#974 - Joe Folley - Existential Philosophy, Nietzsche, Suffering & Self-Awareness

25:38If your whole aim in life is to continue to overcome resistance or beat challenges or however you want to put it, then it is a very kind of process -based philosophy. It's nature's very keen on... Atomic habits for the 1800s. Yeah, a little bit. I, interestingly, I always thought that, I, atomic habits reminds me very much of like this, this chat, sorry, I don't go off topic now. This chapter in Aristotle. So Aristotle's entire philosophy is based around habits and like his whole like picture of the virtuous human is based around habituated behaviors. So I always thought, you know, there's a chapter in Nicaramacan ethics that whenever I'm, I'm sort of teaching it, in occasion go to speaker schools and teach it, yeah, and teach things.

26:16And one of the, I always refer to one of the chapters as sort of atomic habits and the kind of four century BC. But anyway, but yeah, it is, I think that, again, Nietzsche's philosophy is very kind of taking joy in the journey sort of way. But again, it's significantly less, I don't know, it's significantly less fun than I just put it. It's really into the nitty gritty of suffering, which can imagine, this is a man who spends, like a good portion of his life in really unbearable pay. So you can see how this was a really imperative question for him to answer. But nonetheless, he does also eventually conceive of overcoming resistance and the process of overcoming resistance as a joyful activity.

27:03Right. So what would be his advice to somebody who keeps getting kicked in the nuts over and over and is regularly, or keeps having a splitting headache that lasts for months on end? what would his sort of layperson advice be to them about how to deal with that? So Nietzsche's ultimate goal for all of his philosophy is this concept of Amel Farty, which I think is a phrase that he borrowed from Sturke philosophy but is using it in a very different way. So his the kind of culmination of his philosophical project is the idea of loving literally everything that happens to you and not merely kind of being content or kind of accepting it but truly loving it.

27:46And it's kind of, I mean, he definitely never got there because, you know, if you read his letters, he's not necessarily a happy bunny a lot of the time. But that's so the advice that he, or he, when he's writing about how he deals with his own pay, he largely talks about it as, as a kind of resistance to overcome. So something that he's in some twisted way enjoying overcoming. He uses, and he kind of channels it into his writing. So he has these splitting headaches, and he has this economy is that metaphor, but he talks about how it was so painful that it kind of focused his mind in a strange sense.

28:21And so he channeled that pain into his writing or into his work. And although that's not a bit of his formal philosophy, it is nonetheless kind of reminiscent of some of the stuff he does say in his full philosophy. He talks about kind of sublimating pain or suffering or sublimating your drives towards this kind of organized will, whose aim is fundamentally to overcome resistance. and as a result must, will resistance for themselves? Would that mean that a life without resistance would be kind of like a hell? Yeah, essentially, he's very worried about human potential. So one of the images from Nietzsche's philosophy that really sticks out to a lot of people is the figure of the last man, which is a character and thus -based Earth -istra, where the last man is sort of a kind of passive nihilist, but the thing that they're hankering after is contentment.

29:13So, can not contentment in the kind of, I don't know, like Buddhist sense, I suppose, of kind of reaching Nevada, or the nature also has a problem with that. This sort of, all right, I'm going to avoid challenge and resistance as much as I possibly can. And there are two reasons why nature is opposed to this. The first is that he's got this sort of, I don't wanna call it sentimental, but he's got this real investment in the idea of humans achieving their potential. You see this, kind of, again, all through his works. even he has an essay called Shop and Hower as Educator, where he's kind of reflecting on the work of After Shop and Hower.

29:45And in that, he has this kind of like almost mini rant in the middle of the essay, which is like really fascinating, about how he just like absolutely cannot stand it when people don't in his words, kind of embrace what they could uniquely be as there, and instead allow these other pressures to interfere with, again, to kind of invoke his terms, to interfere with them becoming who they are. If resistance isn't there, he's worried that humanity would just kind of decay into this like sludge that doesn't do anything. He's worried that all will do is kind of sit around on our sofas, pursuing comfort, avoiding pain.

30:21And as a result, we will also never feel for him the kind of joys of actually ending up overcoming resistance. So I mean, again, it still sounds very abstract when you put like this. There's actually quite a quite intuitive thought where, you know, imagine that, imagine that you'd literally never struggled in life. Like, I understand, you know, I'm sure that Nietzsche wouldn't like actually wish his headache upon himself. But we could imagine a person who literally never encounters any struggle. Well, if we all recognize that there's a real feeling of achievement in overcoming some kind of struggle or resistance, even if it's just a small one, then for Nietzsche, this person will never experience that sort of, they will never experience the kind of fulfillment that comes with having overcome something.

31:09Does that mean that he hates weak people? Was he not a fan of sort of cowardly weak people? Yeah, it's interesting because I mean, in a lot of ways arguably Nietzsche wasn't like a massively strong person. You know, he was a nervous wreck for much of his life. Again, he suffered from a terrible chronic pain condition. And so there's this sort of back and forth that goes on in a lot of kind of popular discussions on Nietzsche, where people sort of quite understandably pose the question of does Nietzsche really live up to his own ideal here? And again, if we perceive of power as overcoming resistance, then arguably he gets some of the way there.

31:47But you know, I think that it is perfectly plausible to turn Nietzsche's challenge back on him and say, well, I'm going to say, Matt, you've got rejected by a couple of girls and then you decided you hated women as a whole. And you spend, you kind of ran from basically any criticism that you got and you kind of retreated to your cabin and went on walks in the Alps and that doesn't sound like it's overcoming resistance all that much. So let's bring it back to Nietzsche's view on weak people. Yeah, he has a real content for them. Like in a way that I think it's very easy to run from when you're reading Nietzsche.

32:24Because, you know, we've had 70 years of, you know, so well, wasn't it? Yeah, since the end of World War II, so 80 years now, of people going, okay, the Nazis were real fan of Nietzsche. This seems a bit, have they misinterpreted him? What's been going on here? And basically everyone agrees that, yeah, okay, they have misinterpreted him in some key ways. This does sometimes lead to the creation of what I call fluffy bunny Nietzsche, which is where you sort of imbue Nietzsche with whatever you personally think is a really good thing. and pretend that he said it, which is kind of relatively easy to do on the basis that Nietzsche himself says an awful lot of things, a lot of which contradicts one another.

33:02It let you actually, you can kind of pick and choose little bits and create your own sort of model Nietzsche that says everything that you want him to say. But nonetheless, Nietzsche does have a real contempt for what he sees as weakness. And I kind of, I haven't done his wonder to what extent he turned that content on himself. I think that he has this view for a number of reasons. The first is that he sort of thinks that weakness breeds dishonesty. So again, this comes back to that kind of sour grapes point. But secondly, he thinks that in his view, a kind of unwillingness to overcome resistance, which is broadly how he defines weakness, kind of an unwillingness or an inability to overcome resistance, is going to eventually lead this person to kind of become an analyst.

33:49So Nisha has this very confusing way of talking about like weak people or quote unquote weak people because again, he has a kind of weird esoteric definition for us whereby he quite often says, oh yeah man, like I hate them, I have scorned for them or something like that. And then at other points he says, no, no, I love all people. And you sit there and you think, well, what, these things are very difficult to go together. And a lot of the time this is resolved by interpreters by saying something like, well, if you imagine that Nietzsche's project is for everyone to become willing and able to overcome resistance, because he truly thinks whether he's right or wrong, he truly thinks that that is the way that you can not become nihilistic in a world without God and without any kind of given meaning feel self.

34:37Then when he's kind of hard on weak people, I think a lot of interpreters will kind of try and reinterpret this. And you know, I think that probably, this thing is a broadly sensible interpretation, as a kind of tough dad attitude. It would be in some way condescending to extend pity to people when Nietzsche fully knows that they could become this kind of, this figure of uniquely themselves and they could overcome resistance. So that's one of his broad critiques of compassion, which is sort of very difficult to get your head around is these things compassion is bad for the person that is the person that one is being compassionate towards.

35:19You think that you're in some way holding them back. Which again, it's again, it's like a it's a very abstract point when Nietzsche puts it. But again, we kind of all recognize that whether you want to take it as extreme as Nietzsche does, that there are contexts where this attitude is appropriate. And I'm thinking of my own dad, right? My dad was sort of very, you must overcome challenges type thing. And, you know, hindsight, I'm very, very grateful for that. Because it was, it kind of allowed, it kind of taught me how to be more independent. You know, I think of some people I know who had maybe much, and I quote unquote softer parents, and actually, I don't know, did that benefit them?

35:58I don't I think it did. Don't you worry, I mean, I think that Nietzsche's way of putting this is probably far beyond anything that most people want to accept now, because he is really, really anti -compassion and anti -pity. There are like a couple of passages where he's talking about, oh yeah, well you can be magnanimous if you want, but on the whole he's very, very, very hard on people that he perceives as weak. In other news, I've been lifting weights for about 15 years now, and this year has been the most progress I've made since my new gains. And almost all of that can be laid at the feet of Dr.

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37:07And you can do that too. You can follow the exact same training plan that I have and get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength .com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom. A checkout. That's rpstrength .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. them, a checkout. What's the role of the ubermensch then? So the ubermensch is interestingly, despite the fact that it's like the thing that people know about Nietzsche, like the ubermensch is is married to Nietzsche in popular consciousness. It only comes up in the specs of our history.

37:41And the purpose of the ubermensch for Nietzsche is it's at that point, it's someone that It is strong enough to make life seem meaningful and in his terms create values, even recognizing that there is no God, the world is in itself valueless. The Uber Ventures somebody that can look at that and say, all right, bring it on man, I'm going to create values for this world. The actual term Uber Ventures is very quickly abandoned in favour of other things. So this figure then evolves in later work into figures like the new philosophers and the new philosophers are also creating values. So you can tell that they're doing a very similar job.

38:24But again, they're given a very different name. And eventually, you know, this ends up culminating in his kind of final word for this, is Dionysian wisdom. Which again, it's the same kind of idea. It's this idea that you can look at the world. And most importantly, look at the really awful things in the world. You know, all of the stuff that you would hate to go through and in some sense learn to celebrate it and each sort of doesn't pretend that this is going to be an easy thing to do as I say I think it's it's I don't think that he would say that he accomplished that Um, but it's something that he at least Believes to be possible and I don't know.

38:55I'm a bit more skeptical, but that's kind of his position on things Hmm. You said uh, I've heard you say dostaethgi changed you Why yeah, absolutely what why did that happen Partly because I think that it's very easy to compute ideas about resentment or hatred or in the ways that these kind of eat you up inside. So not just, not just that it's like an nasty thing to do to someone else, but it's an nasty thing to do to yourself. There are some lessons I find where you can really learn them cognitively, but either you you need to find them out for yourself. It through kind of no matter how many times somebody has told you something.

39:37Or, and I think this is one of the strange benefits of really, really good novels, is that because you get inside as much as possible the head of the protagonist or the characters, you can kind of feel the lesson in a way that you might have processed intellectually but hasn't kind of, and if on to a better way of phrasing it, like sunk down to the bones. I don't know, again, it's very difficult to talk about this, it sounds really wooey, but I feel like most people kind of know roughly what I mean, right? You know, it's, we've all had moments where we've learnt something cognitively, maybe from a psychology paper, and it's true, right?

40:11We know it's true, and we read it and we think, yeah, I'm definitely going to do that, right? Like, that's in the old, that's in the noggin now, and it's never coming out. And then immediately you just revert back to your old behaviors. And I think something, for me reading Dostoevsky, now I kind of, I like talking about Dostoevsky just because I think that despite the fact that I'm an agnostic and he's a diehard Orthodox Christian. We have a lot to agree upon. I think one of the benefits of reading these Dostoevsky books and indeed any novels that really resonate with you is that they allow you to speak directly to your emotions in a way that just makes it much more likely to stick in.

40:49I can kind of cognitively think, oh yeah, resentment is a self -destructive emotion that I should try and expunge really at all costs. which is a very difficult thing to do. I think we all end up feeling resentful sometimes. But nonetheless, it's very easy to think that. The idea of, okay, I've spent sort of like three hours, no trying to go on to pretty short work. So I spent like three to five hours with this guy who's just a bust, just kind of a miserable prick. Like, yeah, is, really not the word for you. He's just kind of, he delights in the misery of others and delights in his own misery, but it's not true delight.

41:27It's this self -destructive outlook on life. If I think about not becoming the underground man, that's much more likely to stick in my head. I think that, you know, Noce from Underground is a book that I would really recommend to everyone because, again, it's very difficult to put into words, but you really come away from it thinking, oh, wow, I may have known before that not caring about other people and only being out for yourself and trying to be an egoist and feeling all resentful. The world's thinking the world hates me and hating the world in return. I kind of cognitively knew all those things, what bad things to do.

42:03But this kind of really hammers at home in a way that is truly emotionally unforgettable. Yeah, that's a lovely way to put it. It's interesting to me reading fiction. I'm not able to get through old fiction as easily as I can get through new sci -fi. If you put a fucking Blake Crouch or a Max Barry or a PS Brown book in front of me, I'll eat that up. If you put some Dostoyev scheme in front of me, I'm going to have to do this in five page bites. But anyway, my point being getting lessons to sink below the neck are a pretty difficult thing to do. And it's definitely the curse of the sort of room I should pay attention to this.

42:51Pay attention to that. You're shouting at your own gut and sister, saying you will pay attention to this. And it goes, yeah, sure I'll do that. And then as you say, you step out of the house and you forget it all. Whereas Alex had this really lovely idea, actually, which I think is related to this with regards to a anti -atheist argument. The thing that's most real to humans is personification and narrative and story and archetype and good and evil and myth and motivation and human psychology and relations. And that is what the world of atheism is telling everybody to let go of. The thing which to them is most real and most true and most easy to understand and most compelling.

43:41and instead in its place, saying, be compelled by statistics and data and theory. And it's all sterile and gray, brown, sludge, and there's no reason for it other than just raw data. And this is what the spreadsheet says. And I think kind of the fiction versus nonfiction thing is not necessarily too dissimilar to that. We all love the idea of being as compelled by atomic habits as we would be by reading Dostoevsky. But, you know, and this is, you even see this, why is it the case, apart from, I guess, like, explanatory depth, why is it the case that nonfiction books are filled with anecdotes and little portable stories, or because it's more engaging, but also because you know So this will hammer the point at home better than the statistics can.

44:37Absolutely, I think that, you know, where the, again, it's, it's, it's, it's different because narratives, especially, you know, fictional narratives are on their face false. So in some sense, this proposes a challenge to anyone reading them right, because you want to learn from them, you know, I want to pick up a Dostoevsky book and learn from it, but I can't just take everything that I'm reading a lie. I know I'm reading a lie. You, you can write story about anything, you know, I can write a story about, about whatever whatever I wanted it, it wouldn't make it have any lessons in. So you've kind of got this weird two -part division in what you're doing.

45:08Well, like, one kind of, you know, critical side, you've got to think, well, you know, this is a fiction book. I can't take everything it says as it is read. Like, even its allegorical lessons. I can't just kind of take them on board because this is the product of one person's mind. And one person's mind is eminently fallal. On the other hand, just approaching the world in this incredibly analytic, I'm never going to put anything into any kind of narrative. I'm not going to talk to my emotions if that makes sense. I'm not going to appeal to the mature. I'm just going to have propositions and relations between propositions.

45:41That's really hard to learn from. And also, again, learn from in this kind of emotional sense. I also think that it's a quite an empty feeling way to live. And I think that, you know, part of the reason why we perhaps have some recognises is actually we're very good at telling stories. Like if you give people some information, they're almost immediately sorted into a story if they can. It's because, you know, this is fantastic. There are loads of memory techniques and the monics that are just based on this idea, you know, you tell a story about something. And I'm, again, to bring this back to Dostoevsky and even to tie in Neutral a little bit.

46:19I think one of the things that reading a novel by Dostoevsky does is it takes these lessons that you may or may not have heard before about psychology and the human condition if you want to call it that. And all of a sudden, you are emotionally engaged with it. In kind of to use Nietzsche's terminology, it's not just appealing to your cognitive side. It's appealing to your basic instincts. And they're a lot stronger. It's very hard to think yourself into motivation, into real consistent motivation. But if you really feel like something's meaningful and worth getting, you naturally end up following it.

46:52I mean, my kind of part towards this way of thinking is very strange. At University, I kind of basically just did logic, like kind of formal logic. So I was like, I did like the driest form of philosophy, imagine, where you just sit there and you've got a proposition, they're like, well, prove this. And you sit there, and for 45 minutes you go, I give up a new email, the lecturer. But in theory, you sit there and you finish proving it. And I kind of, you know, as I got a little bit older, I say older, I'm like 25. But as I kind of, as the rest of my brain might kind of grew into my mid -20s, I kind of thought, yeah, no, there is really a place for this kind of slightly nebulous, but nonetheless definitely there, um, idea of taking a really great book from the past, and using that to learn a lesson that you know independently is a good lesson.

47:41But that's when it's presented in this narrative form really sinks in, and all of a sudden you can enact it. It's interesting. Propositions and relations between propositions is actually what Alex calls date night on a Friday, which I... I'm recording with Alex tomorrow about the history of love there. I'm very sorry there. This sounds to me a little bit related to the sort of danger of hyperconsciousness, this sort of self -referential thinking. How does that play a role? Again, we hinted here at the perils of the sort of ruminative cerebral, praying at the cognitive horsepower alter thinker.

48:25What's the danger of hyperconsciousness? So, again, this is a really prominent theme in Notes from Underground. One of the things that the underground man is suffering from is what he calls the disease of high for consciousness, which is effectively that he can't act naturally. And by naturally, I sort of mean he sort of lives his entire life ever so slightly outside his own perspective. It's as if he's moving through the world, kind of viewing himself from a third person perspective, like a video camera, like a video camera's following him around and tries he might, he can't inhabit his own first person perspective.

49:05He's like stuck in this third person view. And again, I don't know, again, this sort of one of the interesting things about reading Dostoevsky is very hard to then go away and kind of go, oh, there's all of this empirical literature on kind of n equals 2 ,000 people that verifies this, but I'm willing to bet that at least a fair proportion of people have had this happened to them, especially if they're of the more kind of ruminati type. Like one of the reasons why Noxumanagam really appeals to me is because we have a lot of narratives, and we're told as kids, right? Don't think before you act.

49:36Don't just act. And I think the fair amounts of the population, myself included, really ran with that and went right, I'm going to think, and I'm going to keep thinking until I'm really sure what I'm going to do. And I'm never going to like all of those kind of instincts and more kind of, I'm, you know, forget about those. Those are those are complete nonsense. I'm going to sit here and I'm going to calculate until I know exactly what's going to happen. And one of the, one of the things that, or one of the kind of sub -arguments I suppose if you like, of Noxuman background, is that Ostef's he's attempting to illustrate.

50:06This is simply not how you can live your life in any kind of compelling fashion. He's not, you know, saying you need to act without thinking at all. He's more trying to indicate that the needs that a person has can't simply be satisfied by cognition. He's largely responding to other thinkers at the time who are kind of proposing a theory of a human fulfillment called rational egoism, which is where you organize society around people rationally pursuing their own ends and everything turns out fine. And Dostoyev's point is that no, people aren't rational enough for that. And moreover, they'd be miserable if they tried to be.

50:44There's a line in Hamlet, thus conscience does make cowards of us all this idea that self -awareness is paralyzing. And it seems unbelievably linked here. Yes. And again, it's one of those things like I don't, I can't appeal to like airtight scientific evidence. This is a much better phenomenon. I can only appeal to your own experiences. But this is again, one of the really nice things about reading a, you know, a kind of psychological novelist like Dostoevsky or like another example is the French thinker Stondard. When you're reading a very, very broad study, like studying 2 ,000 people by necessity, any conclusion that that study comes to is probably, it's probably going to apply to you.

51:26It also probably isn't going to be as detailed as you might like. Just because, you know, this isn't a fault. This is exactly what you want out of a generalizable conclusion. You want something in a vice to everyone, but humans are very different to one another. And so, one of the things that I think that psychological novels, and also if, you know, there used to be journals that published them, therapists, casenotes, and they don't really exist anymore, but they were fantastic for this kind of thing. When, if you pick up, you get a very, very in -depth view of one person's perspective on the world, which might be completely useless, but it might, if that person's similar to you, that is like fucking gold.

52:03You know, if they're facing the same problem as you, that's amazing because it's really, really detailed. And you run through this novel and you think, oh my God, I'm exactly like this person. Their life's a mess, so is mine. Now, how am I gonna deal with this? And to a point, you get a lot more detail out of it. You just then have to make sure that your critical lens is also fitted so that you don't, you know, read novels and then go, right, everything in this novel is, you know, by necessity. I'm gonna go kill, I'm gonna go kill a woman. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's such a good point. The fact that by design, representative samples are important in order to be able to do studies.

52:40And because of that, you end up curbing off, you shave off outliers, because outliers get regressed back to the mean by they're being a sufficiently big sample size that's representative enough. But given that even the most, the average of average person, the most average person on the planet, is going to have some idiosyncrasies that are abnormal or non -typical or quirky or different, you actually do need to find for them, okay, what is the person that's like you's thoughts about this thing and what did they learn? and that kind of requires you to either, I guess, do purposefully unrepresentative samples.

53:24Good luck trying to get funding for that. Yeah, or, as you say, targeting individuals' experiences and going very deep. Yeah, I think a good analogy of this is, you know, I'm like, I know I go to the gym as I kind of hobby, but the gym that happens to be nearest to me is like a really intense gym. And so it's got lots of like powerlifters in there who do competitions lots of bodybuilders in there who compete and You know they're all pretty friendly so I go up and matters of them while they're trying to get on with things And one of the things I asked them about is their training program and something that I you're immediately fine I'm sure you know you're you're very into the gym So I'm sure that you've kind of finest as well is that they're all very different Because they all get to know themselves in such an in -depth level that all of the kind of that everything that applies to the average person no longer applies to them, although they can see themselves in such a higher resolution that they will take some of that on board but also disregard other bits because they just know it doesn't work.

54:18Think about it, you know, like, is it Dorian Yates did like four sets for chest every two weeks or something like that? You know, you think that's 99 .9 % of people that's not going to work for us. Not a representative kind of training plan, but it really works for hit. A click aside, using the internet without VPN today is like leaving your front door wide open and hoping that no one walks in. Websites, apps and data brokers are constantly collecting your personal information, what you search, what you watch, what you buy, where you are. It all gets tracked. And Surfshark protects you from that.

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55:22What do you think, could it be the case that existentialism is just intellectualized depression with better PR? Ha ha ha, oh yeah, certainly in some cases. Like, I think that again, you can certainly, especially when you learn about some of these people's lives, you can really see how their personal struggles bleed through into their philosophies. I think that, again, this very controversial thing for me to say, but for me, the value in reading, say, nature isn't necessarily because I think that his view on the world is all that correct. I think it's because, you know, for me, I also have a chronic pain condition.

55:57So when I read nature, I read someone who is kind of going through a similar thing that I do, like I'm in pain for pretty much all my waking out. And so seeing him kind of how he copes with that and the philosophy that emerged from that is really, is very, very insightful for my own experience as well. But like, say you're a point about depression, you know, you really see this in, in the philosophy of someone like Kamu, where a lot of his early novels, like The Stranger is kind of the novel that he's most known for, is sort of about a really depressed person, or somebody that really struggles to connect with reality or other people in any way, and sort of everything seems the same to them.

56:37And this has a philosophical aspect for Kamu. But additionally, if you also feel similarly disconnected from life and you've struggled to relate to people and all of that kind of thing, then that can be far more valuable for you than it would be for your average person. I think that to a certain extent, A lot of existential philosophy is philosophers taking their own problems and really attempting to dig into them. And sometimes they hit upon something that's really generalizable quite often they don't. I think that one of the valuable things about reading them is that if they happen to have a similar problem that you have, then that's so valuable.

57:23So, you know, take this kind of, again, take the chronic pain thing. That kind of idea of like, I've got to find something and I'm suffering already. I've got pain, and there's nothing I do about it. I need to find some way to celebrate it. Is that the appeal of aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy for me? Why didn't Kamu consider himself an existentialist? So partly because he fell out with all of the existentialists, but also because he has a slightly different philosophical approach. So existentialism to really boil it down as much as humanly possible. A lot of the existentialist solutions to nihilism or a sense of felt meaninglessness is authenticity in some way.

58:03And by authenticity, they don't exactly mean what your average person would mean by authenticity. They mean in such a case, like a recognition of your radical freedom. So Sartre, one of the things Sartre thinks that people do is act in bad faith. And for him, bad faith isn't like approaching an argument, wanting to show the other person to be a fool or something like that. It's when we go around the world denying our own free will. So he uses the example of a waiter who, in when they are, in that when they're doing that, don't think of themselves as a person who's chosen to wait. They think of themselves as like a waiter and nothing more than that.

58:45They kind of reduce themselves to their social world.

58:54And A little different. So whereas existentialism is about restoring kind of creating meaning, a sense of, you know, if I was in a boil at down, it's like creating meaning, re -imburing the world with meaning. Kamu sort of wants to know if he can continue to live without appealing to meaning at all. He has his phrase, you know, can I live without appeal. And that's kind of the insight out of which absurdism is bought. So Kamu is very against the idea of retreating into meaning in any sense. He kind of wants you to keep the meaninglessness of life right at the front of your head and see if you can maintain the contradiction between you wanting meaning in some sense and they're not being any meaning there and somehow still continue to live and in some sense enjoy life.

59:42And a lot of people have pointed out that Kamu suffered from really quite severe bouts of depression And maybe this was a causative factor in the particular way that he has constructed this philosophy. Again, it's like I think that, you know, while I think that a lot of these thinkers may have conceived of themselves as creating a semi -universal solution to nihilism and problems of meaninglessness, I think that today, certainly the way that I see them is that they're very, very in -depth solutions to similar problems that the authors happen to have. So, okay.

1:00:21How is... Actually, just when it comes to Kamu, sort of the story of Sisyphus seems very relevant to absurdism. What is the lesson to take away from that? Yeah, so the myth of Sisyphus in Kamu's writing is meant to symbolize this kind of, it's meant to stand in for us all. So in Camus perspective, we are trudging along a basically cyclical existence in the sense that there is no, there is nothing that we're doing anything for. We're not, we're not, we're not, we're not, you know, we're not obeying the will of God or the will of the universe. We are just trundling along in a kind of uncaring, unfeeling vacuum.

1:01:06And he compares this to the Greek king, Cicifus, who is punishment for his attempts to escape death, is damned to Pady's where he has to roll a bowl or up a hill and then watch it go all the way back down again and then start at the bottom and roll it all the way back up and just do that for eternity. It's an existence that completely, to take this back to our stuff about narrative earlier. If narratives are almost inherently meaning inducing, you know, they have a resolution and that's lovely. This is a structure of life that completely defies narrative resolution. It is like intensely, it's, you know, if you imagine doing that, it's like the most meaningless existence you can possibly think of.

1:01:45And on top of that, probably really bloody hurts. So, Kamu, in his phrase, we must imagine Sysfus happy, is sort of... That's kind of, again, it's like the absurdist project in a nutshell, is can you maintain this view of life, whereby you are kind of analogous to an analogous, analogous to an analogous to a pacifist, and nonetheless enjoy it and embrace it and be happy. And it's kind of an open question, whether you can. Like I think that a lot of people will read Kamu and Neatra even Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky happens to chime with a lot of things that I think bring my life meaning, because loving others, that seems like a very naturally meaning -inducent to me.

1:02:26You know, a lot of people I think read these thinkers and sort of go, oh yeah, that's great. But actually, it is an open question whether any of this works. Ladies and we, you're allowed to say, you know, I take your point, Kamu, but frankly, I don't think I can imagine Cisphas happy. You don't think anyone else can either. So, you shut up. Why was he concerned about trying to do that? What was he trying to solve for? What was the end goal he was trying to achieve? So the, well, the stated end goal of the myth of Cisphas is that he wants to know whether he should kill himself or whether anyone should kill themselves, given that in his few life is completely meaningless.

1:03:02And his end result is, no, you shouldn't because in some sense, you can learn to be happy despite, despite yourself being analogous to a syspice. So that's kind of what he's attempting, that's a problem he's attempting to solve, at least as he puts it, is the problem of suicide. You might instead call it the problem of meaninglessness or something like that. Or the problem of how can you literally feel and think that your life has no meaning and yet still continue to live and potentially continue to enjoy life in some sense. And I think how compelling you find that overall narrative is going to depend on how much like the sting of the world potentially having no meaning really hits you.

1:03:51And if that's going to depend, that's going to hit you differently different points of your life. I think for a lot of people, they are just very happy to say, yeah, like a world meaningless man, that doesn't bother me in any sense. And I'm kind of not like that, that actually does kind of bother me. But I think for a lot of people, it doesn't. That's fine. I kind of think that, and I also think that it's Kamu talks about this moment where you kind of realize that life's meaningless and he He doesn't describe it as a cognitive event. Again, tie back to our point earlier. He's basically describing this as one foot in cognition, one foot in emotion.

1:04:24You recognize that life is meaningless, but also suddenly you feed it. And like, I think that, again, to bring this kind of down to earth, I think that something like a midlife crisis or a quarter life crisis is really good example of this. Like, thinking about, you know, I remember before I kind of started the channel, I was just kind of sitting around being like, wow, like I think that I feel like life is meaningless. Like it's very kind of, you know, we've got this kind of life to live and you have no idea what to do with it. You don't even know how you're going to prioritize. Like I don't have an idea of what I even want to do.

1:05:01And I feel like, you know, that more commonly hits people. A kind of midlife crisis is I think potentially a more widespread example of that where, you know, somebody gets to like, oh, actually, one of my friends had my life crisis and he described I did as like, he got to like 55 and he was like, oh my god, like, I'm actually gonna die at some point. And I feel like my entire life has been for nothing. And I can't like, again, I can't like, intellectualize someone into that experience. Like I don't, I don't think that I felt it nearly as much as my friend did. But you know, he was seriously in a dark place, kind of staring down the barrel of ending his own life on the basis of this realization.

1:05:41And you know, I've mentioned for a lot of people, it just never happens and that's like great. I do think there's any reason to like induce it. But I kind of think about my friend a lot with this sort of thing. It's very easy, especially because now I have a lot of, I kind of enjoy life of kind of a natural optimist. So I kind of find it quite easy to kind of bumble along in a kind of generally quite happy state. But and so I think that sometimes I kind of look at these, look at something like Kamu writes and says, ah, you know, he's talking about how the realization that life is meaningless is going to bring immense suffering and it's going to make you question whether it's worth carrying on.

1:06:19I kind of think, will it? And then I remember my friend and think, I just don't think I felt it yet. Well, I wonder how much of this kind of goes back to what you was saying before, so much of the work of philosophy or even YouTube channels, dude, everything is a thinly veiled autobiography as far as I can see. That's a very niche and idea. Nietzsche thought that a lot of philosophers were just basically writing their own autobiographies. Right. It certainly seems to be the case here. Does it not? Oh, absolutely. I think that it really applies to existential philosophy. You know, and I think that's again, one of the reasons...

1:06:56I think one of the reasons why it's very easy. You know, although existential philosophy pulls people in, it's also very easy to pick up a couple of books of existential philosophy and basically go, This is like, bollocks. But I think there's a lot of time that feeling of this is like bollocks. Basically happens if you pick up a thinker who is just psychologically wide very differently to you. Like I sometimes have that with someone like, you know, I occasionally pick up Sartre. And I don't know, I just can't like, there's something about it that just doesn't particularly resonate with me. I can't quite get inside the head of the problem.

1:07:26How would you advise them? Or how would Camo advise somebody who is torn between the life is excruciating the meaningful and life is excruciating the meaningless. How do they sort of eye laughing my arse off? How do they thread the boat through the middle of that? As in stars and the idea of somebody like alternating between sometimes they feel like life's incredibly meaningful. Have you seen the image that I'm talking about? Do you know this? Is this the thing on the tray? No, so this is one of my favorite images. I'll get Dean to put it up for the people that are watching. So it's a tiny little boat, a drawing of a tiny little boat.

1:08:14I'll put it in the chat so you should be able to see this here. It's a tiny little boat and it's illustrated going along the water in between a whirlpool. And on the left it says life is devastating, the meaningless. And on the right is a one, two, three, four, five, six headed dragon. And it says life is excruciating, the meaningful. And there's this teeny tiny little sort of Greek looking boat with oars coming out the side of it. And it just goes, I, LMAO. I think that's, I think that's like, you know, I think that's Cilla and Corriptus. Right. The like, the, the, I actually think that they're kind of an under explored area in existential which I think Kamu touched upon a little bit, but I think is like, if somebody wants to go out and write like the next tracks of existential philosophy, I'd love for it to be on this, would be that idea of excruciating meaning, because it's very easy, I think, to romanticize the idea of a meaningful life.

1:09:15But it's totally possible things to be like far too meaningful for comfort. And you know, I moved to about this in the context So, can we talk to both in the context of politics, which I think is fascinating. So, he's, after he finishes the myth of Cisphas, he sort of has this kind of like indifference about it. He's kind of, he's at Ryokaze, so, you know, all the experiences roughly the same, there's no objective, meaning I'm somehow managing to muddle along, despite that. But in theory, this should make me indifferent to all of the bad things that are happening around me. Can we basically find he can't do that?

1:09:47And he has this book called The Rebel, which is by far his most impenetrable work. But it is generally very, very interesting. And one of the points he makes in The Rebel is that at a societal level, it is perfectly possible to become too imbued with meaning. If you think about any kind of sort of theocratic tyranny, or the terror of the French Revolution, or Camus example is Stalin's USSR, are. His analysis of this is that the issue is at least partly that if you have an ultimate meaning that you're willing to literally sacrifice everything else to, then you will sacrifice as many lives as humanly possible or as you think is required to fulfill this vision.

1:10:30What I think, and it occurred to me that this observation definitely works, not quite in the same kind of apocalyptic sense, but works at some sense on the individual level. In that, you know, we all, I think that the sense of life being too meaningful is very, very natural. It's the sense of being under too much pressure. This idea of like, oh, everything that's happening to me counts an awful lot. What, what am I going to do? Is I think a, a perfect example of somebody feeling too meaningful. Again, I think that that's a, that means that, yeah, that's a really insightful meme actually. I'm, I'm going spend a long time on it.

1:11:04Because again, I think that what a lot of people want is not an abundance of meaning nor a complete lack of meaning, but enough meaning to give them a general direction, but also enough meaninglessness that you can make arbitrary choices along that way. You don't actually want every one of your decisions. I would argue at least. I think most people don't actually want all of their decisions to be dictated by a kind of set of values in advance. And I also think that that's kind of, I don't know, that's an evagely robotic. And also, I think that that kind of approach doesn't do justice to just how difficult some decisions are.

1:11:44I think that certain moral dilemmas, you kind of imagine that you spoke to someone, the Sartre has an idea of like an insoluble moral dilemma. And his example is that somebody's told between staying home and looking after their elderly mother, or going to fight the Nazis in the French resistance. And I know I'd be, you know, and his mum could really suffer from this. She could even pass away while he's gone. And in the moment, it's uncertain whether the French resistance will be victorious or taught. And such a spine isn't this seems pretty indeterminate. And, you know, I don't know if somebody's value system was so well organized that they could give me like an instant answer to that dilemma.

1:12:25I don't know if I'd like that. I think that would be like, I think that, you know, There's a sense in which their choices will be so determined. I don't know, I don't know if it would do justice to how excruciating real moral dilemmas and real just decisional dilemmas are. I wonder how much of this is a challenge of communication, that it sounds so flimsy to sort of talk about emotion and desire and being pulled in different ways and gut instinct and this ephemeral, like flaky sense of something. But it's, you know, how you show me, let me grab a hold of it. Put it into language that is testable, that's, does this make sense?

1:13:08This sort of desire to communicate things in a much more concrete, verifiable way. And I do think that's a pretty good instinct, because at the same time, you know, I do think that philosophical discussions can quickly go into territory that is so abstract that I don't think anyone could possibly give a shit. But I think that one of the ways to keep this down to earth is to link things like meaning back down into things like motivation and action and affect. I think that when somebody says, what's the meaning of life? There's a reason why that question can strike us as really pointless. What's the meaning of life?

1:13:56How do we even go about passing that? And I think that instead of asking questions like, what's the meaning of life? I find that people are often a lot more enthusiastic if you phrase an existential question just in terms of what gets you up in the morning. What actually is the kind of motivating force behind your action? What if you removed it? Would you then struggle to do anything with? Like, and you know, I think that this allows people to get a grip on what they find meaningful. Which is quite a useful thing to learn. You know, if you find out that actually like I would really not know what to do without my group of friends.

1:14:31That might tell you you need to, you might want to invest more of your time and effort into that area of life. And so it's getting kind of quite away away from these particular existential philosophers. But I think that's one of the values in asking existential questions is that it does force you to confront what matters to you. And I think that it's very easy to forget what matters to you. I mean, to take the title's back to fiction, I know that a book that you like is the alchemist. And I feel like a lot of, the same kind of lesson occurs there, right? This is another idea of like, it's very easy to forget the kind of things that are intuitively and instinctively meaningful.

1:15:06I think that one of the real flaws, I think in approaching questions of meaning in the way that I do, which is to go away and read lots of Extentral philosophers and see what they think Is that there's a tendency that you can just become really room -in -a -tip about it and You know occasionally get a comment under one of my videos that's like you're just overthinking it and sometimes if I'm in the right mood I look at it and I'm like you're probably right. You know there is a sense in which you can get so so deep into what this person's particular interpretation of nature is or this person's secret interpretation of Camel or Sartreau to kick guard.

1:15:42And I really, I find that stuff naturally interesting. But there is a sense in which for the way that just you would want to approach an existential question, if you don't necessarily want to go away and read a bunch of this stuff, is that it's, I think the part of it is recognizing that meaning is at least partly extra cognitive. It may involve cognition, but it's not merely cognitius. All vibes, man. Just comes to that. Well, I think that, you know, I think that vibes are really important. Like I do not undervalue the vibes. Yeah, I think so, you know, think about like what you come away with from a social set, like a kind of hangout with friends or hangout with someone.

1:16:26You know, you might not remember exactly what was set, but you remember the vibe. I think that we kind of, again, I don't want to get too woo -y, but I feel like we are far beyond that point. One of the, I think that something that, one of the valuable insights in Nietzsche's prioritizing of the instinct, or kind of Dostoevsky's novelistic approach to existential questions, is that they are both essentially saying, you know, this isn't merely a cognitive issue. This is something that you also need to feel and enact. And you know, they disagree on a lot, but I think it's nice when they agree on something.

1:17:05Hmm. Yeah, I, this, this sort of balance between what the cerebral, room, narrative thinker loves, which is to ask the why question. And the realization that there is such a thing as too much reflection. There is a golden mean for fucking everything, right? And roomination is one of them. I'm kind of obsessed by this idea at the moment that advice which is made and works for most people will be widely distributed because on average it's most it's effective it's an effective meme and it'll continue to spread but the problem is because it's so popular it's got it's got such a bull run behind it that even people who that advice is not for who already have too much of the thing that it's pushing them to do more of attempted to take it on because it works so well for everybody else so one of the good examples here is something like just work harder.

1:18:10Now, just working harder will reliably give everybody, almost everybody on the planet will benefit from that. There are very few scenarios that I can think of where working harder is not going to make the outcomes better. But there is a particular cohort of people for whom working harder is something they already do too much of and what they actually need is a good rest ethic rather than a good work ethic.

1:18:36And reflection rumination that there are many people think before you act. Young Joseph think before you act. This is very important. I must think before I act. Thank you, Mum. Thank you, Dad. I go, if you are a perennial thinker, maybe think of it less, maybe follow your gut, but the problem is thinking before you act, even for the overthinker is likely to give them from an objective metric sense better outcomes in life. They're going to be more careful, they're going to be more considered, they're going to make fewer failures. But what is it that they've lost? All of the losses here are hidden and all of the successes attend to be pretty observable.

1:19:17So the losses of time, of the quality of peace, of the inner texture of your mind, of lost opportunity because it took you so long to be able to arrive at this particular thing. And the same thing for hard work. Well, how much are you tearing yourself up? What about the state of your health? What about your blood pressure? What about how much time you're spent thinking about this thing and obsessing when you should have just been eating a sandwich or playing with your friends or doing whatever? Well, objectively, it's made you more successful. But again, I think this is why widespread rough -hune advice should always go through a filter.

1:19:53And it's also why I find the criticisms that kind of treat audience members, you know, the podcast election with, with Rogan last year, it is so fucking patronizing to say, look at these agentic unwashed peons watching this man just shovel like radical dogma down their throat. They voted exclusively because of what he said. It's okay. Right. So you're saying that these people have no ability to discern anything that they see. And there's no filter between what they watch on YouTube on Joe Rogan's channel or this advice from David Goggin saying to work harder or, you know, the fucking Kamu saying you need to refer, whatever.

1:20:36Like there is no degree of filter. And in the same sentence, I know that if the advice is sufficiently seductive and if it's sufficiently popular, that people do tend to imbibe that. So there's like a big tension going on there, but yeah, I'm pretty obsessed with this idea. Popular advice gets taken on unquestioningly and for some people, they already have too much of it, so they probably need less. Absolutely. I think the other side to that is a lot of the, a lot of popular advice, just kind of generally is going to be maximized towards sort of minimizing social harm. So, actually, the thing that reminded me of this was a clip by David Mitchell on, would I lie to you?

1:21:12And he sort of says, you know, children, broadly speaking, are divided into reckless children and timorous children. And he sort of says, you know, in order to keep the reckless children from jumping off of things and killing themselves by virtue of their untethered love for life, you need to tell all children, stop what you're doing. Think and slow down and be more afraid. And if you're already naturally fearful, as David Mitchell was, this is terrible advice and is actually going to harm you. But because the harm is significantly more hidden, as you say, It's less likely to end up on the news and have more guardrails.

1:21:46Oh, that's so good. You explained what I was explaining much more to sinkily than I managed to do it. Yeah, that's brilliant. I think that the, yeah, I told you to take your point about pop advice. I think again, one of the benefits of reading novels is, yeah, you kind of later in on, if you really relate to a particular novel, then you later in on a vice that is almost tailor -made for you and lessons that are almost tailor -made for you. And I go about Dostoevsky all the time, because that's a novelist that I really like, and who really resonates with me, because a lot of the, a lot of the, you know, he resonates with me far more than someone like Nietzsche, for example, because a lot of Dostoevsky's advice for, or the kind of lessons for living meaningfully, are to do with this notion he has of active love.

1:22:29You know, he's very religious, but the way in which this religiosity often manifests in his work is through the idea that of loving others, but he's pretty, he's pretty kind of clear that loving others is going to be really hard work. He has this wonderful kind of offhand brilliant insight from a doctor in the brother's carom as of, where the doctor says, oh, you know, it's very easy to love mankind in general, and it's very hard to love people in particular. I think that's pretty amazing. That's so true. And I think, yeah, and the dossier has to be kind of outlining that active love is going to make your life incredibly meaningful, but also is going to be really, really, really tough, is that's an approach life that very much resonates with me.

1:23:15That's why I kind of go on about Lost Air Skill a time. I find that all of the stuff that Lost Air Skill criticises people for are applicable to me, and I find that all of his lessons are also applicable to me. So that's kind of, but my point is that other people might find authors or philosophers or anyone one really, who really resonates with that. I think that we kind of, again, we have a tendency, and I have this tendency as well, recovering logic students and all that, to only ever take on lessons that are universalizable. And the trouble is that, if we're talking about the mean earlier, the kind of level of standard deviation of human properties is absolutely massive.

1:23:57So you go off the mean, there's a good chance that you might end up severely down the wrong path, especially in the kind of details. And that's where I think this kind of novel stuff can come in. I'm still, you know, don't I feel like I'm, feel like I sound like I'm really down on a piracy psychology, I'm brilliant, I think it's brilliant. But I also think that, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to make the case for the kind of psychological novel, which is that you absolutely won't learn anything about humankind, but you might learn something about a few people and one of them might be you. Oh, dude, that is so good.

1:24:25Hey, man, let's bring this one home. I love your work, I love your channel, everyone should go and subscribe. Where should people go? They're going to want to keep up to date with the stuff you're doing. Oh, yeah. I suppose I'm on solicitor device on YouTube. I may change the name at some point. That was kind of a name that I basically put on to acknowledge the fact that nobody asked me to do this. As a result, everything I do is deeply on my own. Well, I'm very pro, I'm very pro using your own name. If you ask Alex when you see him tomorrow, ask Alex for the war zone that he made me crawl through in order to convince him to change his channel name from Cosmic Stepped.

1:25:03I just get him to explain to you because he could make me breakfast for the next six months and still owe me every single day. You can make me breakfast. I'm so bullish on you making a change, make it your name, dude. Capture that fucking personal accountability. But everyone should go and watch it. You've got great breakdowns of tons of different books and ideas and like even stuff that I wouldn't have expected on their ideas about masculinity and and love and and and crushes and stuff, it's sick. So I'm I'm I'm very bullish on Joe Folly and dude I'm looking forward to speaking again man. Oh thanks.

1:25:40How's it going?