do those things, the likelihood that you will increase your sense of purpose in life, which is another thing that's very counterintuitive to people, purpose is not binary, it's quantifiable, it's like a scale. So if I were to ask the three of y'all, right, well, maybe let's, like, let's do this, not a thought experiment, but this practical experiment. Do you know your purpose in life? Like, how confident are you that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing in life?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  How confident am I about the God part, or that I'm doing the things that are appropriate?

• 17:44Speaker 03

  How confident are you that you're doing what God wants you to do?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Well, in that general sense, extremely confident, or else I wouldn't be doing it.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Perfect, right? So, Stephen, what about you, bro?

• 17:54Steven Bartlett?

  Five out of 10.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  I knew it, okay, right? So, Alex?

• 17:59Speaker 02

  I don't wanna be difficult, but I kind of reject the grammar of the question.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Awesome. Reject away, bro.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  I think it's what a logician would call an exponable statement, something which needs to be broken down. You asked, do I know my own purpose? That assumes that there is a purpose to know. It's a bit like, the comparison I would give is if I asked you the question, the classic example in logic is, is the king of France bold, yes or no?

• 18:22Speaker 03

  I can rephrase my question, if you have problems with my question. So, do you have a lived experience of something called purpose?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Oh, well, look, I think purpose is having some kind of reason to act or be.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  And I certainly, subjectively, am motivated to do things. I think everybody is, otherwise you literally wouldn't be able to do anything. But it's a bit foggy to me what, psychologically speaking, on a personal level, that fundamental motivation actually is.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Wouldn't purpose be more the goal, rather than the reason to act? What you're trying to accomplish?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  It's a semantic thing, but that's why, it depends what you mean by the word.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  I'm with you, I'm with you. So, and I don't know what I mean with the word purpose, which is part of this challenge, but, okay, so, like, I'm just wondering, so, like, when you, so, a lot of people are motivated to act. Everyone is motivated to act every day, right? I get out of bed, I need to take a dump, like, but my guess is that if we were to administer a scientifically validated instrument that measures your subjective sense of purpose, direction in life, that that would be north of five out of 10.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Do you think that's fair, or is that something that you don't?

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Maybe, yeah, I don't know.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  So, like, do you, when you wake up, do you feel like you know what you wanna do and what's going on, and you're, like, doing good work? Like, I'm asking about the subjective.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Not on a grand sense, I'm quite agnostic. I mean, I'm sort of...

• 19:46Speaker 03

  I'm not talking about, okay, maybe a grand sense.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  I really don't know what you mean.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Perfect, okay, so, so, not on a grand sense, but on some other sense.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Okay, great. So I think that this is like, this is, I think this is beautiful, because I think what we have here is, like, not on a grand sense, so I think on a grand sense, you're there, right? But you're absolutely motivated by particular things. So I think this is the first thing about purpose.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Kind of a clarification, real quickly. Yeah, on a grand sense, yes, but there are distinctions that you were referring to a few moments ago.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Great.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  There are a lot of things that are dissatisfying in my life, but in terms of being on the right course, that's part of what life is. Being on the right course, lots of crazy stuff that's happening in between.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Cool. So, like, the first thing that I've kind of noticed in my work is that, I don't know whether a grander purpose exists or not, I think that's a lovely discussion that I wanna continue to have with you, but I'm sort of, here's where I'm sort of coming from in this discussion. Stephen started this out with some really scary statistics that we're seeing, right? There's a mental health crisis, I think a lot of what we're seeing is, while it may be perennial, I think it's, like, seems more acute right now.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Maybe that's because of the atheist materialism, whatever, I'm not quite sure, but this is a problem, so just sharing where I'm coming from. My hope is that someone who is watching this will have moved forward some vague percentage points, I'm shooting for about 20%, in their personal quest for purpose. And I think a big part of what I'm gonna try to contribute here today is my understanding of, like, how to do that. That this is a quantifiable thing, that we can sort of see at this table, people are sort of like at different places. And so, the first thing that I kind of wanna point out is, I don't know whether there's purpose or not, but as a human condition...

• 21:39Speaker 03

  There is something that each of us feel or experience that gives us an answer. Right? So you're like at 10, but what that means is that something is going on in your mind, something is going on in your heart, something is going on in your body where you wake up and you feel like you have purpose. Steven wakes up and he's like at a 5 out of 10. So he's getting some signals in that area, some signals not in that area. You have some signals in that direction too. You know why you're showing up at this podcast. You've got a book that you're working on. Awesome. Can't wait to read it. But on a grander sense, you're like, I don't know about this like objective stuff or whatever. So this is sort of like this quantifiable thing.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  And you?

• 22:18Speaker 03

  I'm gonna let y'all guess. Where would you put me at a 10?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  I don't like to psychologize people.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  It's okay if you don't like to. Will you?

• 22:27Speaker 02

  I just met you. I don't know. I have no idea what sense of meaning you have in your life.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  I mean, for me, I'm just motivated to try and find out.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  So I think the audience can guess too.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say you're pretty high. That's why you're here. That's why you're articulating your ideas.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  Probably closer to 10 than 5.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, right? So it's like, it's okay if you don't want to do that because I'm guessing that there are certain things in your intellect that tell you. So do you have a subjective instinct?

• 23:00Speaker 02

  No, I just don't know you that well. I mean, I don't know.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  And also, it depends what you mean, right? Because you'll say that you have a, if you say that you're a 10, like you have this, you use the phrase earlier, sense, a sense of meaning in life. And because you're talking about this from an empirical standpoint of whether people report having a sense of meaning, whereas I think that Greg is probably talking about, literally speaking, whether there is actually in fact a real meaning, whether or not people sense it or not. You could say that you have a 10 out of 10, and Greg could say, well, that's, it's great that you feel that way, but it's misguided because the purpose that you have identified in your life is the wrong one. And so to me, the important question is not so much whether you subjectively report feeling like you have purpose in life, but whether that purpose is grounded in something real and true.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think that your answer right now is the reason why you think some of these questions are unanswerable. So I think if you adopt that frame, you'll never know.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  I don't think they're unanswerable.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Okay, let me just finish. Okay, so my first experience of this, right, is that first of all, there is a subjective barometer, like how do we know whether we have purpose? Maybe we listen to other people, but there is some sort of internal sense of this. And this is where the science becomes really important, because if you look at people who have like a history of trauma or something, what you tend to find is that there are certain like neurobiological things that can happen to you that will literally affect the parts of your brain that are able to detect purpose. So this is sort of like a subjective experience. And I think the way that, and I love your emphasis on mechanism, and I think this is what, in my opinion, science and spirituality can really add, is they add the how, right? They add like, why is it that one person

• 24:43Speaker 03

  has purpose and another person doesn't have purpose? So first thing is that, in my experience and the way that I operate, I'm not saying it's correct, it's just, it's effective in terms of helping people move the needle on reducing suicidality, improving resilience, giving them a reason to wake up in the morning, like it tends to work. And it's not just me, it's that there's a bunch of, you know, methodologies that we have in psychotherapy and stuff like that, that accomplish these kinds of things, that there's some internal sense of purpose. Now, what I think surprises a lot of people is that there are two ways that you increase that sense of purpose. The first is a bucket of things that are kind of counterintuitive. And this is where

• 25:24Speaker 03

  we also have to understand that purpose correlates with certain other things in life. So if I feel like I am in control of my life, then my sense of purpose will increase. Those two things are correlated. It's not clear whether it's one thing that manifests in two ways, or it's probably two discrete things because there's some subtlety there. But just as a very simple example, if you take someone who feels out of control in life, and you help them get control of their life, and there's a really great example of this, which is something called passive challenges versus active challenges. So there's a fascinating research on anxiety that shows that if you're someone in life whose life is happening to you, like you wake up one day and then like your boss wants you to

• 26:07Speaker 03

  come in for work, and you have to pay rent at the end of the month, and like you're logging onto Tinder and people aren't responding to you, life is controlling the direction that you move. And people feel overwhelmed by this, and they want freedom, they want control. What they end up doing is they wish that they didn't have these things. So they run away from these problems. So passive challenges are challenges that life imposes upon you, that you didn't sign up for.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Then there's something really fascinating, which is your sense of control in life does not correlate just with the passive challenges. It correlates with the ratio of passive challenges to active challenges. Active challenges are things that you choose to do that are difficult. So this is really fascinating, but if you're getting bodied by life in three different directions, the solution to that is not run away from those problems. It's actually to wake up and start to push yourself in a particular direction. I want to do this instead. If you want to learn how to like, read, you know, learn philosophy, you know, start studying philosophical texts, you know, like as you start to take on more, which is very counterintuitive, because when most people feel overwhelmed, they don't feel like they can do more. The

• 27:20Speaker 03

  exact solution is to take on more active challenges, then you have some sense of control in life. And once your ratio of active challenges to passive challenges is more evened out, this does something really cool. It gives you a sense that I'm no longer out of control. Once you feel like you're no longer out of control, this is the really cool thing, then your capacity to deal with the stuff that life throws at you actually improves. So there's this, this is just one example of like one scientific neurobiological principle that has some psychology associated with, where you can do particular things to give yourself a sense of direction in life. Now, some of the stuff around worship and spiritual practice, that can do it too.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  But I think that usually what I tend to see is that, you know, if someone is lost in life, you can sort of answer it by these big questions. You can sort of think about this sort of transcendental purpose, which I'm happy to talk about. But I think there's a lot of like little stuff that you can do.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  And as you implement these things, the sense of purpose in your life, your internal lived experience of feeling out of control will change.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Let me offer a few thoughts if I could. One, I want to speak to something that you've said, Alex, that I just want to offer a caution about. When we talk about motivation, the motivation for something, we sometimes confuse that with justification. So someone might say to me, it's an atheist, for example, well, you're a Christian because you were born in America. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you wouldn't be a Christian, you'd be a Muslim. Of course, that's irrelevant to the question of whether Islam or Christianity or some other religion is true. It doesn't speak to that. It speaks to psychology. Okay? And the fact is, if the atheist was born in Saudi Arabia, you wouldn't be an atheist either, likely. The key question is what motivates people, for example, to think about purpose? Death, maybe, a fear of death, that might be a motivation. The question is whether

• 29:14Speaker 01

  the place they land in answering the question has any objective truth to it or not. It could be that there is a God, and that there is an afterlife. And facing death does give comfort to that, I should say, when facing death, you have comfort because there is a God and there is something that you're going to. It's closer communion with Him. Okay, just because you're motivated by death doesn't mean that your belief about the afterlife is somehow an error.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  As a founder building a business when I was in my early twenties, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome, because there was something that I wasn't good at. And that thing was finances. Finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called Zero. Zero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses, and it brings accounting, payments, payroll, and analytics all into one place, even for people that don't love doing finances. Zero wants to do the financial work for you, but its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record, because Zero wants to help you understand what's happening in your business, and increasingly, and this is maybe the most important thing, is help

• 30:38Speaker 00

  you make decisions. Finally, we have a partner who can enable us in a simple way for those people that are both left brain or right brain, and enable our dreams. You can learn more about Zero by going to zero.com. Thank you to Zero. Thank you for sponsoring this podcast, but also thank you for helping me to scale my business as somebody that, quite frankly, has never loved finances that much.