Transcript for:
History of Philosophy and 16 Questions: How Should People Live?

all right ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for coming out this evening beautiful evening not as hot as last time which i think is a big plus and somebody suggested by the way maybe we should reverse it so that I'm down there and then people are coming in at the back instead of at the front and then you can get booze easier I think so let me I'm a little Pandu I think that might be a good idea we'll have we'll see how that goes anyway this evening is the history of philosophy and 16 questions question number three should be an easy one to answer which is how should people live and of course as I keep saying I'm not giving answers I'm just throwing questions at you that's why it's a history of philosophy and 16 questions no answers promised now the idea here is is it's natural for us to assume the notion of choice we live where the freest people history has ever known no one has ever had the kind of opportunities to express themselves to live different ways they didn't have the material resources they didn't have the legal freedoms they didn't have the intellectual freedoms to make choices and and for most of human history that is how people lived it's important to know just think if you're a peasant and it's you know 6,000 years ago which is to say you're pretty much like everybody else you work on something large agrarian estate you're not literate just that fact alone narrows your access to the world so dramatically that we think we just can't hardly comprehend it you would not know anything about the world that you you hadn't heard from somebody that you knew or that was within easy walking distance of where you were born because you would never have left that environment so your view of the world is incredibly narrow your opportunities for self-expression are virtually as the example I like to use all the time is in the Middle Ages so this is much later on by the way but it's representative of world history in the Middle Ages we have good records then and you had famine one out of four years so three years of good harvest one year of famine that's roughly your rule and years of famine the peasant sold their clothes to buy food and so much of the population would be naked all winter so even if you had potentially some intellectual freedom what you didn't by the way but even if you did your opportunities to express yourself materially were extraordinarily constrained because what you were trying to do is what most people have been trying to do for all of human history which is not die you weren't interested in how to live that question never occurred to you the question that occurred to you was what can I do today so I don't die and that question just recurred until you died which was on average for women by the way in around 900 was about 24 men made it to the ripe old age of about 28 so you know that your life was just not that Pleasant and certainly you didn't have a lot of opportunity to reflect on the meaning of it all however a one unique point in history affecting happened several times we're going to visit the same event in China which happened roughly at the same time but by the way in a future lecture a group of people achieved enough wealth enough material surroundings enough intellectual and legal freedom that they were able to begin to ask the question how should I live what should I do what makes a good life remember up until this time not dying made a good life the next thing that comes after not dying makes a good life is doing whatever you're told so that somebody doesn't kill you so this is the sort of steps of civilization and then and this point we're going to look at the Greek world we'll look at the Chinese world again in the future and all over the Greek world by the way we always think of Athens but it wasn't just Athens we just have the most documents from Athens people started to look around and as I mentioned before it's crazy in the Greek world because you've got Egypt on one side and Persia on the other side and you have all of these small Greek city-states all over the place and they all do different things and so you had exposure to all kinds of different ways of living and this caused people to stop and start going hey if there's all of these different ways that people do things what's the right way for someone to live and more or less is it the first time in history people were able to actually ask this question systematically because you had a small population of citizens by the way they only made up maybe because it's of course it's got to be males you have to be adult males you have to be a citizen and you have to be relatively well-off and so that combination in Athens was maybe 10% of the population in other cities of states it was probably much less and yeah by all historical standards this was unprecedented and so what happens amazingly is about 100 years from about the fifth century to about the fourth or third century Japan you want to think about even score these things differently people started to say well how should I live and here's a list of the answers that they gave just so you know the they just answered everything every possible answer came out immediately and historical standards so Socrates said famously right action for the right reasons you need to pursue knowledge because knowledge will tell you what the right thing is to do wisdom is the most important goal and nobody ever does evil or harm knowingly they only do it out of ignorance hence wisdom is so important you never knowingly do bad well I do because we're because we're wrongheaded or ignorant so the goal of life is to pursue wisdom because wisdom will allow you to do everything correctly and this is the best possible life which is sort of this is wise philosophers love Socrates because Socrates says yes being a philosopher is the best possible life right and there but there's other Aristotle there moral virtue is generally the path between extremes the golden mean guided by wisdom and the goal is happiness but note here the Greek concept of that's translated as happiness is better translated there's no good translation for it really but think thriving or vital or sort of filled with it means to be possessed with the spirit of life and and so it just means thriving and vital not necessarily like we are having a fun time so as struggle as it can be a big part of it because we're vital when we struggle so that that was very different from Socrates that he says you're just so specially wisdom and then you get the Stoics who emphasize reason above all things and the Stoics were really big on civic virtue so they believed you should participate in the politics of running your state because they say if the best people don't run your city state or your country then of course the worst people will so the Stoics believed that you should be detached from the world that has certain elements of Buddhist attachment about it you should pursue human reason as the highest calling because reason is what separates us from the animals and you should not be attached to the external world at the Kurian on the other hand said you should pursue happiness and pleasure but they thought of pleasures accents of pain you should never pursuit participate in politics because that's what's going to make your life unhappy right is this gonna be complicated and evil and people won't like you and you'll have to go to meetings and it'syou know it's awful in every way so they said nope ah so this is important to know so Epicurious said you should just stay in your garden which i think is correct and you and you should avoid the outside world and pursue the simple pleasures that make life rich by the way he also allowed women into his school which which was just infamous that someone would think that women could actually be an equal participant in pursuing the best life and had the minds and the hearts capable of absorbing that and contributing to it and so that was a bad call Socrates Aristotle Plato not so much on the women Epicurus right there the stoics they didn't seem to care that they were detached Plato duty and virtue but he had played this big on duty and he says if you leave read the Republic which is sort of a manifesto for a horrible totalitarian impressive state he was very much about subsuming the individual to the will of the group so that you could have order he viewed basically chaos as the enemy which is reasonable right but his solution is yeah I don't know but but but that's that was his age so totally different from the epoch sure and somewhat different from the Stoics very different from Socrates he was a long-running argument with Aristotle of course he didn't know this because Aristotle came after him but Aristotle argued a lot of these points then you have the cynics who were basically they wanted to suspend judgment as much as possible like wow we don't know ask a cynic anything and they'll be like man maybe what's the best possible thing to do who don't know how do you make a decision well sometimes you have to decide but you really don't want to be attached to that decision because who knows and the cynics were really they think that you would think this would freeze them but it didn't freeze him it just made them really no fun to debate wins and so and so the other philosophers did not like the cynics because they're always going well maybe being sure that's possible perhaps maybe yeah but but they would never go farther than that and so people said well you have to do this and they're like not so much yeah it was they're very just skeptical so we use the word they didn't mean cynical I could use the word cynical just think of it as like robust total complete skepticism about everything and so you just sort of had to do the best you could with what you had and not get too hung up about things they were really like just let's not get hung up on things that was sort of their key idea there's there's chairs back there feel free to grab a couple they're cynics Plato Oh Serena acts okay just not the cynics by the way um you got like these basically heinous one should seek immediate short-term pleasures the means to the best possible life bodily pleasures are the easiest to acquire so you should probably go to those they weren't against mental pleasures they just thought they were confusing and difficult to get whereas for instance really good cider is easy to get so right you know this so the hedonist were like just enjoy yourself and by the way they didn't think you was cumulated pleasure you just went from pleasure to pleasure - pleasure - pleasure so you have the Stokes who are saying well don't know like just forget all this pleasures stuff and you have the the Serena acts we're going you know pleasure what I'm the white will you would do anything else and you have the cynics who are going maybe could be I don't know and then we have what the more general outlook of the Greek world in which they were operated so you have Kelly's here I'm given callosum to some floor time because no one ever talks about it he's the guy who ever read the the Socratic dialogues which are great run by Plato the I think the best and strangest one is the gorges in which Socrates does the same thing he always deserts all the best possible life is pursuit of wisdom in it and generally these dialogues he says well won't you give me that you know birds fly on Wednesday and somebody says yes and then the next thing you know he's convinced them that evil is good and good evil when they're like wow how did he do that Calla Cleese does not fall for it so he runs him this guy kal achlys and he starts on his stuff and finally calculations that says no the best possible thing is to express your energy your mind and your power to the fullest extent you want power and money so that you can live as full as possible healthier friends and live a complete life that's already just like no no no and they argue for a little bit and then calculus just says no you're just wrong Socrates let's just cut this off and goriias the person that that's named after says well let's listen to them and accountants goes really gorya says yeah okay and so for the rest of the argument Socrates says all this stuff and all calculus says is okay if it makes you happy sure can we finish now are we done and Socrates just Badgers him and Badgers and he's like okay sure can we go now are we done are you finished because he expresses blood is not and usually he's very beat up on in philosophical history because you know Socrates is good and so calculus must be wrong but this position I think is very representative of what more Athenians thought than Socrates which is if you have capacities what you want is the resources an opportunity to express them and so we thought the of the fullest capacity to express your power your ideas your individuality is the best possible life and he just thought any other answer was silly and so we just didn't listen to Socrates my Socrates is essentially yelling at it and Gorton and calculating this is like I'm not listening to you so I you could stop yelling at any moment but I think that that idea is very much more representative of the general Greek idea right that that that's really what you're trying for you're striving for power and resources for yourself and your friends so that you guys in your community and your family can live as fully and freely and totally as possible it's not crazy but it's certainly different from pretty much everybody else other than two that need to be mentioned one is Achilles because Achilles is the great image from the Iliad which is the great book of the Greek world and Achilles this notion is you live for excellence and fame not for pleasure not for detachment not for wisdom not for duty or virtue but for fame and you achieve fame through excellence primarily by killing people so you kill people as fast as you can and as aggressively as you can and then that's the best thing now kilise was a model it's important remember that that during the Greek classical era Athens for instance was at war three out of every four years and so the notion of having very powerful militant sort of physical role model and the notion of pursuit of fame was not again crazy but again is totally different from like the Epicureans if you're in a war you don't want a bunch of Epicureans they're like wow that looks unpleasant I like to avoid that altogether and the cynics are probably like I don't know how do you choose a side let's not choose I can see a point on each side everybody's got a good idea here let's just settle down right but Achilles that's the like nose just point me in a direction and I'll start killing things famously attacked several gods in the Iliad he was just sort of a all-purpose slaughter guy but he was considered a role model fame achieved through excellence and then totally peculiar to me his alice' be a tease because I love him and Alcibiades gets no good play in ancient world even though I think he should because he's an extraordinary historical figure but he was clearly seeking fame sort of through absolute fabulousness and he clearly represented one of the ideals of the Greek world which is you just want to get as much money and much power as you can and then you want to blow it on like big boats and and he was like the fast cars and big yachts and airplanes guys right parties for your friends and you know spend your money attacking your enemies and having fun with your friends and impressing everybody else and that's what he did and and but he was a role model for many Greeks I mean they exiled him twice or three times I can't remember two or three times he got exiled there's like always a great general he's a great general who were scared let's get rid of him and so that notion of he was striving but not necessarily for excellence per se but just for notoriety and fame in its most pure form so he would do anything on also he was famously in love with Socrates between these shared absolutely nothing in common I mean this is the great thing he was Socrates is worst people of all time so if you read the symposium you get that so that's just so does a quick overview of the possible answers to how should you live and notice there's no answer at all this gives you nothing because it gives you basically every possible route the only route that they really didn't articulate clearly was just get rich as possible that's the one we've sort of added but um but clearly this is the alpha ba DS model right he was they didn't ever want to say that directly but but he's the one that mode came closest in the ancient world to just saying no pile up the cash and then blow it and then pile up some more and then blow it it's gonna be great money money is fun and so you get two things when you get this notion of ethics by the way this is roughly the question of ethics of how should one live is just the asking of the question creates an imponderable insoluble swamp there's no good way to respond to this so what follows the asking of the questions is this movement towards the the faith-based religions it's not that religion didn't exist before but it takes on a very new tenor and to two examples of course that we use from the modern world is what I have there at the beginning so the five pillars of Islam profession of faith there is no god but God and Muhammad is His Prophet prayer to said God and said crop profit almsgiving which is very tightly prescribed it's not just random almsgiving and there are rules about this fasting because of the dog and dog religious that shows your dedication to the God and then you get the Ten Commandments I am the Lord your God so God God there's no other gods okay no idols which we've redundant with no gods but there you go don't take the Lord's name in vain and keep the Sabbath and then you get a bunch of stuff you're not supposed to do don't kill people don't covet thy neighbor's wife don't sleep with your neighbor's wife I say it says don't covet your neighbors like a box enter stuff but it just you know don't want their stuff so the answer to the problem of ethics generally is stop thinking and have faith do what you're told and that tension emerges not from before people we tend to think of the history is going oh everyone's mind was closed and they are all in these benign faith-based world there's no evidence of this by the way what's really clear is animist traditions everything is alive spirits everywhere so everybody worship whatever you want you worshiped everything it's all available to you whatever makes you happy go with that when that gets slightly more systematized it's almost entirely a power thing you have to go along with what the community goes along where they don't care whether you believe anything you just have to do what they say it's only when you start getting this exposure to different systems different belief systems and you get this primal question how should you live that people start searching for an answer to that question and when you start searching for an answer to that question one of the most popular answers is I don't want to think about that question are probably the single-most Pot by far it's got to be the most popular don't make me ask that I don't want to have to reflect on how I should live so if you give me a system of rules that following those rules tells me that I'm living a good life boom I mean it's weird on one hand this is the definition of not being free but it also frees you up from all of that pondering about what the hell you should do see this so it solves a problem and so people always pondering this in stories one of those questions where do all this really powerful faith-based religions come from they come from the fact that people didn't know what the hell to do and it's unnerving of course the sort of peak of this is the existentialist who sort of reflect on this crisis a lot the existential crisis but as you can see as soon as you ask the question how you live you get the existential crisis because there are so many possible it's so many different possible ways to live and it's only gotten worse of course you just go through time and the opportunities have gotten more and more and more diverse until you reach today of course day we're just swamped think of here's where I love them you gotta love the internet love the Internet you have access to all the news of everything that's going on in the world all the time you also have access to all history this is this has never been true before you have always been the narrow little which is great because it's so helpful right if you're in a little box it even who knows what's going on in China we didn't even know China was there for a thousand years China is booming the West had no idea China had no idea the West is out there they had rumors of course there's certain barbarians over there you dream of the hell's going on there of an emperor they don't know actually Chinese said they don't know that we rule them that's how backwards they are right this is the Chinese worldview at the time because it hints the Middle Kingdom then the Middle Kingdom comes at the middle of the universe and so they they rule everything and some people know that they're ruled and some people dump those are your barbarians don't civilize people do but but they did but there's no access and almost no contact now it's we have everything what religion should you believe well you've got you know a super market for religions to choose from historically unprecedented usually you have one or a died and we thought we'd look at historical situations sort of places like maybe Baghdad or Sevilla in Spain or Constantinople where they said oh these groups of different religious people live together moderate peace which is true ish except it's important to remember that you had to dress so that you could be immediately identified what religion you were you could not move freely around depending on which religion you were your religious group was ruled by your religious leaders you were subject to their laws the laws of the state you are in as well by the way but also by the laws of your religious fraternity so if you're a Zoroastrian in Baghdad which is ruled by the is Islam at the time you'd be okay ish but your priests weren't responsible for you so you had to follow the rules of Islam you usually had to pay a tax you had to dress so we knew you were a Zoroastrian and so it was it like religious freedom it was more like you have to be a member of your religion and you have to let everybody know so this is how that's different that's a different take and by the way changing religions was generally punishable by death they didn't is not not in current let's put it back right so you weren't out shopping for religion in America today 20% of people change their religion every decade which i think is amazing number we're just out shopping for religions but I like this one I'll go or that we're not and I'll be an atheist and by the way people move from atheists or being religious to being an atheist again it's really we're just shopping around right and my favorite example is of course the Unitarians we never know what they are they a theist it's hard to tell it's my old testement live professor always said the Unitarian Church is where atheist gathered to pray I think there's some some fundamental like corrects and essence there but but but that you have every possible choice which is terrifying and it throws us into this void from which we've never been able to recover the only time we're ever recovered is when we live in a theocratic or a fascist or totalitarian state when where's that problem is all for us do what we're told we just say live correctly or we shoot you by the way we love this we absolutely love this I need to say that but but it happened it recurs so often in history it clearly feel fills a fundamental human need just to know I'm doing the right thing I want to know which is admirable how do I know I'm doing the right thing I desperately want to know and so when an outside power structure tells you this is the right thing to do then we're like oh that's great I feel confirmed I feel like I'm you know I'm liberated from doubt and struggle and the worst possible things self reflection of God self reflection not that they're anything but make me think that's just the worst right and so and so you get this recurrent pattern where we just want to belong to a group again all good examples come from the National Football League and so if you look at sort of people going to football games it's one thing to go to a football game but what do they all have to dress the same right it's weird something that's it's not a law per se historically speaking it would be mostly a law but no you really want to dress a particular way if you're going to a football game so that you people know what team you associated with and that makes us feel good communally because we go all these people are with me and those people the other color jersey are against me and that makes us happy the extreme version of this of course is the soccer in Europe which is communist football penguin soccer in Europe where the fans fight right you have the big big riots in the stand the soccer players don't fight right they're perfectly fine with each other but the group identity is built through conflict who don't we like we don't like those people so let's fight them yes that's total as human history in a nutshell give us somebody to fight and we'll get come together community and then we'll be happy all the Archaea anthropological records by the way show this is the point of stoning people to death that when you get to stone somebody to death as a community it makes everyone happy and builds a sense of communal identity it brings joy to think was just horrible to say I'm just but it brings joy to the community because now we know we're good and they're bad and we do it you do it communally we're all in this together isn't this wonderful we've got rid of it what do we got rid of someone who from some way or another was making us rethink things maybe it's okay to wear different clothes maybe it's okay to marry someone outside my religion maybe it's okay to loan money and interest we've gotten more okay with that you know that but but but but that's that's breaking of codes and laws if you don't enforce it then it becomes a question if those people can loan money and interest why can't I is it now wrong or is it right and so what happens when you get this question by the way again the same thing happens in China is not an answer but the desperate desire for an answer it induces a need that really didn't exist before and people tend to look back at pre agrarian civilization and look how happy and how communal and settled and sort of at peace they seem like yes it's true because they haven't entered the existential well they haven't they haven't had to stop and say oh should I be a hunter-gatherer should it be a stockbroker right they don't you know they don't stand in school for 12 years while people or them to tears asking what are you gonna do when you grow up well I was thinking of digging yams but I think I'm gonna go for hunting the deer right now you're just you are you're gonna do whatever is necessary for the communal survival so you feel like you belong because you belong you have a place everybody has a place or or everybody dies so that just sucks a lot of the stress and worry and slack of identity and self-doubt just goes with that it's beautiful but notice it's also constraining yeah you're you're you're stuck in that world and what's odd is as soon as you give these people a choice they almost invariably choose well let's move to a city let's let's get a TV they love TVs everybody loves to miss very strange but you know less modern appliance let's let's go to the future I had a student when I was an undergrad I was taught at a Writing Center and there was when they're moving the mongs from Vietnam and Laos to the United States and his village had three metal implements which were they were amazed that they had three metal implements and then the government came to them and said we're relocating you and they walked for nine days through the jungle onto the first vehicle that ever seen which was a bus which they rode for 16 hours to the airport where they got on a 747 blew the los angeles think about that right so he's about 12 at the time and he said never seen anything and then one day you get on a 747 he says that blows your mind this is totally and so he had traveled and his people had traveled you know several hundred miles and whatever five thousand years of history in three days and i said well do you ever miss it he says yes and no he says once we were just us there was no then it was just us but now that i know i don't think i could go back even if there was a back to go to which there isn't and and of course the great story here is the garden of eden how do you get kicked out of the Garden of Eden you eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil once you have knowledge all you're doomed you're just doomed right is it's it's just once you know ah there is yeah that's right but you can't go as you can't uh no you can't like well I'm just gonna forget all this and go back and so once the question is asked well it's all over we're just sort of doomed unless you get something like the Dark Ages but this is what the Dark Ages work people forgot that this question had been asked and so they laughs back into roughly total ignorance by the way in the Western rows is talking about this before the lecture there was I think was the 900 to the largest library in Europe had about 400 volumes and Baghdad had several libraries that had more than a hundred thousand volumes each so Islam was booming this is this but but in the dark ages in the last world right they had forgotten that you had all these questions and and they latched back but then the Renaissance happened if we remembered and then you got chaos because we remembered that there's questions and roughly that's where we are today we're stuck in this swamp of questions so how do we respond to this like I said I'm not giving you give you answers per se but philosophically intellectually personally how do we respond to this one remember I would suggest yes you're doomed once you know that there's a possibilities there's no escaping that I think we have this dream that oh I'm going to make a decision and it's going to transform my life into this seamless perfect sort of glowing sphere of light that will be terminated like permeated by unending goodness and I'll know what to do and I'll just be I'll be transcendent being on earth and my life will be clipped I'll have the right job or the right partner or the perfect something-something but it turns out that lasts for I don't know not very long because we have the human capacity then to go huh this is nice it could be nicer that's great this is great this is great I'm getting bored slightly bored little more bored on forward what's great but now I'm bored again that's another problem that we have going back earlier they say go way back to the origins of mankind we have two really distinctive features we're communal order loving animals that seek novelty and excitement this is a bad combination right it's just as it's diametrically appell but you're right everybody recognizes this right you're like oh this is great I love this order I know what's happening is it and immediately we're like I want to change something and by the way it's clear that but did you see this in kids because kids are always best for this because everything is much clearer in them because they're not as good as lying to us or themselves and so kids are doing something fun and they start to get bored they either hit a kid next to them or they smash the toy or you know as far as I can tell with young girls they start to torture one of the young girls they select one at random and start torturing them verbally usually because they're bored they want to change something they want something new and different so yeah AEA bored bored smash no snacks and there's a lot of human history in this but so one notice yes you are stuck in this and I don't think it would it's reasonable to expect yourself to be unstuck there's no unsticking from this particular problem once you're there once you recognize that you could choose something and that you could choose otherwise well you're doomed to is we also think we want the answer there's one reason I'm trying not to give any answers and yet we grow and change this is the other problem with the five pillars and the ten commandments they don't say oh and you're young and then when you're older and then when you middle-aged and then you know weird you know older all that it's just you know change do different things have different outlooks no it's like here's the rules 1 5 10 50 100 doesn't matter the rules are the rules are the rules despite the fact that we're growing and changing all the time what was great for us when we were 15 and probably not so good anymore maybe some of it is but lots of it we've probably given up but brother obviously I'm a reader so I like to reread books I dread when I'm young and sometimes you got all that books actually holds up surprisingly well sometimes like oh my god that book is terrible I would love that when I was 12 I was a greatest book ever written it might not be the greatest book ever written right you know that because I've chained the book hasn't chase sometimes it feels like the book is changing but it's not the book it's a way of tracking your own change your own evolution over time and so the other notions when we want an answer that's going to lift us permanently again into that sort of transcendent spirit okay this is pretty much what Socrates says you can achieve he offers that as a potential outcome when you have perfect wisdom well then you're totally liberated and free and you don't have all these worries you'll always know what to do I think it's a very seductive idea slightly inhuman probably unreachable but very seductive because I just want to know another aspis oh we're stuck and were changeable I mean another aspect of this is this notion of sort of I'm going to make a decision and then we feel committed to it and on one hand sure but on the other hand why right this dis notion is that oh I should know we're terrified of mistakes I've mentioned this before we're terrified of mistakes we call them mistakes it's possible that we can't make mistakes right we can learn and then go wow I wouldn't do that again so I shouldn't do that now but we have this sense of oh I should know I've made a decision I'm committed I'm there and then sometimes commitment is great and it works out and you make great achievements from it sometimes you just realized retrospectively that was just stupidity piled on stupidity piled on air and piled on stupidity the original decision is fine you didn't know you ran the experiment great but sometimes you know and we're hesitant to let go of that because we're right back to the beginning if I admit that was a mistake where I need to make a change or I should it was fine then I won't now what should I do again that's the worst freaking question everybody everybody does this is why people keep jobs because the only thing worse than the job you have is looking for a job right we know this your job has to get so bad before you quit it because looking for a job is the sauce just terrible you don't know if you should take the job like I'll just do anything fine I'll stay here as a slave because anything is worse right that because we don't want to reenter that void of not knowing of reacting the question well that job was no good what job do I think would be good well how many jobs are there see this is the beauty of being in a hunter-gatherer society they're not a lot of jobs right you polish up your resume you go to a couple of tries this is anybody looking for an information management specialist no okay I can do rock tools is that good tell you that Shea's a very limited range of possibilities and probably you have certain native gifts that are best expressed in very limited way but we need those gifts and so we're like yeah say you're good at that we're gonna have you do you're gonna do everything else by the way but you're definitely going to do that because we need people who can weave or who are really good at hunting or good at fishing or dig really well whatever your skill set is they're valuable and so we want to exploit it but notice now we don't know what our skills are because how many skills are possible I mean people do extraordinary things this is amazing the diversity of possible jobs no matter what job you have you can imagine a job that would be better in some way maybe it pays more hours are different I work outside my work inside one is more flexible I have more challenge I have less challenge I have better co-workers I work in a different place I know I'll move cities I don't like this ideal move to another state otherwise that's it y'all lived right it's just where should I live what should I live how well how should I dress it's all a freak see it's all up for grabs and on one hand we think we love this on the other hand I'm not convinced we do because it seems like given the opportunity we ditch that as fast as we possibly can any opportunity to get rid of our freedom we tend to like walk jump on it because we hate this question and so if you've ever felt confused and baffled by the world blame the Greeks good until one of them said how should we live and they gave 50 answers right and some people all the great Greek thinkers I'm like add great on one hand sure but they gave every possible answer which is not that helpful if there were two Greek philosophers you could go great if there were three maybe but there was other just there's so many of them and they all said different things and they're all contradicting each other and so yeah that's where we are and so you know you can embrace this which would be my recommendation but it's a struggle so last note here as we move through this is to ponder the alternatives though remember always that the alternative to this is to sort of abrogate your human capacity to say I don't want to know more about myself or know about my world or more about how I fit into my world or how I should do this or what I'm capable of so when you stop asking the question what you're really announcing is undone that's it for me I want to fix myself here sometimes that's you know unreasonable but notice what you're saying is there's no more agreement that's it I've tapped my potential I've considered every option this is it undone and that I would always equate that essentially with sort of death right now you're a living dead person because living things always change they're always growing adapting something is going on trees bushes flowers they change the grow they do things we do the same and when we try and say no more I really want an answer to this question I think fundamentally what we're saying is I don't want to be human anymore most importantly we're saying I don't want to be me anymore I want to just I just want it to stop I want me to stop on my ideas of stuff I may have motions to just be fixed right we all had those days right were you you're living your life things are going on well and then you wake up one morning and everything in your life sucks even though it's exactly the same as it was the day before right it's like wow yeah that's it's completely human it's because you're not the same every day now you probably don't want to change everything in your life that day you probably want to save hmm having a bad day perhaps didn't sleep well shouldn't have had that 11th whisky or if you get a day after day after day of that at some point then you have to go well alright something has really changed it was fine before now it's not so fun so what what's change is it me is it outside some evolution some combination which and then you have to return to this what do I think the goal of my life is what am i what am I looking for well how do I measure what I'm doing how do I know whether what I'm doing is it's correct and as irritating and frustrating and time-consuming and emotionally draining is that question can be at times and we absolutely have to stop asking it to by the way we used to can you ask that continually it freezes you so sometimes gets them sick of this question I'm just gonna go on with my life for a while leave me alone but then you have to return to it because to not do that is to simply say like I said is I I'm sort of giving away some significant part of my capacity my Commandments with myself and that's been the choice that's offered over and over and over and over again if you do it and by the way Institute institutions our institutions are as part places for good and he'll that give you the opportunity if you fit in the institution and do what they say in the way they say to do it they will provide you with structure and you know pay and something that tells you you're doing the right thing and but this does not make this wrong it just means this is what all institutions do because that's how they survive as an institution but that is a trade-off because institution may tell you to do things or behave in certain ways that really don't correspond with you I think it's necessary very few people fit perfectly in any institution and it can be a perfectly reasonable trade-off by the way it is not that that's wrong for instance but my job I have to go to one meeting a year and I complain about it for about six months three months beforehand I got a damn meeting and three months afterwards I talked about how horrible that meeting was but it's really not that bad you would think but I'm not a big meeting person you know it just is just they irritate me infinitely so but I think that's a reasonable trade-off but if they said I had to go to a meeting a week well that would be a deal breaker right there's no way I can go to a meeting when we get theoretically I could but I just can't so you know that you know where those trade-offs happen but be aware that their trade-offs - no you're making trade-offs it compromises ah it's when we forget or when act I think more importantly when we will ourselves to not notice when we decided hey I'm no longer growing and changing I don't want to want to think about what's the right way to live well that's when a divorce you're sort of you've capture self off and you're done so last note one different way to think about this is to say what is it I'm trying to achieve or goal I don't know it's hard to get a right word what is how do I want my life to feel is one way I think about this you know what do I want in my mind what do I want to feel in my day what do I want to see in my day right how so - it's very interesting to me is because the Stoics for instance and the Epicureans had a different emotional goal they said that you achieve happiness either through detachment or sort of detachment centrally the right word sort of sort of indifference or do you achieve it through sort of a sense of glowing well-being those are very different emotional states which they talk about a lot by the way you know we tend to think of ethical outcomes and all this and they did - also tended to talk about how things feel so I think that's another thing to reflect on what we're doing but also how does it feel when we're doing it and how is it that I want to feel when I do things do I want to feel you know wow enthusiastic like wow this is great again kids are great you toss them in the air right and it's fun it's fun it's funny then you throw them high enough and it gets terrifying right so what's going on nothing has changed really but the feeling has changed dramatically the thrill turns into terror we tend to like thriller from not like terrible you know what is challenge become stress when does interest become obsession those sorts of emotional aspects they also talk about a fair bit because they were at the interested of every aspect of the human experience not just the intellectual or the physical also the emotional and so I guess the the conclusion is yeah yeah you're stuck that they're only wrong answer probably is to stop asking the question now once you stop asking the question of how should then what should I do what makes a good life is my life completely me and mine the way I would like it to be then we've sort of squandered this incredible heritage we sort of that's when you sort of throw it away that sort of the pioneers of our history that that broke this open it sort of threw us into this quagmire or gave us opportunity to explore this quagmire you decide you know did an amazing amount of work for us to say look all this choice is all this possibility all this capacity that's in you and that's in the world available to be explored and while there's any number of possible answers probably really choosing one and sticking only with that without further reflection is really an abrogation of the greatest gifts that we've been given which is human freedom in the end of impulse towards achieving the capacities that are within us and within our communities so thank you very much