Making happiness the focal point of your life trivialises your experiences because in order to regard anything as truly important, you also have to regard its loss as truly meaningful.⁣
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That means that to open yourself up to experiences of deep meaning also simultaneously means that you have to open yourself up to the possibility of deep hurt and sorrow.

It's great to run towards something you like. But it's even better to run away from something that terrifies you.

Take all your faults and inadequacies. Then imagine those get the upper hand and think about where you could be in three to five years.

Some people know they'd be a street person, some people know they'd be an alcoholic, some people know they'd be a prostitute or a drug addict. Everybody's got their own little hell they could descend into with a fair degree of rapidity and a fair bit of enjoyment.

Source: The Joe Rogan Experience #1070

You don't protect your children. You don't get rid of the vulnerability. In fact, you do the opposite.

You expose them to the world as much as you possibly can. You teach them to be strong.

That's the best antidote to their vulnerability.

Does pornography increase the chances of divorce?

This is a clip from my podcast with Rob Henderson.

If you fulfill your obligations every day you don’t need to worry about the future.

The "Hail Lobster" merchandise will only be available until Sunday, 24th of October. 100% of the profits will go to charity.

If you'd like to contribute, click the link to purchase something from the store.

https://linktr.ee/haillobster

Here's how you know if someone's your friend:

You can tell them bad news, and they'll listen. They won't tell you why you're stupid, why that bad thing happened to you and how something worse happened to them once and derail the whole conversation.

This is the weirder thing: You can tell them good news, and they'll help you celebrate.

That's a really good way of deciding who you should have around you.

Today I am joined by Dr. Steven Pinker, and Dr. Jonathan Haidt to discuss the concept of utopia, how religion brings people together, the implications of thinking in terms of true and false versus right and wrong, and how fast our lives are changing in the age of social media.

We also assessed a popular claim that sees power as the driving factor behind Western culture.

Watch the episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tAQM5uU8uk

Are Men Benefitting From the Loosened Norms Around Marriage?

Rob Henderson and I discussed pornography, defunding the police, the role of sex, the consequences of reproductive technology, psychopathy and its relationship with dating apps, and more.

Find our podcast together on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Linked here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6ZyQKiwMQw

"I believe that we are ultra social creatures, we evolved in groups. In a sense, we broke out of the hive in the 19th century to 20th century. With prosperity, we could live alone, and we have individualism."

Watch more of this podcast with Dr. Haidt and Dr. Pinker here: https://youtu.be/4tAQM5uU8uk

Is Meaning Found In Responsibility?

On my latest podcast released on Monday, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and I sat down to discuss truth, how societies function, utopias, the role of religion, and more.

Watch it on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/4tAQM5uU8uk

On today's podcast episode, Dr. Clay Routledge joins me.

Dr. Routledge is an existential psychologist, writer, and professor at North Dakota State University. He's also a senior research fellow at the Archbridge Institute and an editor for Profectus magazine. Dr. Routledge studies basic psychological needs and how they're shaped by family, social bonds, economics, and broader cultural worldviews.

Our conversation covered loneliness, meaning, nostalgia, Terror Management Theory, and existential psychology. We also shared views on human progress, responsibility, religion, and UFOs.

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yV0b-NhKTY

Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life.

Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it. When you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare. If that works, too, move on to even more ambitious projects.

And, as the necessary beginning to that process… abandon ideology.

Beyond Order | Rule VI (Abandon Ideology) | Page 178.

Read more here: https://bit.ly/BeyondOrderUSA

So, what is the conclusion?

There are many things to which we might commit ourselves. A case can be made for the arbitrary and even meaningless nature of any given commitment, given the plethora of alternatives, given the corruption of the systems demanding that commitment.

But the same case cannot be made for the fact of commitment itself:

Those who do not choose a direction are lost.

This is despite all the genuine limitations and disappointments that becoming something entails.

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Click here: https://linktr.ee/DrJordanBPeterson

People think that the purpose of memory is to remember the past. That's not the purpose of memory.

The purpose of memory is to extract out, from the past, lessons to structure the future. And that's the purpose of personal memory. So, you're done with a memory when you've extracted the information that you can use to guide yourself properly in the future.

If you have a traumatic memory, for example, that's obsessing you, if you analyse that memory to the point where you figured out how you put yourself at risk, you can determine how you might avoid that in the future.

Then the emotion associated with that goes away.

Red skull meets Spiderman. Where else? NYC!