A Thorough Critique of Popular and Psychological Accounts of Meaning of Life

26:43Dr. John Vervaeke:Okay. What kind of connection? Like gravity? Obviously not. It's going to be a cognitive biological connection, because it's going to have to do with affordance and adaptivity. And it's going to have a function, and the function is going to integrate and afford your agency, and as we're going to further argue, your selfhood and your personhood. And these are all ways in which you are. in the world. And of course, it's not just going to afford them haphazardly, it's going to curate and coordinate that in some comprehensive fashion. And that means already, some of you might be saying, that sounds a little bit like, you know, what the ancients used to talk when they're talking about character.

27:32Dr. John Vervaeke:And yeah, and that's partially what we're alluding to. I would say a better way of getting at that point, which we're going to come back to is that there's deep connections between the cultivation of meaning and the cultivation of wisdom. So we're going to come back to that.

27:52Dr. John Vervaeke:One thing that people seem to associate with meaning in life that isn't explicitly foregrounded by the feature list we gave you, although it has a deep heritage, especially in the philosophical tradition, is that meaning in life is associated with a kind of reduction of cognitive dissonance. You're not beset by feelings of existential guilt. Remember, we're not talking about moral guilt or success guilt. Existential guilt. Like when you're like, am I being who I should be? That kind of question. You don't want that deep kind of cognitive dissonance around that. You don't want to be in deep conflict with yourself.

28:41Dr. John Vervaeke:So although I'm not totally happy with this phrase, I'm going to use it as a placeholder, as long as you give it a lot more resonance. Part of what meaning in life is associated with, and I don't mean a sense of contentment, because that's over here with subjective well-being, is I mean it much more like what the ancients used to call ataraxia. The best translation is something like peace of mind, but it means, it means, like, it's not just you're not in conflict and you're sort of content. It means that you feel there's a deep integrity, a deep integrity, a functional integration to what you are that is deeply affording of your agency, your selfhood, and your personhood.

29:28Dr. John Vervaeke:So that's one side. And then something we've already seen before in the talk so far is that meaning in life seems to be being about connected to what's real. Now what's interesting in the literature is you get very famous seminal thinkers like Plato arguing that those two things are the core things. And why? Core to meaning. He wouldn't say meaning. He would talk about something like eudaimonia or the good life. but what is that? Now Plato worries a lot about virtue we'll come back to that and of course he also worries quite a bit about success by the way but there's this other thing he's talking about and he is bringing out the idea that we have two meta-desires what's a meta-desire?

30:20Dr. John Vervaeke:meta-desire is a desire you have for all of your other specific desires so I desire some water right now or I may desire to shift my position. Okay? A meta-desire is a desire you have for all of your desires. It doesn't mean the desire is just like one state. It can vary in its intensity, but that's what we're talking about. And what we're talking about here is that you want whatever to satisfy your desires to be real. Now, that's becoming problematic in our culture, and that's having an impact, by the way, on people's meaning in life in a way that a lot of people are starting to notice and talk about, and we're starting to get some empirical evidence about it.

31:03Dr. John Vervaeke:When we get into social media and we get radically disconnected from reality, meaning in life measures start to fluctuate, or at least things that are predicted if meaning in life is declining start to show up.

31:22Dr. John Vervaeke:So you want whatever is satisfying your desire to be real. You don't want it to be an illusion. You don't want it to be a fraud. You don't want it to be deception. I've done this many times with students in my class. How many of you are in really satisfying romantic relationships? How many would you want to know if your partner was cheating on you, even if it meant the destruction of the relationship? Almost everybody puts up their hand. When I ask them why, they'll say, because it's not real. It needs to be real. If you found out that your parents, their whole life didn't really love you, but were pretending, they were rehearsing scripts about what to say and how to act, and they want to keep their jobs as an actor, they want to keep saying those things and doing those things, are you okay with that, or do you want them to really love you?

32:06Dr. John Vervaeke:Okay, so you see the point, okay? And Robert Nozick did a lot around this with the experience machine and things like that. Plato does a lot about that too. Okay, so we want it to be real, but we want also whatever is satisfying our desires to not fragment us, to not disintegrate us. And of course, this is such a trope, it's cliche. The person that satisfies one of their desires, but he's at war with himself, right? And torn apart or she's fragmented. And oh, right? This is gaining the world, but losing your soul, the proverb, right? And so again, the point is we want these two and we don't just want them haphazardly.

32:53Dr. John Vervaeke:We want, and this was Plato's argument, we want something in which they are reciprocally affording each other so that this connectedness that's at the core of meaning in life is being deepened, enhanced. It's going deeper and better into us, and it's going deeper and better into the world. I often use a Latin term to describe this because I want to bring out some associations that I hope will make you a little bit uncomfortable because that is the intent. The word for connectedness in Latin is religio, means to bind together. But you're probably hearing something like religion in there. Okay, hang on to that concern with me provoking you that way.

33:35Dr. John Vervaeke:Maybe some of you aren't. Some of you are saying, that doesn't bother me. I think religion and meaning in life should be deeply associated. The point is the meaning in life construct needs to talk about this relationship, and we're going to come back to it. I'll point you to a book I'll be talking about later. Arjun and I are both reading it, Appeal and Attitude. Well, Arjun's not reading it yet, but he's going to be reading it. Appeal and Attitude, Prospects for Ultimate Meaning by Stephen G. Smith. This ultimate meaning, what is going on there? What is that? And that sounds religious, but is it necessarily what we mean by standard of religion?

34:10Dr. John Vervaeke:Why are so many people today spiritual but not religious? Why aren't they just content with everyday meaning? Why do they want a more ultimate kind of meaning? Okay, so let's keep going. You see, there's a gathering momentum here. I hope you feel it. All right, so we have meta-desires, and we're trying to solve them in a way that ultimately works at the meta-meaning level. Remember the level of how ultimately do agent and arena fit together? And then part of the argument I've been alluding to is we're trying to solve some of our meta-problems of adaptation. What do you mean by that? Well, adaptivity is the ability to solve problems, and our adaptivity is intelligence.

35:00Dr. John Vervaeke:We have general intelligence. We can solve a wide variety of problems on a wide variety of domains, a wide variety of ways that all strongly mutually support each other. And this is why the race is on for artificial general intelligence, because intelligence is so powerful that way. But the thing is, and I'm not going to do this argument here, I have done it so many places, and Arjun has heard it many times himself. You know, there's two key meta-problems we're trying to solve for our adaptivity. Anticipation. We're trying to anticipate the world. This is handled well by a predictive processing framework.

35:37Dr. John Vervaeke:and we're trying to zero in on the relevant information and ignore all the vast amounts of irrelevant information, combinatorially explosive. And we have to ignore most of that information. We have to find some information obvious so that we are oriented and we know what to do. So we've got these two interlocking. They do interlock. I can't give you that argument right now, but there's lots online about this, lots in publication. They interlock the anticipation, predictive processing, relevance, realization. So these are meta-problems. Notice what's happening here. We're talking about something that's addressing our core ability to connect to the world, which is solving meta-problems.

36:24Dr. John Vervaeke:We're dealing with meta-meaning, and we're dealing with the satisfaction of meta-desires. This is how it can be something quite profound for us. even if many of us perhaps are not thinking about it or reflecting on it or wanting to think about it or reflecting about it. The point that it might have a significant functional, causal, cognitive, biological, ontological, having to do with the structure of reality, depth to it, is nevertheless a plausible case. So, for example, one of the things that relevance realization gives you is an optimal grip that And it gives you a way of taking a stance, setting yourself up for a sequence of optimal grips so you can make yourself way through the world.

37:12Dr. John Vervaeke:And this brings us back again to orientation. Relevance, when you look out into the world and you're casting a perspective and participating in an identity, a particular agency, perhaps also a particular form of self, perhaps a particular form of personhood. But as you're doing that, you are orienting towards reality. and orienting is fundamental. If you're not oriented, you can't reason. Kant discovered this way back when, and a lot of people are talking about this. Dan and I are trying to get a paper published on, it's in revision right now, about orientation and rationality. You can't be rational.

37:48Dr. John Vervaeke:You can't make your way through the world, et cetera, et cetera. You can see why this is really important. Now, notice that we use language of disorientation to talk about meaninglessness. I'm drifting I don't know which way to go I don't know where I am right now okay so orientation really matters really matters in an important way so once you start talking about relevance realization there's the possibility that meaning in life can be affected by the ways in which relevance realization can complexify, how it can recursively feed back on itself and correct itself. What are you talking about, John?

38:38Dr. John Vervaeke:Relevance realization is self-corrective. You do it when you have an aha moment, when you go, oh, I thought she was angry, but she's afraid, and you have an insight. And everything, your whole perspective changes. What's foregrounded and backgrounded, what's salient, meaning stands out for you or doesn't, shifts. And what role you take shifts. You have an insight. Okay? Relevance realization is recursive on itself. So another argument, it's an awakening from the meaning crisis, both the series and the book. There's the shameless promotion of the book. There it is. And there's a book actually written about the meaning crisis by somebody, about my work and Chris's work on the meaning crisis by Andrew Sweeney.

39:22Dr. John Vervaeke:Thank you, Andrew. True.

39:27Dr. John Vervaeke:There's a paper that's also in revision, gone through two rounds, getting very close to getting published, where we propose that there's a cognitive continuum, that you start with a well-established phenomenon in psychology called fluency, and then when that spikes, you get an insight. I can't argue it right now, but fluency has to do with something like relevance realization, getting an optimal grip, right? Okay. When you get a cascade of insights, you get a flow state. Now, stop right there. You know what the flow state is like? You know that state where you're, I'm in the zone, I'm at one, right?

40:05Dr. John Vervaeke:All that chatter in my head is gone and everything is bright and I feel like I'm describing like discovering something deep about the world. And it's like the world and I are fitted together. Notice this language. And we're at one with each other. and this is flow and this is Csikszentmihalyi's work and this is optimal experience, optimal performance. Why would it be optimal experience and optimal performance? Probably because you're optimally gripping the world. And what's going on there is that people who have the right kind, so let me stop, I'll say it a different way. You want quantity and quality of flow because those are predictive of how well people judge, how meaningful their lives are.

40:49Dr. John Vervaeke:You want a lot of flow in your life. The more you flow, the more you're likely to say, I have a meaningful life. But you want the right quality of flow. You don't want flow in video games to which you're addicted that are disrupting everything else in your life. So you want this to happen in a way that transfers broadly to many different domains of your life and transforms you, helps you get better at flowing in many different domains. And of course, some of you might be saying, you know, some religions try to do that. Yeah, Taoism, Zen, that's what they're trying to do in some important way.

41:33Dr. John Vervaeke:Now, if you start to flow at the level of how you are doing sort of your fundamental orientation, at the agent arena level, you may get a whole... You may not have just an insight here or a flow here. You may have a whole system of insights, a comprehensive flow state. You may have a mystical experience. And we've already done work in my lab. We've presented it at several academic conferences and there was COVID and there was other stuff and then the people drifted away. I've never got it published. but turns out more meaning in life results if you have more mystical experiences. Again, cultures have said this, but nobody bothered to test for that.

42:23Dr. John Vervaeke:Think about that. Why? Why is it? That seems like obvious. And it looks like it's the sort of insight aspect of the mystical experience that's doing most of that work. Again, are we looking for found coherence, or are we looking to find and cultivate coherence, like insight, flow, mystical experience? And of course, some people have mystical experiences in which they report the following. Many people cross-culturally, this is Yadin's work and Newberg's work and a whole bunch of other people's work. They have an experience, a higher state of consciousness in which they say, I experienced the really real the really real it was so beautiful I was so at one

43:17Dr. John Vervaeke:and what they do is they transform many many of them transform their lives in ways that are objectively better they change careers they change relationships they start to change the structure of their identity They want to be in contact. Listen to the language. They want to be in connection with the really real. Not because it's doing anything for them. It's good for its own sake. We're already out of the domain of moral goodness because we're in meaning. It's not about success. It's not leading to any kind of success. It generates. They come into conformity and it ripples out with success, and that gives us objective measures.

44:02Dr. John Vervaeke:But that's not why they're doing it. It's good. It's good because it's really real. Remember the meta-desire? We want to be connected to something that's really real that is integrating us. So it goes deep into us and we go deep into it. We can indwell it deeply and internalize it deeply. It inspires us profoundly to change who we are. This is Wilke's great line from his poem. You must change your life. Okay, so what's going on there? Coined a term for this, sorry, it's technical, called onto, having to do with being, normativity. It's a kind of goodness that isn't about moral goodness or aesthetic goodness or success or power.

44:53Dr. John Vervaeke:It's about I'm deeply realizing what is deeply real, and I want to keep doing that. meaning in life needs to be able to talk about this cognitive continuum it needs to talk about the impact of insight, flow, mystical experience higher states of consciousness on meaning in life the current construct is not set up well to do that

45:21now

45:28Dr. John Vervaeke:part of the problem, we argue And this is very similar to arguments that I've made with Leo Ferraro and others About mindfulness or wisdom Is psychology is using a feature list It's using a feature list There's these four things Feature list And they describe a product When you have these, listen to my language When you have these, you have meaning in life It's a feature list and it's a product theory

46:03Dr. John Vervaeke:Okay, what's the problem with that? First of all, feature lists, I've made this criticism multiple times in multiple publications. Multiple publications. Feature lists, this is something our folk theory thinks is what holds our understanding, but what the scientific work shows doesn't hold our understanding, or at least doesn't sufficiently hold our understanding. So for example, tried and true example. Ask people, what's a bird? Feathers, wings, a beak, and it flies. They're going to pile some feathers here, put in a beak, gather them all together, throw them in the air. Do I have a bird? No, I don't have a bird.

46:45Dr. John Vervaeke:And what's missing is a structural functional organization. How do the pieces fit together and belong together, the features, so that the bird fits to and belongs together in its environment. That's what's missing. The religio is missing in an important way. What you want is you want a feature schema that says, how do the features hang together? how do they belong together, such that they enable the organism to belong to the world, such that its behavior makes sense to it and to us.

47:39Dr. John Vervaeke:Now, that means when we're talking about a process instead of a product and a feature schema instead of a feature list, we're now talking about something that's inherently developmental in nature.

48:00Dr. John Vervaeke:Now put these two together. Meaning in life has a normative dimension to it. You should. You should. It should inspire you. And it's a process. It's a process. When you put normativity and processes together, what you're basically getting is a developmental dimension. We're talking about an aspect of meaning in life that is connected with maturation. Maturation. This is why you make judgments about people's meaning in life projects as being too childish. The guy's 35 and all he wants to do is play with cars. he might have larger cars but we make these kind of criticisms because we've got at least an understanding implicitly that there's a developmental maturational aspect and that makes sense John Rusin has argued very well that what's at the core of maturation is facing up listen to this language it's so perfect facing up to reality you face it when you face something you're oriented towards it, and it can challenge you.

49:13Dr. John Vervaeke:It can call to you. Face me. You mean, you know that? And facing up means, oh, there's a normative dimension to that because up is good. Up is good in some important way. So meaning in life has a maturational, developmental aspect to it. Now, that means that in addition to we should be worrying about or concerned about, I should say, the inspirational aspects of meaning in life. This means there's an aspirational aspect of meaning in life. Now, here's again how meaning in life is like rationality. Rationality is inspirational. How do I become rational? I indwell people that I judge to be more rational than I.

49:58Dr. John Vervaeke:I imitate them and internalize them until my metacognition develops and I can do for myself what they could do for themselves. That's inspirational. I'm inspired by them. Rationality is also aspirational. This is my relationship between my current self and my future self. Part of what it means to be rational is I aspire to be more rational than I am. I have a responsibility to my future self to try and make my future self have a better life. So I aspire. This is Agnes Callard's work on aspiration and how it's central to rationality. Meaning in life. Why do you think these parallels keep coming up, by the way?

50:43Dr. John Vervaeke:Meaning in life keeps coming up also as inspirational and rational. Well, why? Because if it's developmental, if it's normative, if it's inspirational and it's normative, that means we have to worry about making mistakes, being self-deceived, doing it wrong. We have to try and get better. So it has an aspect, an important aspect of rationality to it. One of the things that concerns us is there's no concern in meaning in life around asking people to what degree they've checked to see if their meaning in life project is rational, or is it the result of self-deception, or misinformation from other people, or illusion.

51:41All right.

51:44Dr. John Vervaeke:So, notice what we're talking about here. We're talking about inner peace, deeper connection to reality. it's got an evaluation dimension into it in it that brings in rationality because evaluating well that's one of them that's part of what it is to be rational another meaning is right normative in the sense of developmental maturational aspirational that's also a kind of rationality bringing all this together inner peace connection to reality, these two dimensions of rationality, we're talking about wisdom. We're talking about deep connections between wisdom and meaning in life. The current meaning in life construct is not theoretically connected with the cultivation of wisdom in any important way.

52:39Dr. John Vervaeke:That makes it deeply anomalous and therefore suspicious, because across cultures, historically and spatially, geographically, the cultivation of meaning and the cultivation of wisdom have always been deeply interwoven and understood that that's like a necessary case.

53:03Dr. John Vervaeke:Part of what is going on, we are arguing, is a kind of modal confusion. Eric Fromm very misly argued we have two existential modes. And notice why this merely psychological isn't enough here. And he's a psychologist, so it's important to say that. Existential mode, by the way, is an agent arena configuration that tells you how you should be going ahead. One is the having mode. This is where we meet our needs by having things, by controlling them. I need to have liquid. There you go. Control and consume. Categorical. There's a can of sparkling water. But I have other needs that he calls the being needs.

53:52Dr. John Vervaeke:This is being mode. These are needs that are met by developing. I need to become honest. I need to become courageous. I need to become more mature. And notice that these aren't about controlling. the world, they're about entering into right relationship with it, right connectedness, right religio. They're inherently bound up with meaning in life. But if you confuse these, you get very deeply frustrated. So if you try to pursue satisfying a being need, I need to be in love. So I'm going to have lots of sex. I need to be mature. So I'm going to have lots of cars. You won't actually be satisfying the developmental needs, you'll be frustrating them.

54:49Dr. John Vervaeke:You'll be very foolish, very self-deceived. Now, so let's put this together. We have a theory, and we're going to see how it exacerbates what I'm going to say now, but let's get to the point. We have a theory, the folk theory, scientific, that tends to think of meaning as a product that one possesses personally. It doesn't have any normative aspect to it. It is not bound up with the cultivation of wisdom, with the cultivation of virtue and virtuosity. This is our point. This is going to be conducive to a modal confusion about meaning, a profound modal confusion.

55:37Dr. John Vervaeke:That's costly. That's costly in a lot of ways.

55:53Dr. John Vervaeke:And why that matters is if you're confused, and let's say there's, oh, I don't know, a massive worldwide pandemic, and you're cut off from your busy routine, and you're thrown back onto your more fundamental ways of connecting to the world. I'm obviously alluding to COVID, you can go through some very serious struggle. Many people fell into despair. Meeting in life should help you to deal with those things that tend to bring about despair. A sense of alienation. Everybody felt alienated. A sense of absurdity. This doesn't make any sense. A sense of anxiety. is it all just going to collapse is it all meaningless my world isn't working modal confusion if we just sort of have shelter and physiological health that's all we need right

56:59Dr. John Vervaeke:anguish, heartbreak I haven't seen my mother in three years sorry not three years In three months.

57:14Dr. John Vervaeke:That kind of anguish. So the way of talking about this is called existential, not existential, or existential mode, existential resilience. How much does your meaning in life, how deep is it, and notice deep to deep, how deep is it such that it makes you resilient in the face of significant trauma to your world.

57:44Dr. John Vervaeke:Such, right? And that trauma doesn't have to be like it was in COVID. It could be. It could also be more, caused more reflectively, more in the philosophical sense of existential. You may think, why am I doing all of this? It's like, what I'm doing doesn't make any sense to me. And notice now again, maybe this is part of what's going on with coherence. Maybe coherence isn't about just things fitting together. Maybe coherence is a resistance to absurdity, something more pronounced and profound. We need an idea of meaning in life that tells us how it connects to and how it can afford, through wisdom and virtue and virtuosity, existential resilience.

58:39Rationality was also central.

58:42Dr. John Vervaeke:Many of you probably noticed that a lot of your friends, maybe even you, went kind of crazy during COVID. And having practiced rationality ahead of time would have been helpful, would have been helpful.

59:01Dr. John Vervaeke:So meaning isn't in here. It's not within you. It's not a personal, private, preferential possession. My meaning. Talking about my meaning ultimately doesn't make any sense. Go back to the original metaphor. Imagine if I treated word meaning as if it was my private, personal possession.

59:32Dr. John Vervaeke:that didn't mean anything why because we're not sharing it and if meaning is normative i have to be responsible to people challenging me to correct it in fact a lot of philosophers going all the way back to kant most recently brandon there's a normative component even to semantic meaning. No, no, no, that's not what that word means, and we correct each other on it. Where's the authority for that? It's how we are trying to maintain connectedness to ourselves, to our ancestors, and to our children.

1:00:18Dr. John Vervaeke:meaning is between it is not within it is not within it is between well I can have these feelings and they're meaningful to me if you don't have a notice what we talked about earlier you have a relationship to your future self what do you do to make sure those feelings are relevant to your future self who may not be having those feelings could you really survive a feeling? How do you make that feeling connect to your future self? How do you make it shareable to other people to make sure you're not going kind of crazy with your meaning or being radically immature in your meaning? This is another thing we're criticizing.

1:01:03Dr. John Vervaeke:There's a presupposition of an individualistic framework. Even though meaning plausibly connects to worldview view and worldviews are cultural in nature. Look, I have to be able to indwell you and internalize you in order to be meaningful and also to be rational. We've already talked about this.

1:01:35Dr. John Vervaeke:In addition to it having to be communicative, it has to be communal. We have to have a shareable sense presence of this. We love it when we have a shareable sense presence over this. We love it when the Blue Jays are playing the Dodgers and it looks like they're going to win and we're all sharing this and nothing's really happening. Like how did your life actually impact? What? Right. Maybe if you're a, you know, a Blue Jay, you get less money. But for us, no, we want to commune. We want to communicate and commune. One of the worst things that can happen to a human being is playing golf all by themselves and getting a hole in one and nobody's around.

1:02:27Okay?

1:02:35Dr. John Vervaeke:So we need sensed presence and we need communication and correction that's why one of the most powerful ways to punish a person is to put them in solitary confinement

1:02:53Dr. John Vervaeke:so

1:02:57Dr. John Vervaeke:we've got these two things we've got relevance, what we find relevant and real or if you like, true because true doesn't necessarily just mean semantically true You have to be true to somebody, a true friend. Your aim has to be true. So I'm using it much more broadly like that, and there's a reason I'm doing that.

1:03:24Dr. John Vervaeke:Relevance constrains what truths we consider. We don't pursue all possible truths. They're combinatorially explosive. I bet none of you are concerned about whether or not the number of paper clips in your bedroom correlates with the number of squirrels you might see that day. the number of such truths is overwhelming. And you'll say to me, notice, right, that's not important. Import. Take it in. It's not relevant. But it's not just one way. Yes, we use relevance to constrain truth, but we use truth to correct relevance. Tom, she's not angry. She's afraid. Look, pay attention. You're right. Relevance constrains truth, and truth causally corrects what we deem relevant.

1:04:23Dr. John Vervaeke:They're bound together.

1:04:29So, meaning is deeply interwoven with trust.

1:04:37Dr. John Vervaeke:we have to be able to trust each other now we trust each other by sharing meaning and the more deeply the meaning is we share the more we trust each other the more we trust each other the more we can indwell and internalize inspire each other and act as models of aspiration for each other so trust and meaning are like this they interweave but meaning also has to do with belonging this is the psychology of belonging This is the work of Kelly Allen and others. We need to belong. And this is her language. We need to fit in. Notice the language. And if we don't belong, we suffer loneliness and alienation, and we're physically and financially and emotionally probably in trouble.

1:05:23Dr. John Vervaeke:That's what her research shows. So meaning and belonging go together, and meaning and trust go together, and meaning and a kind of truth go together. Again, not just conceptual truth, but there's a Greek word, aletheia, how things disclose to us, how we can realize things, moments of realization. And it's interesting that we've got trust and belonging and truth all connected.

1:05:56Dr. John Vervaeke:there's an ancient word that's the etymological origin of truth and trust and also gives belonging it's the word troth we don't use it anymore but it shows up in things like betrothal I'm betrothed to this person

1:06:16Dr. John Vervaeke:there's this deep, deep connectedness there

1:06:24Dr. John Vervaeke:So this is part of what's going on in 40 Cox's Eye Cognition isn't in your head, it's between you and the world It's co-meaning, sense-making Making sense of our sense-making Is co-created by us and the world We already saw that with the agent arena mattering Relevance realization, however is very egocentric. It's about how things are relevant to me. Then I have to learn, if I want to communicate and commune, how to be relevant to others. And what's interesting is I start to face what Rosa calls resonance. And I can also get this relationship with the world. Resonance is when you turn a corner and there's a beautiful sunset, and you just stop and behold it.

1:07:11Dr. John Vervaeke:You just stop and behold it. You're reciprocally opening with it. You're just trying to let it go deeper into you and you're trying to go deeper into it. And it requires that there's a certain degree of uncontrollability to it. If you can completely control it, you won't be in resonance with it. This is like flow. Flow needs an environment that puts a demand on you and you have to stretch your skills to meet it.

1:07:41Dr. John Vervaeke:We need resonance. This is Hartmut Rose's argument, or our lives start to seem meaningless to us. But that connects up with everything we're talking about. But sometimes the resonance, that reciprocal opening, can turn into reverence. We can get so deep, we can flow so deeply and be so at one that we can touch what's onto a normative, the really real. And we more than behold, we like, we behold. And that has an impact on meaning in life. We need a theoretical construct that can meet up with all of this work, a growing body of work, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, around mystical experience, around resonance, around flow.

1:08:25Dr. John Vervaeke:We need meaning in life construct that can connect us well theoretically with this whole continuum. The problem with the meaning in life construct is it's propositionally fixated. It's fixated on propositions. It's fixated on our beliefs. What do we believe? Ask people what they believe. What do you believe? What do you believe? Is most of your connectedness carried by your beliefs? No, 4E Kong Sai says that most of your connectedness is carried by your skills, your procedural knowing, carried by your states of consciousness that make you present in the world. It's your perspectival knowing, and it's carried by your participatory knowing, your agency and your selfhood and your personhood, and whether or not you belong to yourself.

1:09:11Dr. John Vervaeke:that carries what's known as existential feelings. This is the work by Radkiff. I don't like the word feelings, because he argues at length that, unlike what we normally mean by feelings, he's talking about something that is, and this is his language, world-directed. It's connecting us to the world. What he's talking, he talks about experiences of derealization, depersonalization. He's a psychiatrist or philosopher of psychiatry. You know, people have the Capgras syndrome where they think all of their loved ones have been replaced by identical robots. Or they have Cotard symptoms. They'll say, this isn't my arm.

1:09:54Dr. John Vervaeke:Will you please amputate it? This isn't my arm. So sensed presence of connectedness that's non-propositional in nature. These people know, they have all the propositions about their arm. They have all the propositions about their beloved people. They still have most of their skills, but the sensed presence and the connectedness are gone. And then their sense of reality, their sense of being in a real world is really challenged. There's also the opposite of that, where that sensed presence of connectedness is better than the norm. and that's when people talk about the really real and states of at-one-ment.

1:10:43Dr. John Vervaeke:The current construct really can't deal with any of these points because it doesn't ask about the state of the world. It doesn't ask about worldview. It doesn't ask about the state of fittedness. Now that's really odd because we're going through a trust apocalypse, as Karen McCammon argues. Trust in all of our institutions at an all-time historical low. We're going through a loneliness epidemic, and loneliness is as bad on you as smoking. Lack of belonging, lack of connectedness. But interestingly, we should predict that using the psychological measure of meaning, like, we should go out and find that meaning in life is going down or poor.

1:11:38Dr. John Vervaeke:But in some of the studies done by the psychologists, meaning in life is above medium. Everybody's lives are quite meaningful. But if you were to ask those people, do you think the world's really ordered and beautiful? Let me ask you. Do you think the world is really ordered and beautiful? Do you really trust? Are you really connected and communing with it? Does it really inspire you and afford aspiration? Or are you trying to cocoon yourself from it as much as you possibly can? You're not communing, you're cocooning. But can we really cocoon? Look at COVID. We can't really.

1:12:22Dr. John Vervaeke:Now, the problem is those results are challenged by other results. There was a survey in the UK in 2019, much greater number of people, and 80 % of people said their lives are meaningless. What's going on? How can the scientific construct? You get ambiguous results when your construct is not well structured.

1:12:56Dr. John Vervaeke:Part of what's going on is another problem, which is behind that meaning is my personal,

1:13:06private possession.

1:13:09Dr. John Vervaeke:My meaning.

1:13:13Dr. John Vervaeke:It's an assumption that was given to us by modernity. from the European Enlightenment and so on. It's the idea of we're an autonomous, monological self in that we reason best when we are acting autonomously by our own and reasoning in our head, and cognition is like computation in our head. It's what Taylor, a great Canadian philosopher, calls the buffered self. But the self and its metacognition, being metacognitive is important to your sense of self. we test animals, the mirror test, which is a metacognitive test. Are they aware of their own appearance? Are they aware of their own cognition?

1:13:55Dr. John Vervaeke:Are they aware of their own body?

1:14:03Dr. John Vervaeke:Reason, metacognition, the self, are all dialogically developed. They're developed through dialogue with other people. so much work going on now Sperber and Mercier and a ton that reason is fundamentally dialogical in nature and of course meaning is too and personhood is inherently communal there are no persons without community there are no communities without person because being a person requires recognition and responsibility.

1:14:47Dr. John Vervaeke:So at the level of relevance realization, we don't want that autonomous, buffered self. We want the extended agent, the extended self, the extended person. What do you mean by extended agency? Niche construction. Organisms shape their environment, and the environment shapes them, and they're mutually fitting to each other. And you know what culture is? A way in which we connect to other people to speed and deepen that whole process. That's what culture is.

1:15:22Dr. John Vervaeke:You get resonance realization. When we're resonating with our world or with other people, that's extended selfhood. There's a shared narrative that allows us to indwell and internalize. We get what Siegel calls mind-sight resonance. I see into Arjun so I adjust myself so he can understand me and see better into me and then because he sees better into me he adjusts himself and we start doing this, we resonate and he's not a possession because there's a part of him that is always beyond my control so we can get into one of the most powerful forms of flow between each other we can get into this deep dialogue with each other and you've been in there you've been in those conversations that take on a life of their own and have their own story and narrative to them.

1:16:09Dr. John Vervaeke:And then you get extended personhood. This is reverence realization. Persons are responsible, listen to that word, to promises and permissions. No other organism is. You won't catch any animal making a promise to you. You do things that you don't want to do because you made promises, and one of the things you have to do as a person is keep your promises. Because if all of us stop keeping our promises, culture dies. And if culture dies, we're in deep trouble. And we also have to get permission from other people. Why? Because we seek to be recognized by other persons. If nobody recognizes you as a person, your personhood is in danger.

1:17:02Dr. John Vervaeke:That's why ostracizing or exiling people is so powerful.

1:17:10Dr. John Vervaeke:This was Hegel's great point. This is how he overturned Kant's notion of the autonomous self. We, how do we decide the use of words? Do we go to the word judge? Where does that normativity come from? I recognize when Arjun is using the words correctly, and I, ah, I connect to him. And then he recognizes. We are always having to recognize each other as having the correct authority to participate in a conversation. That's... We need an account of meaning in life that connects up to something that's going on at this personhood level. This is my friend Greg Enricus' notion of the justification hypothesis.

1:18:06Dr. John Vervaeke:We are always justifying ourselves. No other creature has to justify itself. And I want you to slow down and think, justification has a rational component to it. knowledge is justified true belief. How many of you are taught that? Justified. Yeah, justification. It goes into morality. Was that behavior justified? Of course, it's connected to justice. But many of you have probably forgotten it's also religious. It goes back to Christianity, especially the Protestant Reformation. Justification by faith. We are justified. We are made into persons. from God because of our faith, the way we commune and connect to the source of what is ultimately real.

1:18:59Dr. John Vervaeke:You understand I'm not offering an argument here for God, but I'm trying to show you how the account of meaning we're building here allows us to understand why the Protestants in the Protestant Reformation spoke that way and died for it.

1:19:29Dr. John Vervaeke:We can't address selfhood and narrative justification and worldview cultivation of wisdom with the current meaning and life construct can't do any of that it actually thwarts us and disconnects us from those important projects

1:19:58What this means

1:20:02Dr. John Vervaeke:Again, low existential resilience Which means people are vulnerable to despair

1:20:11Dr. John Vervaeke:Let's do something here Let's ask the scientists Who proposed this definition of meaning in life how do you address the question whether or not meaning in life is just an illusion after all it's just subjective and personal you're just projecting it onto an objectively valueless world

1:20:40Dr. John Vervaeke:William Desmond says this if you accept that if you accept the fact-valued economy given to us by the Enlightenment, that there's subjective values and there's objective facts, where's meaning in there? Is it a subjective value that is just projected onto an objectively valueless world by an organism that is objectively valueless and causally insignificant? That's just nihilism.

1:21:10That's just the hermeneutics of suspicion.

1:21:15Appearances are all deceiving.

1:21:22Dr. John Vervaeke:But here's the issue. If meaning is real, and it's a real relation, and it's a real coordination of how our agency, our self, and our person connects individually and collectively to reality, then it does not clearly sort into fact or value. if it's about relevance is relevance an objective fact? is this objectively relevant? it doesn't make no sense is relevance just a subjective preference? no, you can be wrong you thought she was angry but she's afraid, you're judging the wrong things as relevant it's neither objective nor subjective it is again the real relation it's an affordance, it's an adaptivity It's real fittedness.

1:22:20Dr. John Vervaeke:And in that way, it's like reason. Is reason subjective or objective? Before you answer, think about how either one of those answers destroys you. It has to connect your agency and your subjectivity to reality in both ways. What's relevant constrains what you look at, but what you look at corrects what you judge relevant.

1:22:56So,

1:23:02Dr. John Vervaeke:it's interesting that Metz gets very close to that. He takes a great deal of time, careful, by the way, and I have to thank Arjun. and Arjun read through this very carefully. I had a much more superficial reading, so I'm really thankful and relied on his help. But he rejects, he completely rejects any subjectivist notions of meaning, like we just did there. He rejects most of the, what he calls objectivist accounts of meaning. And then he comes around to a version, but I think it's actually really close to transjectivity. So let's do this just a little bit. He criticizes Wolff, because Wolfe says that, well, meaning in life is when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness, but there's no such thing as objective attractiveness.

1:23:55Dr. John Vervaeke:Oh, no. Oh, no. Okay, so that's the threat of nihilism, right? And he says, well, no, the problem is that subjective attraction meeting objective attractiveness, it's really vague. It's really vague. One of the things we can do to respond to that is we can make use of Stephen Smith in this wonderful book, Appeal and Attitude, Prospects for Ultimate Meaning, and instead talk about instead of attraction, talk about appeal. Things are appealing to us. Why does that matter? Appeal means to call. When I appeal to you, I'm calling to you. When things are appealing to us. It's not we're just attracted to them.

1:24:44Dr. John Vervaeke:Do you see the difference? They are calling to us. They are promising some potential fittedness that is good for us and good to us in some way. And he replaces...

1:25:03Dr. John Vervaeke:I don't think he knows about wolves, so that's incorrect. But he says, let's talk about what he calls attitude. Attitude is your orientation, your stance. Are you correctly oriented such that you can connect to what is appealing to you in a right relationship? Notice how once you shift and try to get a little bit clearer about what's really going on, do you really experience your moments of meaning as projections? When you turn the corner as the sunlight, are you just projecting? or something calling you such that you stop and interrupt your day and you want to behold it and participate into it.

1:25:43Dr. John Vervaeke:And like the people that have a higher state of consciousness, you want to at least momentarily conform to it and realize it, let it go deeply into you and you deeply into it. Why are you doing that if it's just an illusion? Well, it's not because affordances and adaptivity are fittedness at the level of agency, selfhood, and person are constitutive of everything we do. See, relevance realization finds relevance realization intrinsically interesting. Why? Because if it doesn't take care of itself, it will go wrong. That's why you have insight. Insight is evidence that relevance realization is interested in relevance realization because it is seeking to correct relevance realization so it connects better to what's real and empowers you to take the right agency, be the right self, have the proper responsibilities as a person in that situation, to be wise.

1:26:56Dr. John Vervaeke:you are intrinsically interested in the causes and conditions of what makes meaning making which I don't like as a term, I would rather call it meaning cultivation what makes meaning cultivation possible

1:27:19Dr. John Vervaeke:see when things can call to us they can demand from us. Flow requires situations that are demanding for us, demand that we push our skills to the limit and beyond. That's not the same thing as attraction.

1:27:45Dr. John Vervaeke:What we're talking about with religio is something that's fundamental to human existence at the level of agency, self, and person. This is exactly Metz's theory. He calls it a kind of objectivity. I don't think it really is. Or objectivism, I should say. Which is not a good name because it sounds like he's talking about Ayn Rand and that's just disaster no matter what you do. So I think it's closer to being transjective. The betweenness, the metaxu, the connectedness, the religio, the fittedness, the affordance, the adaptivity. He proposes a fundamentality theory. And I've already said, well, yeah, once you correct with critique what's going on in Wolf and you bring in some Smith and you bring in the arguments here, you're getting to something that's fundamental to human existence at the level of agency, selfhood, and personhood.

1:28:39Dr. John Vervaeke:So here's his definition. He's going to refine it, but I'm not going to do the refined version because it would take too long. here's his more succinct initial presentation the later versions don't overturn it they just expand on it a human person notice the word by the way a human person's life is meaningful the more she employs her reason and in ways that positively orient rationality towards fundamental conditions notice that's not subjective but it's not really objective because it's about fit fundamental conditions of human existence that's very deeply aligned and convergible with what we're arguing

1:29:37Dr. John Vervaeke:we're talking about the constraints and the causes

1:29:44Dr. John Vervaeke:of connectedness, religio. Both this way, agent and arena, self and story, person and community, and this way, between all of them, so that we are at peace while we are deeply connected. we're talking about wisdom that enhances our religio our connectedness individually and collectively and can take us towards potentially ultimate meaning as Smith said and Yadin's work points to we're talking about something not just about our beliefs we're talking about our skills and our perspectives and our character Remember I said I would get back to it? Now I am. We're talking about virtue because virtue involves all of those.

1:30:40Dr. John Vervaeke:We're talking about virtuosity, something that's inspirational and aspirational affordant that is flowing for us, that's inducing maturation. We have virtue and virtuosity. We have wisdom.

1:30:57Dr. John Vervaeke:Set it in multiple different and converging ways. If I had to put it, if we had to put it, sorry, into a very succinct thing, what's wrong with the current psychological notion of meaning in life? Is that meaning cultivation is separate, isolated, unconnected from wisdom cultivation.

1:31:23Dr. John Vervaeke:But that current construct, our Western folk and academic construct of meaning in life, is the anomaly. It is not the cultural historical norm. nor does it address all of these philosophical and psychological arguments. That is the thorough critique of the current construct of meaning in life. So I'm now going to sign up for a minute and ask Arjun to comment to the degree that he has time to do. First off, thank you for doing such a great overview of our work. obviously in my opinion you contributed the bulk of the work and i was only there for a small part but i think that the presentation here is essential to understanding and improving on the construct right in science we rely on the construct for everything that we operationalize and as we've said here if the construct is so deeply flawed then the experiments that follow will also be similarly flawed.

1:32:34I want to touch on subjectivity and objectivity a little bit further and how transjectivity, as you said, fits into that divide. We've talked about how subjectivity limits us and prevents us from interfacing with what's really real. In my own experience, and also as I've heard from many other people, if we take this subjectivist approach, we become open to cosmic absurdity, which is a term that John uses, it's the idea that because we're physically smaller than most everything in the universe, such as stars or galaxies, that somehow we are insignificant. So when the cosmic scale bears down upon us, if we adopt a subjectivist approach, then we are so easily overwhelmed that we fall into nihilism, which is what happened to me and which is what happens to a lot of other people.

1:33:33So one would think that the solution is to adopt objectivity. Well, that's also flawed because it refuses to admit our subjective well-being plays a role in meaning in life, which is something we've discussed as well, which ultimately plays into the idea that we need to develop a new metaphysics for understanding our place in the world. And that's what transjectivity is. John, do you want to talk a little bit more about defining transjectivity? exactly what it is.

1:34:01Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, I mean, and here I want to give credit also to somebody who has preceded me with astonishingly beautiful work, and I'm going to be recording a conversation, some conversation with him, William Desmond, and his whole work. He does a book on the being in the between, ethics in the between, God in the between. He's trying to carry out all the major categories. This is the metacological, the between. And it's exactly this idea that is also at the center of for e-cognitive science. The cognition is not in your head, but it is embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended. It's about how you are dynamically coupled at multiple levels to your environment in loops of different temporal and spatial depth.

1:34:47Dr. John Vervaeke:And this also lines up with predictive processing models. Some of you might realize it also. Work like Michael Levin does with the idea of a cognitive light cone for talking about how intelligent an organism is. This is all about the between, the connectedness, the transjectivity. So you've got great work in philosophy by Desmond. You've got 4E, cognitive science. And then, as we've tried to argue, if you actually go in and try to clear up these problems in meaning in life, you also get to transjectivity. And many of you who have a philosophical education will probably be noting that we are relying on arguments by Wittgenstein and Heidegger, who are also Heidegger's notion of aletheia, Wittgenstein's argument that there's no private language.

1:35:38Dr. John Vervaeke:that they were trying to break us out of this Cartesian framework in which there's the subjective and the objective, there's value and fact, there's is and there's ought. And all of these things have caused just unendingly terrific problems in philosophy and science. And so in many different quarters, biology, 4E, cognitive science, philosophy, both continental and analytic, There has been a sustained effort to try and break us out of that Cartesian prison. And we're extending that effort to the meaning in life construct. Yeah, the subjective objective dichotomy isn't something that's just constrained to this specific topic that we're dealing with.

1:36:30Even in physics, for example, in quantum mechanics, the measurement problem, which some of you might have heard of, particularly describes how we don't have an idea of what measurement even is and what the observer is because we've for so long neglected the role of the observer in understanding how the system works. similar principles at play here. If you don't understand the observer and how the observer is affecting the system, how the system affects the observer, then your explanation for the phenomenon will be incomplete. Thank you.

1:37:06Dr. John Vervaeke:That's excellent. We could also point to other convergent work by Frank Gleiser and Thompson, The Blind Spot, and their critique about how one interpretation of the scientific worldview, a standard naturalism, has never included or made a proper place for the meaningful experience of scientists doing science in its ontology. So the one thing that doesn't fit into its ontology is the very thing it's relying on to generate its worldview. And so that's why they call it the blind spot. I strongly recommend that book because it canvases like what Arjun did with physics. It canvases a lot of these kinds of issues in physics, in biology, in cognition.

1:37:48Dr. John Vervaeke:a little shout out they talk about the central blind spot and cognition being the problem of relevance realization and so yeah this is right this is a species of a larger genus and the species are not disconnected they all are interwoven together this is a larger nested network of problems and we need to address it because I've been trying as I've alluded several times meaning in life really matters to human lives in profound ways. Precisely. It's not something that is just relegated to some ivory tower academic paper. This is a movement that we're trying to build because it is addressing real problems that we see in our society right now.

1:38:35The problem of meaning is something that applies to the person you see around the block, to people you see on the street, your friends, your family, your neighbors. The problem of meaning is fundamental to being human. And if we don't adequately resolve this issue right now, it's just going to create further and further repercussions down the line. And at that point, it might be too late for us.

1:39:00Dr. John Vervaeke:Yes. So Arjun is alluding to the argument, which I'm not going to review here from Awakening for the Meaning Crisis, that if you think that the argument that we're weaving here about the interpenetration, the interweaving of wisdom and meaning cultivation. Our culture has entered into a meaning crisis which could also be described as a wisdom famine. We don't know where to go to look for wisdom. The institutions that used to be central to wisdom like monasteries, how central is a monastery to your life? The role models we used to have, all of these have disappeared. There's a lot more, but that's the nature of the meaning crisis.

1:39:45Dr. John Vervaeke:And of course, that vacuum will not remain unfilled. We try to fill it with other things. And so we've got a lot of symptoms of the meaning crisis. I won't go into this, but you can take a look at that book. You can take a look at the video series. So our concern is we want to be able to address these issues that people are facing around absurdity and loneliness, a general sense that the world is full of bullshit and disordered in ways that are toxic to human beings. More and more and more. I won't go on to the meeting crisis, because if I start talking about it, I'll talk for 50 hours. So not only is the issue of meeting in a larger network of problems, that network of problems is, as Arjun said, not ivory tower.

1:40:36Dr. John Vervaeke:it is a pervasive corrosion to our culture. Our culture, I want to be clear, it's not like we're the only culture that's ever had a meaning crisis. Meaning crises have arisen at different times at different places. And part of what we do in the book is look at that historically. We always face the perennial problem of falling into despair or self-destruction or both, which is what suicide is, despair and self-deceptive, self-destructive, destruction. We always face that threat. The issue isn't that. That's perennial. The issue is, in what way is your culture helping you to wisely cultivate a meaning that is shareable with others so that you can trust them, so that we can work together to commune in the ways that help deepen our agency, selfhood, and personhood?

1:41:29I couldn't have put it better myself. And that's why you're the professor here.

1:41:35Dr. John Vervaeke:yeah go ahead please please i know you're pressed for time so i want you to take control of everything one more thing i want to talk about here is how the word meaning itself is deeply confounded the jingle jangle problem is john tells us in cognitive science when we talk about meaning and meaning in life especially we're describing a very thick phenomenon right it's descriptive it's a value of it's aspirational but the term meaning itself can mean many things you see the way i just use even mean there yeah in this case when we talk about meaning in life we're talking about it i think applied specifically to human beings it's not something that could be applied to other categories of entities like uh i won't use this framework of meaning to to evaluate whether the american revolution was meaningful it's the same here so our focus on meaning in life is very much on how humans should live, how humans should aspire, how they should be evaluated, how we should describe the meaning in their lives, and not so much regarding other areas of philosophical interest.

1:42:42Excellent.

1:42:43Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, I totally, I'm totally in agreement consonant with that. I think that's exactly right. This is a pervasive problem. Jingle jangle, I can never remember which one it is. We'll have multiple names for the same phenomena or will have the same name for multiple phenomena. This is not my idea, by the way. I taught it to Arjun, but it's not my idea. This is a pervasive criticism that is about a pervasive problem in psychology and the social sciences, the jingle-jangle problem. We talked about it all the time. We talked about it, I think, in the paper in which Igor Grossman was the lead author on wisdom in a polarized world.

1:43:22Dr. John Vervaeke:so we are trying to get rid of that noise and the way people slip and slide around in that in a way that is actually very unhelpful and one more thing i want to talk about it's the appeal to phenomenology in our arguments and in most arguments regarding meaning in life i think some people might think that we're appealing to phenomenology too much that trying to appeal to how people feel and how they intuit the world is actually a disadvantage of our theory but i think it's actually the opposite meaning life is a phenomenological phenomenon it is something that is so deeply connected to your existence in the world to your conscious experience to how you feel to how you act to how you behave, that it is impossible to disconnect this phenomenal perspective from any theory of meaning in life.

1:44:21What we should be trying to do, and what we're trying to do here as well, is connect that phenomenal perspective to propositions that we create and descriptions that we make so that we can explain not only the experiences that people have, but also generate predictions for how they might feel under different circumstances.

1:44:41Dr. John Vervaeke:Yes. What I was giving the presentation and what we're trying to do is, and this is, of course, something that was ultimately inspired in me by my good friend, Evan Thompson. We're trying to link powerfully, integrate the functionality and the phenomenology. Relevance realization, for example, is both a highly functional account of what you're doing, solving problems, etc., but it's also phenomenological. phenomenological, what is salient to you, how you're sizing up things, what's foregrounded and backgrounded, what you're paying attention to, what appeals to you. But it's also explaining how your intelligence is operating and functioning in the world, et cetera.

1:45:22Dr. John Vervaeke:So, part of our methodological orientation is to constantly bind together the phenomenology and the functionality so they are mutually informing each other and transforming each other in a way that is theoretically fruitful.

1:45:40That's all I have to say on the matter so far. We'll continue to build on this argument, I think. We'll continue to look for more plausible convergence with other sources, as John said. And hopefully we'll be able to put this in a paper sometime soon so that we have it formalized and so that we can put everything together in a more cohesive way.

1:46:02Dr. John Vervaeke:That's the plan. And of course, we're going to iterate this again. we have both committed to a longer project, longer term, not only sort of finishing this and hopefully, you know, a publication, we also want to do work on a positive theory in the sense of, okay, now tell us more about, like, the positive, like tell us more positively about how one goes about doing this, cultivating meaning and wisdom together, and so forth. And so that, of course, is tricky. But we've already made a lot of proposals that have started to lay the foundation for that positive response to the criticism. But we're going to also do that.

1:46:55Dr. John Vervaeke:We're both looking forward to it. I'm very interested and encouraged by the fact that there are many people, like think of Smith's book, Appeal and Attitude, Prospects for Ultimate Meaning. that's a really powerful subtitle because I'm really interested in the degree to which people need a more ultimate kind of meaning when they fall into deeper versions of a meaning crisis and nihilism, loneliness issues like that and also sort of maladaptive displacement in which you try to recover through a kind of religious commitment to politics and polarization and you try to make that the domain in which you're going to get this all satisfied.

1:47:47Dr. John Vervaeke:Or you take up a relationship to a fictional universe, MCU, and you're trying to get satisfied. Again, I won't go into all the ways in which people have surrogacies for proper meaning in life, but a good theory of meaning in life should offer people alleviation to suffering and good alternatives to surrogates, especially maladaptive ones. So that's what we're going to also do in the more positive theory.

1:48:19Yep, and I think with that, we're pretty much wrapped up here. I want to thank you again, Julian, for having me on. A great pleasure to be here. It's a great pleasure to work with you, and I look forward to our continuing partnership.

1:48:32Dr. John Vervaeke:It's been a great pleasure having you on, and I appreciate your presence. It allowed me to share credit with you and also be encouraged by you. And I like the way you brought a personal dimension to it, especially the perspective of a young adult, people who are facing some of the most stringent challenges around meaning. So I want to thank you very much. I want to thank you for your integrity and your genuineness. So thank you very much. Thank you, everyone. there is more to come.