It's like, otherwise, your life is meaningless. Well, what should you aim at? Well, I don't know.
Well, pick something, pick something, aim at it. As you move toward it, you'll get wiser.
Then maybe your aim will change. That's OK. But at least it'll change in an informed way.
It's like discipline yourself in one dimension. See what happens.
There's a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, and it's very, very, very old,
we share it with virtually every animal that has a nervous system.
It sits above the spinal cord. It's extremely old, evolutionarily speaking, and half of it
governs fundamental motivation, so governs hunger, for example.
So if you're hungry, you pause at the existence of something that will satiate your appetite,
a peanut butter sandwich. And then you're happy when you're moving towards the kitchen.
And then maybe you get thirsty in the hypothalamus does that.
And then maybe you need to use the washroom or maybe you're too hot
and the hypothalamus pops up these little motivational frames and then
emotions modulate your movement towards the goal that's established
by these fundamental motivations. But that's only half the hypothalamus.
The other half is the origin of the dopaminergic system that
mediates exploratory striving and positive emotion.
And so the way our brains are set up, way below the neocortex,
way, way older than that, the default position is if you're satiated in all the important
dimensions, then you're curious and explore. Well, why? Well, because you might
find new resources that could be used to
satiate those fundamental motivations in the future.
So that heroic drive into the unknown is unbelievably archaic.
And then it's regulated by fear and pain.
So you go into the unknown. Well, you don't want to die.
So if you get damaged, you experience pain and you want to avoid pain, so you experience anxiety.
These are very fundamental systems and they are reflected in our narratives.
That's essentially, as far as I can tell, why the dragon hordes treasure everywhere.
The dragon is an amalgam of predatory stimuli. And fire, which is a destructive force,
but also very useful. So Dragon is something
like predatory, destructive entity. You might say, "well, is that real?"
Well, yeah, but it's a meta category. It's like there are lions and raptors
and lizards, let's say, 60 million years ago when we were still in trees.
The idea that there's a meta predator is a great idea.
A meta predator is what all predators share in common. That's a dragon.
Well, what should you do with a dragon? Well, avoid it, that's one answer.
Another answer is burn it out of its lair so that it doesn't have baby dragons.
And an even more sophisticated answer is well, confront it.
You can feed your family with the body of a dragon.
It's treasure. You've got to aim at something.
It's like, otherwise, your life is meaningless. Well, what should you aim at? Well, I don't know.
Well, pick something, pick something, aim at it. As you move toward it, you'll get wiser.
Then maybe your aim will change. That's OK. But at least it'll change in an informed way.
It's like discipline yourself in one dimension.
See what happens. Well, that's exciting.
And I think that's something that's open for everyone.
You can do that, I shouldn't say
that because I don't believe that. I think you can find yourself in a
situation that's so dire that there's no escape from it.
But that doesn't matter because there's still, this is the hero myth might not be,
the best we have might not always work. But it's still the best we have.
And the fact that it might not work doesn't mean we should throw it away.
It's still the best we have. I mean, everyone dies and so we fail in some sense.
The fact that a symphony ends doesn't mean that it wasn't worth listening to.
One of the things I've noticed time and time again
is that whenever I talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning,
the crowds that I'm talking to go silent. I say, look, you need a meaning to sustain
you through the vicissitudes of life. OK, well, try to debate that.
It's like, is life painful? Yes. Is it anxiety provoking? Yes.
Is it uncertain? Yes. Is it painful beyond baring
sometimes? Yes, it's difficult. Everyone agrees about that.
Now, they might disagree about how difficult, but that doesn't matter, the central point holds.
What if you think that's all pointless? Well, that doesn't seem very helpful.
OK, so you need a sustaining meaning. Well, where do you find that?
Well, you generally find it in responsibility to yourself and to other people.
And people ask themselves those questions when I'm talking
because I ask them to ask themselves those questions and that's the answer.
Well, what's meaningful? Well, I have a
meaningful relationship with my father. I have a meaningful relationship with my wife.
I have a meaningful relationship with my pet because I take care of that pet.
When I commit to something and make sacrifices,
that sacrifice is something I also talk about a lot in both of the last two books,
if something's valuable, you'll make sacrifices to attain it.
And that that discovery of sacrifice, I think that's what separates human,
it's one of the primary factors separating human beings from animals.
Because we discovered that we could let go of something we value in the present
and we would gain something we value even more in the future.
We acted that out dramatically in all sorts of strange ways over thousands and thousands of years
before it was formalisible psychologically. But it's a massive discovery.
I can forego gratification in a particular way and benefit in the future, so I can share the
proceeds of my hunt. And I store up
future food in the form of reputation. And the favors I'm owed now by other people.
It's a massive discovery. But one of the tenants of cognitive
behavioral therapy is collaborative empiricism. So, when you have a client and you say,
"well, you know, maybe your mood would be better if you got up at eight o'clock
in the morning regularly instead of two or four in the afternoon irregularly."
And then you say, "well, we don't really know if that's true,
let's try doing it, getting up at 2:00 regularly for a week and see what happens,
and then maybe we'll try moving it back an hour, week by week..."
But you can see how it goes. Well, I would say run the experiment.
Is your life better? And you can even look at the way that you evaluate your past.
When you upheld your responsibilities, did that improve your quality of life,
even though it might have been difficult? And, you know, generally people say yes to that.
We derive a certain amount of satisfaction from past accomplishments
and generally in proportion to their difficulty.
And so if that's not true, fair enough. And I mean, there's variation.
Highly open people tend to take more delight in extraordinarily creative ventures
and extroverted people in being with other people. Conscientious people are more duty focused.
But it doesn't really matter, it's still responsibility.