199. Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World | Clay Routledge

[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, Season 4, Episode 54.

[1] This episode was recorded on June 14th, 2021.

[2] In this episode, Dad spoke with Dr. Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist, writer, and professor at North Dakota State University.

[3] He's also a senior research fellow at the Arkbridge Institute and an editor for Perfectus magazine.

[4] Dr. Routledge studies basic psychological needs and how they're shaped by family, social bonds, economics, and broader cultural worldviews.

[5] He's published over 100 scholarly papers, co -edited three books on existential psychology, and written several books, including nostalgia, a psychological resource, and supernatural, death, meaning, and the power of the invisible world.

[6] A lot of Dr. Routledge's work focuses on the need for meaning, so he has a lot in common with my dad there.

[7] They had a very engage in conversation where they spoke about loneliness, meaning nostalgia, terror management theory, and existential psychology.

[8] They also get into human progress, responsibility, religion, and UFOs, so a pretty wide range of topics.

[9] I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did and have a wonderful week.

[10] Hello everyone.

[11] I'm pleased to have with me as a guest today, Dr. Clay Routledge.

[12] He's a faculty scholar in the Sheila and Robert Shelley Institute for Global Innovation and growth, professor of management at North Dakota State University, and senior research fellow at Archbridge Institute.

[13] Dr. Routledge studies among other topics, meaning, belief, atheism, magical thinking, existential economics, and entrepreneurship.

[14] He is the author of Nostalgia, a psychological resource, and supernatural, death, meaning, and the power of the invisible word.

[15] He has published more than 100 academic articles, co -edited three books.

[16] and written numerous pieces for outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, and the National Review.

[17] I first ran across his work in Newsweek where he wrote a interesting article on what you might describe as the potential moral failings of universal basic income, and its failure to address people's need for meaning in addition to the necessity for economic security.

[18] I looked up his website and found that his lab does unique work.

[19] there aren't a lot of psychological labs that are concentrating as intently as Dr. Routledge on meaning and belief and that sort of thing.

[20] And so I thought it would be very much worth talking to him, especially also given his emphasis on economics, which adds an additional twist to his interests.

[21] So welcome, Dr. Routledge.

[22] Clay, thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today.

[23] Thank you for having me on, Dr. Peterson.

[24] It's a great privilege to be on your podcast.

[25] Well, so fill me in a bit.

[26] Tell me what your lab has been doing and how you got interested in doing what you're doing and also how you managed it because your research interests, I wouldn't say, are exactly center of the road by academic psychological standards.

[27] But you've been very successful with it.

[28] Yeah.

[29] So, I mean, I'm a bit of an atypical academic in a lot of ways.

[30] One, when I was in college, I didn't even think I was supposed to be there.

[31] I remember I had a high school guidance.

[32] counselor who said, well, you're not college material.

[33] So, you know, you need to figure out, you know, a job that that you can do when you graduate.

[34] But why did he think, why did he think you weren't college material?

[35] I'm a late bloomer.

[36] I wasn't a great, I wasn't a great student.

[37] I, you know, this was, this was decades ago.

[38] And, you know, now I'd probably be diagnosed with ADHD or something like that.

[39] I mean, I was just a very active young, young male who, you know, wasn't particularly interested in setting still and classes and reading books and things like that.

[40] I wanted to be engaged, doing, you know, doing active things.

[41] So I wasn't a great student.

[42] And, you know, but I think I was just kind of a late bloomer.

[43] And then by the time I graduated and I thought, well, I should go to call.

[44] I should, you know, give it a shot.

[45] And I went to a local commuter college.

[46] And it pretty much worked, um, oftentimes full time as like a security guard and a bunch of other jobs.

[47] I've done martial arts much of my life.

[48] And so I was a part -time martial arts instructor.

[49] Then I was just going to college.

[50] And I was actually originally a criminal justice major because I thought, well, I should probably do something like be a police officer, you know, something a little bit more more active.

[51] And, you know, I didn't, I wasn't really into that.

[52] I took a psychology class, which is common as part of a criminal justice major.

[53] And I was like, oh, wow, this is, this seems pretty cool.

[54] And so I got, you know, I got interested in psychology, but even still, when I, you know, I finished my psychology degree, I had no intentions of going to graduate school.

[55] I spent a few years actually working in outpatient clinical mental health and also in social work, which we can get into later because I do think that some of those experiences have, you know, have really influenced how I think about things, just, you know, the practical experience of working with people in the community.

[56] Sometimes it was because of severe mental illness.

[57] Sometimes it was just, you know, people that had, you know, real social dysfunction and, you know, a lot of problems in their family and in their, in their personal lives.

[58] Right.

[59] So you had the opportunity to do something that was clinical to bring your knowledge down to earth, so to speak.

[60] Yeah, absolutely.

[61] And I, you know, I just had an undergraduate degree.

[62] I wasn't a psychologist, like a clinical psychologist or anything.

[63] I was basically a social worker, an outpatient caseworker.

[64] But I had, you know, dozens of, you know, clients that I was responsible for, you know, kind of checking on them, making sure they were medication compliant or doing the things that were they were supposed to do as part of their treatment plan.

[65] And it was a very, it was a very interesting and educating experience.

[66] I did that, but then decided, you know, I want to go to school.

[67] I want to try graduate school.

[68] I had a professor who was as an undergraduate who she was very much like, you should, you should go to graduate school.

[69] You would be great.

[70] You would do really well.

[71] And, you know, I just wasn't super confident about.

[72] it but then I took the GRE and I did you know pretty well I think and and I applied to a few I only applied to I think four programs I got into two of them and then I went to school at the university of Missouri so that's a long way of saying when I started school which was in September of 2001 then that was when right when the 9 -11 happened like it was within my first week or two of classes.

[73] In fact, I remember I went to...

[74] In graduate school.

[75] In graduate school, yeah.

[76] In graduate school.

[77] I remember I went to this really, I had this a nova.

[78] Like, you know, when you're in grad school, you take these quantitative sight classes.

[79] And that a class?

[80] I think it was just called a Nova.

[81] And, you know, I was in this class and then, you know, it was kind of announced that, hey, there was this attack happening.

[82] And I saw some, some of it was unfolding before I left the house in the morning, but we didn't know what was going on.

[83] And then I was in this grad seminar.

[84] And our professor actually sent us home and said, everyone needs to go home.

[85] There's a terrorist attack, something happening.

[86] So this was at the very beginning of my first semester of graduate school.

[87] At the time, I was in more of a personality and social psych, like health lab.

[88] It was an alcohol lab.

[89] And so we were really looking at like very practical, very practical outcomes related to risky behavior and as predicted by individual differences.

[90] But when 9 -11 happened, I just started thinking about, I mean, it just really astonished me how you had these people that are because of a cause or something they believed in are willing to sort of override their self -preservation instinct and, you know, and die in the service of an ideology.

[91] Yeah, well, that was something that really compelled me too.

[92] I was very curious all the way through my graduate school career about what it was about belief that was so compelling that people were willing to risk their lives or to kill or to commit atrocities, all of that.

[93] What is it that belief does that's so psychologically significant that it seems to override everything else?

[94] It's a hell of a question.

[95] Right, right?

[96] And so it just happened by chance that I was at the University of Missouri, doing my, you know, starting graduate school.

[97] And after this happened and I was thinking about these questions, there was a scholar there, Dr. Jamie Arndt, who this was his whole area of research was he was in an area, I don't know if you're familiar with, called terror management theory.

[98] Yes.

[99] And so he was doing research in his lab, not on terrorism or anything like that, but on this notion of what does it mean to be an organism, intelligent enough to be aware of your the inevitability of your on mortality.

[100] Right.

[101] That's based on Ernest Becker's work, the denial of death, which is a great book.

[102] I think he's fundamentally wrong, but it's a great book.

[103] Nonetheless, he's wrong in a very interesting way, and he's very, very smart person.

[104] So the denial of death is a great book.

[105] Yeah, and I'm familiar with some of the major researchers in the terror management area.

[106] I've met a couple of them, and we've had some discussions.

[107] Excellent.

[108] So yeah, so that's how I kind of started.

[109] And, you know, so I, so I ended up changing labs, which people might not, you know, your listeners and viewers might not really know what that means, but that's kind of a big deal.

[110] It's, it's kind of a dicey thing to navigate in graduate schools.

[111] You get accepted.

[112] Typically, you know, you're accepted by a person to work with them in their lab.

[113] And then to be like, well, I want to move to a different lab.

[114] It's kind of a big.

[115] It's like switching an apprenticeship.

[116] Right, right.

[117] can go quite wrong.

[118] Yeah.

[119] So it's a risky.

[120] It's a risky move.

[121] But, you know, when I've started grad school, I wasn't, I wasn't really sure what I was doing.

[122] I went to a small, as an undergrad, I went to a small commuter college and there was no, you couldn't work in a lab.

[123] There wasn't anyone doing research.

[124] So it wasn't like what a lot of, like, you know, my own students have the opportunity for, you know, undergrads to work in my lab and get a census for me. So I had no idea.

[125] So when I started, I really didn't know what I was getting it into.

[126] And so when I, you know, when I, when I had the opportunity to potentially change labs, I negotiated it carefully so no one would be offended or anything.

[127] I certainly didn't want to hurt my own future prospects in the field, but everyone was fine with it.

[128] What did you find compelling about Terra Management theory?

[129] And can you outline it a bit for everyone?

[130] We could have a bit of a discussion about that as well.

[131] Yeah, yeah, of course.

[132] So what I found compelling about it was, and I do have some issues, with it.

[133] I'm not in total agreement with it in its purest form.

[134] But what I found compelling about it was really the writing of Ernest Becker that is based on, which is this notion of what does it mean to be so smart that in a lot of ways where, you know, as Becker pointed out, humans have godlike imaginative capacities, right?

[135] We can we can fantasize about all sorts of things.

[136] We can do all, you know, we can engage in all sorts of mental exercises in which we can, which was allowed us to transform this planet, right?

[137] And even send people into space.

[138] What does it mean to have that intelligence yet at the same time know that you're a biological organism that no matter how smart you are, you can't outsmart your own demise?

[139] And not only that, that it can come without warning.

[140] So you can exercise and wear your seatbelt and drink green tea and everything else you're told to do.

[141] And maybe if you're lucky, you'll, avoid an early death, but that doesn't change the fact that, you know, when this podcast is over, I could take a walk out the door feeling pretty good about my day and get run over by a truck.

[142] And, you know, so that's what, you know, so, so what Becker and then ultimately some of the Tara Management scholars pointed out as, or they argued was that's, that's always kind of in the background, right?

[143] The threat of mortality.

[144] It's not, you're not, we don't, you know, we've got things going on.

[145] We're not consciously thinking about it most of the time.

[146] But where aware of it.

[147] Becker tried to bring closure to Freudian psychoanalysis, and so people who are interested in Freud could read Becker because he did a good job of modernizing Freud, and he claimed that we needed an immortality project to set up against the mortality and the terror that it held for us, and that we were compelled to identify with large -scale systems in an attempt to muster a kind of immortal heroism as an antidote to the terror of death.

[148] He thought of that, I think essentially, although he wavered someone in the book, essentially as delusional.

[149] And I think in some sense, from my perspective, that was where he went wrong.

[150] Because I'm not convinced precisely that it is delusional and it's fundamental essence, but plenty of people would debate that.

[151] I think you and I are on the same page about that.

[152] I would agree.

[153] I don't think it's delusional.

[154] And, you know, there's some other issues maybe I think that people can take with some of the theorizing.

[155] But ultimately, the terror management theory for people who, you know, aren't familiar with it is, is taking those ideas of Becker of saying that, well, because of this awareness of mortality, which Becker argued would otherwise be paralyzing if you didn't have this hero project to engage in.

[156] And that's why the book's called Denial of Death, right?

[157] At some level, you have to deny that that's it, right?

[158] And you have to transform yourself into something symbolic.

[159] And so one of the arguments that Becker made.

[160] is as humans live in kind of two, kind of two worlds.

[161] We live in the material, physical world that, you know, every morning when you wake up and have your aches and pains and need to go to the, you know, go to the restroom, you become well aware of your animality, right, your creatureliness.

[162] But we also live in this imaginative, symbolic world where we're able to create works of arts, world religions, all sorts of, you know, all sorts of interesting things.

[163] And that world is the world of meaning that we seek to create.

[164] And ultimately, that is the world that's immortal because I know that, you know, I'm going to die, but I can be part of a project.

[165] Like you said, I can be part of a heroic project that outlives me. So in a lot of religious traditions, that might be very literal, right?

[166] They're a belief in an afterlife.

[167] But Becker also argued that we have the ability to engage in symbolic immortality.

[168] projects as well.

[169] So passing down our genes or creating works of art or, you know, building communities or things that outlive us to the extent that I can say part of myself is in those projects, then part of myself lives on, even if, even if I don't physically.

[170] And so that gets into, you know, that takes us back to the, to the terrorism idea because, you know, one of the arguments was that, well, you know, you're going to die and there's not much you can do about that, but if you invest yourself in something bigger than yourself and that thing lives on, then you have some type of immortality.

[171] Do you remember that movie Braveheart?

[172] Yeah, I interviewed the director a few weeks ago in my podcast.

[173] Oh, really?

[174] Well, there's a great scene in there where he's trying, William Wallace is trying to motivate the people to overcome their fear of what is clearly a lopsided battle, right?

[175] And he does, like, everyone, and he has this speech where it's like, you could all go home and right now, and maybe you'll live perfectly fine, complete lives, but one day you'll be old on your deathbed and you'll look back on this and maybe you'll, you know, maybe you'll wish that you would have gone for it, right?

[176] Because this is a bigger, this is going to be a more enduring a meaning project than you're just going home and having a normal life course.

[177] Part of what got me about Becker, I mean, Becker said at the beginning of the denial of death that he never read Jung.

[178] And that was a big mistake because much of Carl Jung's writing centered on the immortality project from a different perspective than Freud.

[179] Jung didn't consider the participation in the hero project as delusional.

[180] He thought about it as centrally adaptive.

[181] And it seems to me, I mean, the attack I've taken is that the meaning that people derive from being embedded in significant projects is an antidote to the terror of not so much mortality, but fragility, I would say, because there's actually things you can be a lot more afraid of than death, I believe.

[182] And that that's not illusory.

[183] I mean, it can be, right?

[184] It can become delusional.

[185] But it's not reasonable for me to believe that the projects that we undertake, the heroic projects, let's say, even hard.

[186] such things as raising a family are the denial of death.

[187] They're an attempt to extract meaning out of finite life.

[188] And I suppose it's also too much of a cognitive theory for my liking because it doesn't take other elements into account, like the existence of a religious instinct, let's say, or something like that.

[189] So despite that, I have a lot of regard for the book.

[190] I think it's a brilliant book.

[191] Yeah, yeah.

[192] No, I agree with you.

[193] And but that's, that's kind of how I got started is I, I, so I entered this lab at the University of Missouri and we were doing.

[194] So the idea was the people who started Tara Management Theory, I think they wrote like a theoretical article or something and presented it maybe like at a social psychology conference in the, the early 80s.

[195] And people were like, hey, that all sounds really cool, but it's totally untestable.

[196] And so I think that was the initial reaction.

[197] And then so what, what they did is they tried to create.

[198] create a series of hypotheses that they could test.

[199] And one of them, you know, the most common one, but certainly not the only one is what's called the mortality salience hypothesis, which basically is if it's true that, you know, the awareness of death is the thing that provokes our investment in these belief systems and as well as the self -esteem project, which, you know, Becker talked about a lot, then temporarily heightening people's awareness of mortality should in turn temporarily heighten their defense of these systems, right?

[200] Right.

[201] And so that's what they started doing experiment.

[202] That was Solomon Greenberg and Pizzinski.

[203] Correct.

[204] Yeah.

[205] They wrote a book called Dwarment at the core on the role of death in life.

[206] That came out in 2015.

[207] I haven't looked at that book.

[208] I've talked to Greenberg and Solomon about their work before.

[209] they'd be good to have on this podcast, actually.

[210] I hadn't thought about that.

[211] So yeah, so they would bring people into the lab and remind them in various ways of their mortality and then look at the effects on their beliefs, the punitive effects.

[212] They also had a hell of a time publishing their work to begin with.

[213] It was resisted quite stringently, quite assiduously, by people in the field.

[214] Yeah, I think so.

[215] I mean, in a lot of the resistance, it seems to be this is too philosophical.

[216] It's too abstract.

[217] It's hard to pin down.

[218] And understandably, because I mean, one challenge, you know, one of the challenges that people have made to the theory is when you make people aware of the mortality or when you heighten people's awareness and mortality, regardless of how rigorous of a control condition you have.

[219] So you can say, for instance, well, maybe the problem with death is that it's separation, it's isolation, right?

[220] And so maybe it's really a social thing.

[221] Maybe, maybe, you're being separated permanently from loved ones.

[222] And so what's triggering these defenses is something social.

[223] So you can try to control for social exclusion or things like that.

[224] But one of the challenges is regardless of what type of control condition you have, by nature, death is a, it's a real thing.

[225] It's not an abstraction.

[226] And it's multifaceted.

[227] It's multidimensional.

[228] Because you do worry about all these things, right?

[229] And there is, there are some Israeli social psychologists who were also, Victor Florian, I don't know if you've heard of him and Mario Michelincer, they were also doing this kind of existential psychology.

[230] And they were looking at the awareness of death more through this multidimensional perspective that when people are, the fear of death isn't just the fear of annihilation, which is kind of what Becker focused on.

[231] But it is the fear of, there's uncertainty about what's going to happen after you die.

[232] There is a social element of it, too, which is I'm going to be separated from the people I love.

[233] There's a fear of pain.

[234] I mean, so there is a whole bunch of other stuff packed in there, and it's hard when you make people aware of death, you're bringing online all of that stuff.

[235] And so how do you, it's a bit complicated to disentangle.

[236] Yeah, it's not obvious, too, whether, like, death is a subset of uncertainty or uncertainty is a subset of death terror.

[237] I mean, part of the problem with Becker's theory is that a lot of beliefs are actually representations of ways to act in the world that stabilize the world, right?

[238] So if you have a theory about something, you act it out and you get what you want, then you validate the theory and you indicate to yourself that your knowledge is sufficient to protect you from uncertainty.

[239] Well, the ultimate uncertainty in some sense is your annihilation.

[240] I mean, you can make that case.

[241] But you can't say that all belief systems function to specifically inhibit the fear of death.

[242] I mean, he would say that that's the worm at the core, which is, of course, what Solomon, Greenberg, and Pesinski talked about in their book.

[243] But I'm not even completely certain of that, because like I said, I think there are things that you can be more afraid of than death.

[244] Pain might be one.

[245] Yeah, yeah.

[246] So, yeah, so I agree with that.

[247] So there are the kind of hardline terror management people that take the position you just articulated, which is this is it, this is the core, this is the core existential issue.

[248] But then there are people more like me who sees death as one of a number of potential existential threats.

[249] And in addition to that, even though early on in my career, because I worked in the terror management lab, and so we were largely running these types of studies where you make people aware of their death and then, you know, you measure a bunch of things.

[250] After that, I really started to getting more into a more, what I would consider a more complete existential psychology.

[251] And this is an oversimplification, of course, but you can kind of think of existential psychology as having like a dark side and a light side in some ways.

[252] And terror management and Becker, that was kind of, you know, the edgier dark side, which is ultimately what meaning about is it's a defense system, right?

[253] Like, people are afraid, people are aware of these vulnerabilities and it makes them afraid.

[254] And so they dogmatically cling to beliefs in order to reduce that fear.

[255] So that's kind of an extension of Freud's notions of religious belief as a defense mechanism.

[256] And you can see the Freudianism slipping through there.

[257] And that is the issue.

[258] Is it what's the difference between a defense and an adaptation?

[259] And, you know, in one hand, culture, you could say that your identification, with your culture allows you symbolic immortality, but you could also say, well, it builds your house so you don't freeze to death in the winter, too, right?

[260] So it's not just symbolically preventing your death, say, let's say, or protecting yourself against your fear of death.

[261] It's actually stopping you from dying, which is not a trivial issue.

[262] Right, right, of course.

[263] And so there, you know, and then there's, but there's the second side is, you know, we might call the light side, which is more of what people might be familiar with in the positive or humanistic psychology tradition, which is humans aren't just trying to defend, you know, they're not just in this defensive mode.

[264] We also are explorers.

[265] We're growth -oriented, right?

[266] So part of what we're striving for isn't just to, you know, to defend the world as we know it.

[267] It's to create new beliefs and to explore new ideas.

[268] And so, you know, even when I was in grad school, because there were some positive psychologists in the department.

[269] And then I was in this terror management lab.

[270] You know, I had the opportunity to work with, with different, to collaborate with different people.

[271] That was what was great about our program is they very much encouraged, um, people to go work with, with other professors.

[272] So even starting in graduate school, I was starting to explore the tension between psychological defense and psychological growth motives.

[273] Um, you know, and so this idea is that you, you need both, right?

[274] Because, um, like an argument, artistic or creative pursuits, sometimes you can do things that bring you so outside of the structures that provide, you know, protection that provide psychological defenses that they can leave you very vulnerable, right, to anxiety and to chaos, right, as you know.

[275] And then so you might kind of retreat a little bit, look for your protection.

[276] And so balancing that.

[277] Yeah, that's just like when a child, you see this in children.

[278] I mean, when they start to explore, they move out away from, their mother, but it can be anybody they're stably bonded with.

[279] They move out to explore until they hit a threshold where the fear of being isolated overwhelms the compulsion to explore, and then they run back to be comforted, and then they explore next time a little bit farther.

[280] And that meaning that's associated with exploration isn't the same thing as dogmatic protection from uncertainty, right?

[281] So there's at least two things going on there.

[282] There's the orienting that dogma gives you in the world, which is your crystallized knowledge, let's say.

[283] But there's the meaning that's intrinsic in extending that knowledge that also seems as a, it's like an existential antidote to suffering and to even to mortality salience.

[284] Because you get lost in that, right?

[285] And that's, you get immersed in that and grossed in that.

[286] And that's central to the idea of meaning, I think.

[287] Yeah.

[288] Yeah.

[289] Totally.

[290] I totally agree with that.

[291] And so I became, very much interested in that and you know i was using these kind of regulatory self -regulatory models of like approach avoid um behavioral inhibition behavioral activation right and so that that was something i became very interested in was what shifts people towards you know a threat shifts people towards defensiveness right because you face a threat and then you're like well now's not the time to be super creative or open minded now's the time to be vigilant right to shrink in a little bit after 9 -11 right everyone was shell -shocked and retreated for a while in a state of surreal existence right right yeah so that you know so that's kind of how i got started um in existential psychology and then i ended up you know this is going to seem like a like it's a bit off message but it connects which i ended up studying the psychology of nostalgia and it turns out there there wasn't you know there's there's a long history of theoretical writing and you know kind of case study and anecdotal writing on nostalgia speculating things like it's a neurological disease to it's a it's a form of oppression and all these different things but there wasn't really much empirical research on it except in the area of marketing and marketing researchers were doing they were doing some neat stuff but they weren't interested in kind of getting down to the mechanics the psychological mechanics of nostalgia.

[292] Instead, what they were doing was just seeing, does nostalgia predict consumption?

[293] If you're nostalgic for something, do you want to go buy it?

[294] But why?

[295] They weren't really answering why.

[296] So I started doing research in the psychology nostalgia.

[297] Again, this was in grad school.

[298] And part of my motivation for that was similar to the ideas we've been talking about, you know, people turn, just like people are aware of their, that our ability, our temporal consciousness, right?

[299] Our ability to move the self through time allows us to go into the future and think about our mortality as we've been talking about.

[300] So that we think that's somewhat unique to humans, right?

[301] That we can think long into the future and think about a future without us.

[302] And so what I thought was, interestingly, that might provoke us to turn to the past.

[303] Because if I'm thinking about a future and it makes me anxious or uncertain, I can look to the past at meaningful memories and I can I can kind of comfort myself to be like, no, you know, I have had a good life.

[304] I have people that care about me. I've done interesting things.

[305] And that can make me feel, that can kind of reinstate or, you know, boost my meaning if I'm feeling, you know, feeling potentially meaningless because of the inevitability of my mortality.

[306] So that's why I started studying nostalgia as a psychological defense.

[307] But what's cool about doing research, as you know, is you might have ideas of how things are.

[308] And so you propose hypotheses and you test them.

[309] But then there's also this kind of discovery process, you know, while you're doing a bunch of studies where you're looking at the data and you're just thinking, oh, wow, there's a story here that I missed.

[310] And what I was finding when we were doing nostalgia research is we were asking people to detail and writing a memory.

[311] that makes them nostalgic.

[312] And so we have all these, like, long narratives of people talking about nostalgia.

[313] And one thing that I thought was interesting, but did not expect, was how much of these narratives were actually kind of future focused.

[314] And what I mean by that is people would say things like, when I was a kid, I used to spend summers at grandma's house.

[315] And it was, you know, this was awesome.

[316] And this was a great time.

[317] And I, and I'll always cherish these memories.

[318] it makes me sad that my grandmother's no longer alive.

[319] And so that's gone.

[320] I can't return, you know, I can't return to that experience.

[321] But it makes me hopeful for the future because I want to do that for my grandchildren someday.

[322] And so what I saw in a fair amount of these nostalgic narratives was this kind of self -regulatory process is where people were like dipping into the past to bring to mind and memory that they found particularly meaningful.

[323] And that felt that that was comforting.

[324] It was also a little bit sad.

[325] You know, nostalgia is an ambivalent emotion.

[326] But then they were using, that was inspiring them.

[327] Like that was motivating them.

[328] That was saying, you know what, that was special.

[329] So I should, you know, I should orient my life in a way that allows me to reproduce something like that.

[330] Well, right.

[331] Well, that's the purpose of memory, right?

[332] I mean, people think that the purpose of memory is to remember.

[333] things as they happen and that's that's really rather shallow conception psychologically i mean you remember bad things so you don't repeat them and you identify good things so that you know what good things are and you can pursue them it's it's a very pragmatic process when it's when it's well when it's when it's when it's properly functional there's no reason just to have an objective record of the past in your head you want to mine it for significance and so it's very interesting that that nostalgia took that future -oriented turn.

[334] So you think people get meaningless, let's say, and they get a little bit desperate.

[335] So they turn to the past and they look for things.

[336] They search for places that were meaningful.

[337] They think, oh, that was valuable.

[338] Maybe I could pursue that in the future.

[339] Yeah, yeah, I think so.

[340] And so I've now done dozens and dozens and dozens of studies on the psychology of nostalgia, which has led me and not just me, but, you know, a number of other researchers to kind of position nostalgia as this, as being a motivation, is having this self -regulatory or motivational purpose, which is exactly what you just said, which is I might be experiencing loneliness or even boredom or uncertainty or, you know, something's going on and I don't feel totally stable in life.

[341] I'm missing something.

[342] And so I reach into the past.

[343] And I think it's, it's good to think about it that way.

[344] It's, it's, it's not because a lot of there's a popular conception of nostalgia that it's hiding in the past that you're avoiding your problems that you're avoiding the future and so there's a very negative attitude in some in some quarters of like nostalgia is bad because it gets in the way of progress but my argument is no what happens is you're not running to the past and hiding you're reaching into the past to pull into the present experiences that will help guide you and then that puts you on the path forward.

[345] And now we've done a number of studies in which we find that after people engage in a nostalgic writing task that they subsequently feel more optimistic and motivated.

[346] And it also increases actual behavior.

[347] So when people write about a nostalgic experience, which is typically social, it's typically an experience shared with loved ones, they subsequently want to go out and do things with people.

[348] They were like, hey, that was really good.

[349] I should do that again.

[350] And so I think that really got me thinking more about this, not just a growth -oriented approach, but that people move back and forth between defense and growth, right?

[351] And you could also imagine that that could become pathologized like anything, you know?

[352] I mean, if you're, you know, people fantasize about what they want and then out of those fantasies they can derive goals and begin to act in relationship to those goals or they can just spend more and more time elaborating the fantasies and not moving at all and that can lead to delusional thinking if it's taken to an extreme but that doesn't mean that fantasy per se is a pathological activity just that when it becomes a substitute for action then it can become pathologized so yeah yeah definitely i mean yeah you know i always say nostalgia is like a lot of things that um are generally good for you that you know people can i mean there are people who over exercise right that you know physical fitness is good but there are people that spend too much time at the gym and then it ends up causing injury um because they're you know they're doing too much of a good thing right there are lots of people who drown from drinking too much water as it turns out as well So, you know, anything in excess can be a poison.

[353] Yeah.

[354] So I'd say for the, you know, for the typical person, you know, nostalgia is a relatively healthy activity that helps them kind of figure out what's important in life.

[355] Do you know what elicits it in particular?

[356] Is it loneliness?

[357] Or are there particular eliciting factors?

[358] Yeah, yeah.

[359] So there's two general classes of nostalgia triggers.

[360] One is very obvious because it's just, you know, what we call sensory inputs.

[361] which is you hear a song come on the radio or somebody puts like a photo up on social media.

[362] And so that's a direct trigger of reminding you, right, the smell, right?

[363] Scent, yes, scent evoke nostalgia is very powerful.

[364] So there's those what we, you know, what we call direct triggers.

[365] And then there's what we call psychological triggers.

[366] And they tend to be negatively, negative affect, typically loneliness, but other things as well.

[367] So we've done this where we've induced, we've used like emotion inductions, where we've had people, watch, you know, watch video clips that either make them happy or sad or have a more neutral affect.

[368] And so it's not just the case that any emotion provokes nostalgia.

[369] It tends to be negative emotions.

[370] So when people feel sad, when they feel loneliest, when we ask people, loneliness is the most common trigger.

[371] But we've also looked, even at boredom, we've done these experiments where we have people do these really, really boring tasks where they're just spending a period of time writing down concrete mixture, you know, the formulas for concrete mixtures or things like that.

[372] So it just seems like a meaningless task, which which increased, subsequently increases nostalgic feelings.

[373] We've looked at meaning threats.

[374] We've had people read existential philosophy essays that remind them of how insignificant their life is.

[375] And, you know, that that increases nostalgia.

[376] But because of the social nature of nostalgia, And that is, most nostalgic memories do involve time spent with loved ones.

[377] So do you suppose that's a, is that a, an analog?

[378] Do you think of the security seeking behavior that we discussed a little bit earlier?

[379] You know, when a child goes out and explores and then hits a wall, they return to something comforting.

[380] And, you know, almost all higher cognitive functions are elaborations of something that's much more basic.

[381] So, I mean, affection between adults looks like it's an elaboration.

[382] like deep affection.

[383] It looks like it's an elaboration of infant attachment circuitry.

[384] And so you make people bored or you put them in a bad mood and then they return to the security of social interactions in the past.

[385] And you can think of that as purely defensive, but it also indicates to them what they did find meaningful and they can use that in a positive way.

[386] Yeah.

[387] Yeah, I think exactly that.

[388] I mean, in fact, we've done some work looking at nostalgia and attachment theory.

[389] And it does seem like nostalgic memories, you know, they're basically bringing online these attachment schemas, these frameworks that people use.

[390] And in fact, when you look at interactions between people's scores on attachment scales, it is the people who score high attachment security or what, you know, modern psychologists would say low attachment anxiety or low attachment avoidance.

[391] Right.

[392] So these are these are healthily attached people who had decent.

[393] maternal relationships.

[394] And that's another indication that this isn't psychopathological.

[395] Right.

[396] So those people get the most social benefits out of nostalgia.

[397] One, when you look at the content of their memories, people who are high in attachment security, those people have, their nostalgic memories tend to be more social.

[398] And they tend to be more intimately social.

[399] So nearly what I mean by that is if you ask somebody to write down a nostalgic memory or to just share with you a nostalgic memory for nearly everyone it's social but if you if you look at the writings of people who are high in attachment security they tend to get into more intimate or more detailed they it carries more themes of love of love and like strong body and so again like the attachment system they're really saying they have a secure they have these very deep secure bonds they approach relationships you know to see if people who are indulging in nostalgic memories that are associated with attachment, to see if they're more analgesic to pain, right, because that loneliness and social isolation look like their pain -related phenomena, at least according to people like Yak Panksep.

[400] And so hypothetically, bringing to mind a social attachment memory that's deeply meaningful should make you more pain tolerant.

[401] We used to use this thing that I referred to as a finger crusher, which it wasn't.

[402] It was just a weight, a weighted blade, dull blade that pushed on a finger here, like that.

[403] And then the pain sums across time until you tell the people, take your finger out when you think a reasonable person would.

[404] And you can ask them, when does it hurt?

[405] And then you can measure when they take it out.

[406] And you can do it with a couple of fingers to get a good, you know, repeated measure.

[407] And we tested, I never did publish this study, but we tested at Harvard with an undergraduate.

[408] we had people interact with a dog, they had to like dogs, and then tested them for analgesia afterwards, and they were more analgesic as a consequence of interacting with the dog.

[409] That's interesting.

[410] Yeah, no, that would be a really cool study.

[411] It's not the same thing, and this isn't research I did, but there were some researchers that looked at nostalgia in the context of actual physical feelings of warmth.

[412] And the idea was kind of like what you're talking about, like we associate relationships with comfort and warmth and emotional warmth, right?

[413] And so they did things like manipulate the temperature in the room in the lab and then had people, you know, kind of estimate it.

[414] And, you know, people in the nostalgic condition thought their room was warmer.

[415] Yeah, I would say that is analogous, you know.

[416] And that's a good example, too, of how these sources of meaning are not merely cognitive, right?

[417] I mean, one of the things that I studied pain responses for quite a long time in their differentiated form.

[418] And so frustration produces a pain like state, disappointment does, grief does.

[419] And people use tactile contact as a mediation for pain and for grief.

[420] And it's about the only thing we know of that's actually useful for grief, real touch.

[421] And one of Pankseps, one of the people that was affiliated with Panksep did, massage with premature infants in their incubators and accelerated their growth up to the rate of normal neonates and the effects.

[422] This was three 10 -minute massages a day.

[423] The effects were measurable six months later in terms of physical and cognitive development.

[424] And so these aren't these aren't precisely cognitively mediated meanings.

[425] They're really embodied.

[426] It's interesting though, because you can call them to mind, which is a abstract cognitive representation of something that's much more physical and tangible.

[427] But they're not delusional and they're not just meaning systems.

[428] There's something far more basic than that.

[429] Right.

[430] Do you know what the state of the science is on?

[431] I remember years ago there was a lot of excitement about some social neuroscientists that were, they were arguing that social pain, the neurosystems built upon the same frameworks as physical pain.

[432] And so that, and maybe that you could even, I think they were, you know, doing studies where they were giving people like acetymedophon or I can't remember.

[433] Yeah, that was Baumeister.

[434] Yeah.

[435] I don't know what the status of his research was, but I regarded that as pretty well established.

[436] I mean, if the pain system is very, very ancient from an evolutionary perspective, you'd expect it to have branched out and differentiated and all sorts of higher functions.

[437] And if you look at the drugs that affect response to frustration, disappointment, grief, they tend to be opiates.

[438] So that's another line of evidence.

[439] That's all documented quite nicely in Jeffrey Gray's book, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, because he talks a fair bit about the difference between pain and so that would be physical punishment, and what it elicits as a state, which would be pain like, and anxiety, say, which is elicited by threat of punishment and not punishment itself.

[440] and opiates are good at moderating punishment -like responses, pain, essentially.

[441] So I think it's well established in the animal literature.

[442] Some of that, the human researchers cottoned on to that, but it was the animal researchers who nailed it down.

[443] Yeah, yeah.

[444] So, you know, so that's kind of the area that I, you know, started doing work, nostalgia specifically that kind of branched me away from, just thinking about while we're doing these kind of defensive studies, right, where we threaten people and then see what they defend, both in terms of...

[445] Just out of curiosity, another thing that would be interesting is that if nostalgic memories of attachment ameliorate feelings of depression, because depression looks like a pain phenomenon as well, at least in some of its manifestations.

[446] Yeah, so I don't know if there's...

[447] I haven't done anything looking at actual, like clinically depressed, people.

[448] So most of the nostalgia work I've done has been, and, you know, for lack of a better term, what we call the normal population, right?

[449] So I haven't, you know, done work with clinical groups.

[450] But certainly in our research among, you know, the normal population, we find that nostalgia does have effects that you would, you would predict would reduce depression because it does reduce loneliness, it does reduce negative affect, it does reduce anxiety, it increases positive emotions, and it does things that counter depression, like it increases optimism and inspiration.

[451] So, you know, but it's an open question about, well, what if you looked at severely depressed?

[452] Right, but no, all those pieces of evidence that you cited do suggest that at least with normative levels of depression, it would be, it would have an ameliorating effect.

[453] so yeah so and there you know that that is a i know there is a whole other literature on reminiscence therapy and you know that the stuff we've done has been more experimental but i think that i think you could you could certainly connect nostalgia is a big part of the reminiscence therapy the reason i think that you know we haven't really is because a lot of the reminiscence therapy, people, they're not particularly interested in basic scientific questions.

[454] So they're not trying to tease apart the specific, you know, cognitive and affective mechanisms.

[455] They want something that works, right?

[456] So they kind of deliver a whole package.

[457] And so in the reminiscence therapy work, a lot of it is what we would consider in the experimental world kind of confounded, right, because they're doing a bunch of stuff at once.

[458] They're bringing to mind nostalgic memories, but they also typically are in the context of a group setting where they're talking to other people and sharing memories with other people.

[459] So then, you know, you had to get into, well, is it the nature of this conversation that they're having with people where they're talking about, you know, things that are really important to them, or is there something specific about the actual memories that they're engaging in?

[460] But what I think our research does is it complements that by saying, well, if you just isolate the experience of bringing in the mind the nostalgic memory in a laboratory cubicle where people are by themselves and you get these positive effects, it suggests that at least part of what's happening in reminiscence therapy is this individual level experience of bringing nostalgia, nostalgia memories to mind, revisiting, reconnecting with them.

[461] And then I'm sure it only helps if you have the opportunity to talk about those memories with other people and share those memories.

[462] In fact, that's a new area of research that we don't have anything published in yet, but I had a PhD student who actually just graduated, and this is what her dissertation was on, is what she called shared nostalgia.

[463] And her argument was, what we do in the lab is not very typical of how most people actually experience nostalgia, which is people tend to be nostalgic when they're around others.

[464] You get together with family members and you talk about you talk about memories you especially in the context of loss you go to a funeral or what do you do you're sad of course but then you talk about memories you shared with that person and oftentimes people are laughing and you know you know trying to honor that person's life but also trying to connect over you know over the meaningful memories you had together so a lot of it reminds you of your affiliation with those other people too which would be a great thing to have happen when you're experiencing a significant loss.

[465] Yeah, absolutely.

[466] So I do think that there's some more research to do in that area.

[467] And like I said, we're just kind of getting started into how do people actually share nostalgia.

[468] And might it serve even beyond the individual and beyond like the more interpersonal relationships?

[469] We're also interested in nostalgia at the cultural level because there are ways that we might pass down traditions and rituals intergenerationally that connect.

[470] So I might have a lot of things that are different in my life and the experiences I've had at the time period in which I grew up than somebody 20, 30, 40 years older than me. But to the extent that there are things that are passed down in the family or in the community that can connect me to that person, that might help with intergenerational community life right and so for just to make social cohesion period right you know we if if we're strangers to one another and then we can identify elements of our past experiences that we share maybe like shared love of a particular band or something like that then we're identifying areas of commonality and perhaps decreasing our distrust of one another I mean, Robert Putnam has demonstrated that, you know, communities tend to be more generous politically when they view those in the community as importantly similar to them.

[471] And so you can imagine that going through the search for a shared past and identifying commonalities might be also a way of generating a shared history across time as part of what unifies people together.

[472] Yeah, absolutely.

[473] So this is what we call collective nostalgia, what you just.

[474] articulated, which is I might, you know, I might have never met somebody who lives across the country, but to the extent that, you know, that we have, as Americans, that there is something that we've, that we identify with, like even music, like you said, or, or, or a movie, if you remember when, I don't think they were particularly good movies, but when the new Star Wars movies came out.

[475] People were really excited about them because there was, you know, there was this collective nostalgia of we all remember when we were watching the original Star Wars movies.

[476] And that was, you know, kind of like a quintessential late 70s, early 1980s American, you know, thing to do that we could bond over.

[477] And yeah, well, it's part of, it's part of experiencing a shared myth.

[478] It's not trivial.

[479] I mean, it's trivial in one sense, but it's not trivial at all in another.

[480] I mean, we don't exactly know what it is that bonds people together in a community, a family, a community, a nation, any of those things.

[481] And the idea that it's shared positive memories is, well, that's got to be part of it.

[482] Yeah, yeah.

[483] I actually talked to a screenwriter a while back about this.

[484] And he made an interesting point.

[485] He was talking about how, because we have the way with the Internet and with all these different, entertainment options we have now, you know, his argument was we might be losing some of the shared media, shared entertainment.

[486] Now, people talk about this when they talk about news all the time.

[487] They say, oh, people consume different news.

[488] But to the extent that he was making even the point that we have all these like dedicated children's programs where he was talking about when he was a kid, he had to watch whatever his dad was watching.

[489] And so his dad would introduce him to Western movies or whatever, and the whole family would watch the same thing.

[490] And so you had this shared cultural, artistic experience that connected you.

[491] But now he's like, you know, you might, the kids might be in the backseat of the car, each with their own screens, watching totally separate things, and you're listening to your own thing.

[492] And the whole family isn't crowded around the TV together in one room sharing the same experiences.

[493] And so we might have very, very individualistic, very tailored media experiences that make it harder to have those socially connecting entertainment Yeah, well, it makes it harder to communicate too because to communicate with anyone you have to mostly share their experience and then talk about a little bit of variation.

[494] I mean, if you're totally opaque to one another in terms of what you've experienced, there's so much to talk about that you can't even gain a toehold.

[495] And you do wonder if this incredible explosion of entertainment options, let's say, but it's far more than that.

[496] It's cultural options does produce, well, perhaps does heighten the probability of the kind of fragmentation that we seem to be experiencing right now.

[497] Yeah.

[498] Well, that might be why every, so every now and then something's popular enough to where, like, not everyone, but a decent chunk of people rally around it and it becomes the thing everyone's talking about.

[499] So like Game of Thrones, it might be.

[500] an example where there's some kind of program that is either so well executed or it just delivers the goods in whatever way, whether it's a movie or television show, where it becomes a cultural phenomenon.

[501] But a lot of the times, it's not that, especially I don't know if you watch like streaming, like Netflix or things like that, but like you can now kind of, you don't even have to turn on.

[502] It's not like we all have to turn on the TV on Monday night, 7 p .m. if we want to watch something because that's our.

[503] chance.

[504] Now we can, I can watch a show that you watched five years ago.

[505] So not only is it the case that there's a ton of options, they're delivered at, you know, individual times.

[506] I can watch, I can, I can, you know, what do you call it when people binge?

[507] I can binge watch a show that, you know, you're not going to watch for another year if you watch it at all.

[508] And again, I don't know if they're, you know, I'm not trying to be.

[509] It's very peculiar too when you think about it that we have the opportunity to, you think about something like a Marvel movie with its, that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, that we have the technology that enables us to experience that singly.

[510] I mean, it's, it's completely preposterous.

[511] I've been associated to some degree with one traditional culture and they use dance, music, storytelling, masks, religion.

[512] It's all integrated into one thing.

[513] And they all participate in that simultaneously.

[514] And that's really the core of their culture.

[515] I mean, without that, they're not a people.

[516] And when you're not a people, to be a people is to be very much the same as other people in important ways.

[517] And that's part of what makes peace.

[518] And you do wonder the increasing atomization of our exposure to cultural material, what that leaves us to have in common.

[519] Right.

[520] So there is a provocative argument that some have made people like, I don't know if you're familiar with, Patrick Deenan and, you know, some of these, you know, like Catholic traditionalists.

[521] And I, he wrote that book, why liberalism failed.

[522] And, you know, I'm not, and it's not my expertise to, I don't know anything about, like, political history.

[523] And so I can't really, you know, I can't really, like, litigate his case for him or make a case against it from that perspective.

[524] But from this perspective of psychology, I think that he's on to something.

[525] And his basic argument, is the success of liberalism is its ultimate failure in that if total individualism means that I owe you nothing, right?

[526] That I can reject whatever, you know, I can reject whatever culture I was raised in and forge my own path.

[527] And in many ways that, you know, we can think of that as being as being good because it can mean we can escape being oppressed or, you know, We can get rid of bad systems that are barriers to my liberty.

[528] But at the same time, that also means there's, you know, it's the atomization that you're talking about, that it can be very alienating and it can get, ultimately, it can get to a point where what he calls anti -culture, which is, it's not just individualism is another culture, which is what cultural psychologists, you know, tend to argue that there's collectivist cultures and individualistic cultures.

[529] His argument is that it's an anti -culture because it's a rejection of culture.

[530] And again, maybe I'm misrepresenting his, you know, or I'm certainly oversimplifying it.

[531] Maybe I'm misrepresenting this case a little bit.

[532] But that is, that's just one example.

[533] Well, it's at least an open question.

[534] How much we have to have in common with one another to live in something approximating mutual understanding and peace.

[535] I mean, it can't be nothing.

[536] You know, and the people who, I don't attend church, but I have some close friends who insist upon its utility and who are very intelligent people.

[537] And part of the argument they make is a cultural argument.

[538] It's like, well, at least for one hour a week, cynical about that, though you may be, the entire community is doing one thing that's the same.

[539] And so there's a point of focal union there.

[540] And of course, the churches used to be the center of the towns and orient the town towards temporality, all of those things.

[541] And so we don't really know what we've lost when we lose those shared rituals and shared, and shared beliefs.

[542] Right.

[543] And we don't know what we've lost when, when, when part of the, part of the reason we've, we've lost it is of course people are, you know, people don't believe.

[544] And so people are becoming non -religious.

[545] But, you know, I have an argument that, you know, part of belief is, is, is, is it kind of an individual difference.

[546] And so it could be the case that there's always been varying degrees of people who are extremely committed to a faith versus people who are just tend to be more skeptical, regardless of the state of scientific knowledge.

[547] And this gets to, you know, some people have argued as like the extreme male brain idea.

[548] Is it related to interest in people and interest in things?

[549] Correct.

[550] Oh, good.

[551] Oh, I always wondered about that.

[552] Yeah.

[553] So the people who are interested in things are much less likely to be religious believers, I would presume.

[554] Correct.

[555] Correct.

[556] So there is an argument that some people have made that religion is very much relies on social cognition, right?

[557] Or relies on the same neuro processes involved in thinking about people, like you just said.

[558] Because to spirituality, you have to animate the world with minds in a way, right?

[559] You have to anthropomorphize.

[560] You have to, so you could have a, in fact, in some cultural traditions that, you know, we have our Big Five personality model, of course, but some cultural traditions, they have a spirituality dimension of personality.

[561] It's recognized that people just naturally vary.

[562] In the West, we tend to be a little bit more blank slated about religion.

[563] People tend to think, well, you just decide to be religious or you were raised religious.

[564] It's just a matter of cold cognitive belief rather than a temperamental proclivity.

[565] Right.

[566] So, but you know, but at the same time, we say things like people have a calling or, and maybe secular people don't say that, but people kind of recognize that there's individual differences in what, in what people, some people are good artists, right?

[567] Some people are just more artistic.

[568] Some people just, so some people are just more likely to see the world as a little bit enchanted, whereas others are just more naturally skeptical.

[569] And so, so let's just assume for some, second that that's true that there's this individual difference that's always existed where you've had some people that are just more interested in things like you said.

[570] And so they might even be somewhat, at the extreme, they might even be somewhat mindblind.

[571] Religion might not even totally understand it because they can't really tangibly grasp it.

[572] Whereas other people are, you know, they can see the world is more magical.

[573] And even so if that's always existed, then what you what you might find is in the past when we had a less individualistic culture, everyone went to church, not because everyone necessarily believed at the same level of commitment, but people didn't have this attitude of, well, I'm not going to go because I don't believe.

[574] People had more of a, well, I, this is the thing that we do.

[575] Well, it was also the case, I think, to some degree, that, you know, part of the reason that we don't believe now is because we have a variety of things we could believe in.

[576] And the farther back you go in history, I mean, imagine a medieval town where Christianity dominated.

[577] There might have been some Jews there who would posit an alternative faith, let's say, but Christianity wasn't so much an explanation of the world as it was the explanation of the world.

[578] So, I mean, maybe you were a brilliant iconoclast and you doubted certain things, but you didn't have an alternative scheme of representation at hand like you do now.

[579] right yeah it was the only game in town so so yeah so i do think that's part of it but but maybe there's a benefit even though we have more things you can believe of course you know it people act like it's weird if you say something to them like well maybe it's good from time to time to submit to things that aren't you know a hundred percent in an alignment with what you want to do and what you believe, right?

[580] Maybe there are, you know, maybe there are benefits to being part of a community project and there's a recognition that it's full of people with individual differences, that there are going to be people that are devout believers and then they're, you know, going to be people that are more skeptical, but there's something, there's a place for everybody in this, in this community.

[581] I mean, we do this with other things like sports.

[582] I mean, some people just aren't good athletes, no matter how hard they try.

[583] But at least in American culture, and I assume it's the same and similar in Canada, we think that kids should have a go at it.

[584] And we think that it's okay if you're not naturally gifted, it's good for you.

[585] There's benefits from participating in physical activities.

[586] And it's fun.

[587] And it's a way to have teammates and to connect with people until maybe learn leadership skills or learn what it's like how to win and how to lose and you learn all these life skills.

[588] And it's fine that some people aren't that, you know, just aren't that good at it or kind of clumsy or whatever.

[589] And so I'm not trying to say that religion and sports are by any means the same thing.

[590] But the point is in other domains, we recognize that there are individual differences and that doesn't preclude them for participating in the project and that there might be benefits for having them more.

[591] I mean, I know this is a loaded term now in academia, but inclusivity, but there might be benefits for being inclusive in saying that there's a place in religion, even for people who are more skeptical.

[592] And I do think that might be the case, I'm not 100 % sure, but I do think that that might be the case outside of the Western world.

[593] Again, I think in the more individualistic cultures, more and more apt to say, well, what do you believe?

[594] What do you think as an individual?

[595] What do you want to do?

[596] As opposed to what is your duty to do?

[597] Or what is...

[598] And what's your relationship to the collective?

[599] Correct.

[600] Well, you could also imagine that it might be something like a difference in fundamental cognitive metaphors as well.

[601] And those could be different niches.

[602] So imagine that the...

[603] So just for the benefit of the audience, the biggest difference known between men and women, in terms of individual differences, is interest in people versus interest in things.

[604] And men are more interested in things, and women more interested in people.

[605] On average, the difference is about one standard deviation, which is very large by the standards of such things.

[606] And so you could imagine that maybe it's more acceptable, more understandable for people who are primarily interested in things to view the world mechanistically.

[607] whereas so that's a metaphor the world is a machine and there's a kind of determinism that goes along with that but also a logical analyzability and and a reductionism and a decomposition that would all go along with tool formation let's say whereas you could also visualize being as a spirit and that also makes sense because the community in some sense is a spirit and other people are spirits and so and animals are spirits they have there are personality like and so to view existence itself as characterized by personality would be a different approach, but one that would have its benefits and detractions just as viewing it like a machine might.

[608] You know, I'm often struck by the fact that, you know, it seems to be that engineers, engineer types are more likely to be critical of mythology and narrative, religious in nature, particularly because it doesn't align with their mode of thinking, but they tend to pick up their mythology in in the form of say science fiction it comes in a more implicit level right you're actually getting to to a series of studies that that we did looking at at this so there was a there was some surveys that came out a number of years ago that found that um the more secular people were the more likely they were to believe in UFOs and when I say that's perfect that goes along with Jung's analysis of visions of UFOs in the sky, right?

[609] He thought those were, those were replacements for religious revelations.

[610] The angels essentially descending from on high.

[611] Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[612] Michael Shermer and I talked about this because he, you know, he's written about this before that.

[613] He's got a great quote that UFOs are like deities for atheists or, I can't remember exactly what I was, but it was something to that effect.

[614] But what we, so there are these surveys that find that the more secular people are, the more likely they are to believe in UFOs.

[615] And not just UFOs in the sense that, well, we don't know what these things are, but they're likely to believe that there's intelligent alien life among us.

[616] So they're really taking a leap of faith.

[617] So that those surveys existed.

[618] But what we were interested in in our lab was, well, to what if religion is about meaning, which there's a lot of, you know, studies looking at the existential benefits of religion, including meaning making, we're like, well, if a religion's about meaning, and people who aren't religious might be, so they might be more vulnerable to not having meaning and thus more likely to be searching for meaning, would they be more likely, would that explain why they're more likely to believe in UFO?

[619] So in other words, from like a methodological point of view, what we did is we looked at this correlation between lack of belief and religion and a positive belief in aliens to see if it was mediated, see if that relationship was mediated by these meaning -making variables.

[620] And so there's these measures that maybe you're familiar with called the presence of meaning, which measures to what extent you actually see your life as meaningful.

[621] And then there's another measure called the search for meaning, which is basically to what extent you're currently looking for meaning in life.

[622] They tend to be negatively correlated, not always, but it makes sense that they are because the more you feel like your life is full of meaning, the less a need you are to go look for new meaning.

[623] And so what we found was we found support for a mediation model in which the less people believed in God, the less meaning they reported having, the more, the higher they were in search for meeting, which in turn predicted their belief in aliens in UFOs.

[624] Have you, have you expanded that to political belief?

[625] Because one of the things I, look, I heard this survey once from the Gallup organization in Canada.

[626] Now, you know, you may know this, you may not, but Canada has had its bouts of separatism, right?

[627] Quebec, our French -speaking province, has put forward the plans to separate a number of times and has come very, very close to breaking up the country.

[628] And Quebec was the last country in the West, really, to radically abandon Catholicism.

[629] It was a really Catholic country till like 1959, and then it just disappeared.

[630] And now Quebec has like the lowest birth rate in the Western world or close to, and very many out -of -wed common law households rather than formally married.

[631] And, you know, whereas in the 50s, the typical family had 12 children, it's like one now.

[632] So radical transformation, a very short period of time, that dovetail.

[633] with this rise in Quebec nationalism.

[634] And I always thought, well, you know, Catholicism disappeared and the state became the religion.

[635] And then I saw a Gallup poll that indicated that if you were a lapsed Catholic, you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist.

[636] I thought, well, there's evidence that when the religious instinct falls out of the religious domain, it plummets down to something like the political level.

[637] And then political, the political becomes religious.

[638] And so you're seeing that people who are less, formally religious.

[639] So, and do you distinguish between dogmatic belief and spiritual belief?

[640] Because that's often distinguished.

[641] But in any case, they're more likely to believe in these extraterrestrial events.

[642] Any work at all on the political end?

[643] So I haven't done any empirical work on the political end, but what you just said is exactly what I was thinking.

[644] Now, there is some work in this model of compensatory control.

[645] not looking at meaning, they're looking at a sense of control in life.

[646] And they, and they found like the, there's, there's a paper on it.

[647] And I'm trying to remember the name of it.

[648] It's called something like God or government.

[649] And basically what they find is the less religious of society is the more people want big government.

[650] And so the idea is that people want some kind of controlling structure that helps make, when you feel personally out of control that helps order the world.

[651] And If a society moves away from religion, they tend to be more interested in government, which isn't exactly what you were saying, but I think it's close, though, it's close.

[652] I mean, it indicates, like your research seems to indicate, is that there is this fundamental impulse towards something approximating religious belief.

[653] And so then you might think, well, in most cultures, particularly traditional cultures, that need is fulfilled by the total.

[654] of the culture.

[655] It's relatively integrated and everything is oriented in the same direction.

[656] Whereas in our culture that's fragmented to the degree that it has, that's all gone away, but that doesn't mean that the desire for something like coherence is, and I can't see how it can disappear because who wants incoherence?

[657] That's uncertainty and trouble.

[658] And maybe that's driving part of this search for meaning that you're describing.

[659] Yeah, I think so.

[660] And one of the things that's really fascinating about this because when I was doing this work and I was writing, I was writing a book on all of this.

[661] So I was doing empirical work, but I was also looking at broad trends.

[662] So if you look in the U .S. at the areas of the country that are the least religious, so you can look at that both in terms of self -identified religiosity, but you can also look at church attendance and, you know, other indicators of religion.

[663] Those are the places where the New Age industry is thriving, right?

[664] So like on the coast, right?

[665] So you can at that broad level of analysis, you can say the more secular parts of society tend to be the ones that go more in on new agey stuff.

[666] They also tend to be the one.

[667] And then this gets to what you're saying.

[668] That also tends to connect with the political activism.

[669] And I remember this happening during, during, maybe it's the early Trump administration years that you'd see these articles in places like the New York Times.

[670] Like these weren't fringe.

[671] outlets.

[672] You'd see articles where I was talking about like witchcraft, the resistance witchcraft.

[673] So they're like people.

[674] So there were there were witches that were trying to cast spells against Republicans and and Donald Trump.

[675] And they, you know, they were there were these articles totally unironic.

[676] And you know, it wasn't like they were presenting this and saying like, wow, these people really believe this stuff.

[677] They were just presenting it as this is how it is.

[678] Right.

[679] There's these people.

[680] So imagine this is this is something.

[681] read that as it's it's analogous to what you're saying that as belief in dogmatic the dogmatic traditions of religion decline there's a corresponding increase in the number of people who claim to be spiritual so there's a separation between spiritual and dogmatic and so it's really easy to criticize dogma you say well do you really believe that concrete thing why not make it more abstract well it's less susceptible to rational criticism and so that's advantageous it's more individually tailored in some sense but the problem is it lacks structure and the ability to unite people you know and obviously the problem with new age spirituality in some sense is that everything goes and there's no uniting see the thing about dogma because it's codified and traditional everyone shares it and then you can think about it in terms of your own speaking your own thinking as well.

[682] Like you and I can have this conversation because we accept a whole variety of things dogmatically.

[683] We can experiment on the fringes a bit.

[684] You know, we don't have to dig into what each of us means by every single term.

[685] So we stand on dogma and make a foray out into investigation.

[686] But when you get rid of the dogma, well, you get rid of the blinders and the constraints, but you seem to also get rid of the structure and the coherence and the thing that organizes the community.

[687] And it certainly doesn't appear to me that new age thinking is more coherent than, say, Catholic thinking, not at all.

[688] Right.

[689] Well, so yeah, so you're actually getting into exactly what we observed is it appears that a lot of these new age alternative beliefs are motivated by the need for meeting, but they don't seem to do a good job of providing meeting.

[690] because remember, they're inversely correlated with the presence of meaning.

[691] And I think for the reasons you just articulated, I mean, when we have a meaning framework, what some people might call dogmatic framework, everything you just said, like it organizes us.

[692] And not only that, but it calls, it gives us responsibilities and duties.

[693] So with this, anything goes new age stuff, you can just say, like, well, I'm not really into that.

[694] I'm into this.

[695] but if we all if we have a shared um religious belief that says well you have a duty to do this like you have a duty to take care of your family to you know you have a duty to help your neighbor um it takes away the the the selfishness right it takes away the well i don't want to do that i want to do this other thing and you know that it might be that a lot of things that provide meaning are well you talk about this in your latest book I just read about the connection of responsibility to meaning.

[696] These dogmas give you responsibilities where I think about a lot of the new age stuff.

[697] It's like you're not responsible for anything.

[698] No one's saying that, well, you have to do this or you have to do that.

[699] It's almost like it's a consumer experience of, well, this works for me or this doesn't work for me. Yeah, the problem is atomization, but also that lack of, well, and we should talk about meaning a little bit.

[700] I wrote a paper a long while back about different kinds of meaning, and they're sort of paradoxical, because there's the meaning that exists when something really unknown happens.

[701] And that's a funny meaning, because you don't know what it means, but it's meaningful, it's significant, and maybe you go out and explore it, but then there's the meanings associated with things that are fixed, right, that are already.

[702] in place.

[703] And it seems like you need a balance between both of those to have an optimal experience of meaning.

[704] Because one takes you way out on the fringes where, you know, you're atomized and insane and the other, well, locks you into a structure that has no escape and no room for you.

[705] So the meaning is this umbrella term, but decomposing it into its constituent elements also seems to be useful.

[706] And that would also allow for the investigation of what meaning suits, what situation?

[707] Because sometimes what you want is the meaning of security, right?

[708] You want constraint.

[709] You want not that.

[710] I don't want all those choices.

[711] And other times, that's not the case.

[712] Right.

[713] Yeah, I think so.

[714] So I edited or co -edited a book on the existential science of religion a couple of years ago.

[715] And one of the chapters that, one of the contributions to the book was making this argument that religion functions, as a meta choice.

[716] And it's for what you just said.

[717] So if it's so it actually provide it promotes freedom because people think of religion as being like restrictive right often.

[718] They're like, well, I can't do the things I want to do because religion's telling me I have to do.

[719] Here's all the things I have to do.

[720] Here's all the rules that the that are imposed upon me. But this argument was religion at least done in a healthy way as a meta choice in the sense that there's this this behavioral economics type of research where if you have too many choices, you're paralyzed by indecision.

[721] So if you narrow down, if you have too few, it's suffocating, right?

[722] So there's an optimal level of choice in which you're free, right?

[723] You're not overwhelmed, but you can, you know, you have options.

[724] And so what religion might do well is function as a meta choice, which is I can reduce to one choice, the system, I can buy into the system that sets up these parameters and as a guidebook for how to live.

[725] So I don't have to think about every single little thing.

[726] Like I'm buying, I'm making the meta choice of buying into this framework.

[727] But that in itself is a choice because you could reject, you could say, well, I'm not going to do this anymore.

[728] Yeah, well, you can think of it in that sense as something that's more akin to, and this isn't reductionistic.

[729] It's more monopoly that they can't bounce a basketball off the center of the board right they're happy because they have adopted this set of rules and it enables a kind of cooperation and competition that's enjoyable and constrains choice to something approximating an optimal range yeah and you could say well we could play monopoly or we could play Catan but fine you make that decision you got to play something or you play by yourself in a corner and that that issue of being overwhelmed by choices That's something that people don't seem to be quite as, what would you say?

[730] They're not quite as aware of.

[731] If you tell people about that, they think, oh, yeah, I know what you mean.

[732] But our society, and maybe that's because of its individualistic nature, as we recoil at constraint, we fail to see the fact that we do want our choices narrowed to a range of, I mean, look, what's our working memory capacity?

[733] Four items?

[734] Something like that, right?

[735] Our field of conscious choice is very narrow.

[736] And so when we're presented by options that exceed that constraint, and there's other constraints, it's very easy to become anxious instead of free.

[737] Right.

[738] Yeah.

[739] Yeah.

[740] And so this is, I mean, and of course there are a number of people who have, you know, put forward ideas like this talking about the idea of ordered liberty or disciplined freedom, you know, that you get more freedom when your life is disciplined.

[741] Like if you if you don't have certain rules that you live by, then you, you, you know, your life can descend into chaos pretty quickly.

[742] I mean, people do this even when they think about something as simple as going on a diet.

[743] Right.

[744] So if you, if somebody gives you advice, like if you went to, you know, if you went to like a nutrition person or, you know, you hired like a trainer or someone to help you lose weight or get healthy, one of the things they would tell you to do is if, you know, if you don't have certain food in your house, you're less likely to at night be tempted to walk into the kitchen and eat a bunch of cookies if they're not there.

[745] But that requires a choice of not putting them there.

[746] So it's not a restriction on your freedom, right?

[747] You could get your car, I guess, to drive out to the store and get cookies, but you're less likely to do it if you set up your environment in such a way that removes temptation.

[748] And so there's a lot of even very little things we do in life that are like that, right?

[749] Some people might say life hacks, right, where we learn, well, if I do this, then I know myself and I know I'm the type of person that after a long day's work, if I come home, I'm going to drink too much beer.

[750] And so I'm just not going to keep beer in the house.

[751] I'm going to make beer a thing that I do only if I go out with friends.

[752] I mean, there are people that make these choices because they have, they know they have vulnerabilities to, you know, over drinking.

[753] And so I think there's a lot, lots of things in life that even beyond religion or, you know, other systems in which, like you said, we kind of implicitly understand that you have to set up guardrails and rules.

[754] And people don't scream, well, that's anti -freedom.

[755] They think that's just being sensible and being reasonable.

[756] But when you talk about certain things like, like religious traditions or faiths, for some reason it seems to, at least in, you know, in the kind of modern and Western secular world, people seem to think that that's more oppressive.

[757] Well, it's also, I think, partly because more academically oriented types thinkers have proposed critiques of religion that are very, that reduce it to a single dimension and then criticize it along that dimension.

[758] And so the atheist types like Richard, Dr. Dawkins, and he tends to think that belief in God is like belief in a proposition, a stateable proposition.

[759] Is God real?

[760] Like, is a table real?

[761] And it isn't obvious that that's the proper way to formulate that issue.

[762] And you can make it absurd almost immediately by reducing it to that sort of representation.

[763] But there's multitude of functions that religious traditions serve.

[764] And even people like Becker, you know, he basically reduced it to a single dimension.

[765] It's a defense against death anxiety.

[766] It's like, well, it may be that, but it certainly isn't only that.

[767] It's a very, very complex issue.

[768] Right.

[769] And so, but people run into these critiques, Marxist critique, religion is the opiate of the masses, or the Freudian critique, which is, well, God is essentially a projection of the father, an infantile projection of the father.

[770] It's like, well, yes, sometimes in some cases and in some ways, but wait.

[771] And I guess it depends, too, to some degree.

[772] And maybe you could tell me what you think about this.

[773] It seems to me that the core of a culture is something that's essentially religious.

[774] By definition, like if you look at what unites people across geographic geography and time, there's some central conception of the world as spirit that, brings people together implicitly and explicitly.

[775] And then if you dispense with that, well, well, then what?

[776] Well, you've demonstrated that, well, you get people adopting rather odd beliefs.

[777] So that's a kind of heresy, essentially.

[778] So there's an automatic tendency to produce heretical religions.

[779] That's the consequence.

[780] And maybe some of those are political.

[781] And they're fragmentary.

[782] Yeah.

[783] No, I agree.

[784] I mean, that's actually why I started looking at, the individual difference level of analysis, not because I was particularly interested in thinking about spirituality or religion or any of these things as an individual difference.

[785] What I was interested in is if there is, people did this when they talked about the need to belong.

[786] You can pretty much get everyone to agree that humans are social and have a fundamental need to belong.

[787] That's not controversial.

[788] So you can use that as an example.

[789] And what researchers did, well, they said, well, if that's true, then you would expect there to be natural variability.

[790] Everyone might have some basic need to belong, but there are going to be some people that are very, very oriented towards belongingness, whereas others aren't going to be so much.

[791] And so that individual difference isn't a case against the basic need.

[792] It's saying that the basic need manifests, you know, differently across the continuum.

[793] And so that's pretty much my argument, I think, for religion and spirituality is that, that what you just said, I think it's true, is if people, if a society abandons religion, they don't really become secular.

[794] They start investing in all sorts of other things, you know, what we might call like a substitution hypothesis to fill that space of, you know, of the role that or the multiple roles that religion was playing in their society.

[795] But then an important question, you know, which we talked about a little bit, is just because people are turning to different things to fulfill that function doesn't mean they're actually doing a good job of fulfilling it, right?

[796] Just because people are turning to politics as a substitute religion or UFOs or new age beliefs doesn't mean those things are actually doing a good job of providing meaning.

[797] So let me ask you this then.

[798] So, okay, so we've kind of come together on a hypothesis here, is that there is some, need for union around a centralizing tendency.

[799] And that kind of throws us back to the beginning of the discussion, because Becker would identify that need for the central centralizing tendency as a manifestation of the denial of death.

[800] And we've kind of elaborated on that and criticized it and broadened it, I would say.

[801] So it's something more like, well, the need to, you know, imagine we have to unite in personality to some degree, right?

[802] I mean, so we're ruled by a body of laws.

[803] And it's interesting that it's a body of laws.

[804] And the laws are what we act out.

[805] So as long as we're law abiding, that makes us a certain kind of personality.

[806] And I would say a more conscientious personality, probably a more agreeable personality, probably a more emotionally stable personality than we would otherwise be alone.

[807] And so imagine that for us to live in a group, we have to partake in a central personality and deviate in our individual ways, but that partaking of the central personality, without that we get fragmentation and inability to make peace, inability to understand each other, inability to cooperate.

[808] And that is something like the worship of a central spirit, at least as it's acted out.

[809] Yeah, yeah, I think so.

[810] And also connecting back to, you know, something that we talked about, the difference between, you know, more defense versus growth perspectives.

[811] It's not just the case that unifying around the belief is somehow, you know, like Becker would argue, somehow allowing us to escape our anxiety, it's very inspiring and mobilizing.

[812] Because if you look at a lot of the projects that we engage in that, so I know you had Marion Tupi on, who's a friend, you know, a number of weeks back, and he talked about the human progress and how that people don't see, a lot of people don't think that we've made progress.

[813] Yeah, well, they're blinded by the variability.

[814] Right, right.

[815] But if you look at, if you look at progress, there's a lot of thing and not just the progress that we've benefited from.

[816] I mean, you and I are able to have this conversation separated by many, many miles over the internet, instantaneously communicating thanks to progress in technology, right?

[817] We wouldn't have been able to do this decades ago.

[818] But if you look at a lot of projects that are focused on making society or the world the better place, they're projects that extend beyond our individual lifetimes.

[819] So in other words, you have to make some commitment to say, I'm not just going to be hedonistically looking out for myself and, you know, trying to have as fun of the life as I can and then it's over, you know, which some people do, of course.

[820] But you have to say, I'm going to give part of myself to something bigger than myself.

[821] So that's not just the defense in my mind.

[822] You talked about something that's adaptive.

[823] That's something that's very good for society to say it might take 50 years or 100 years before we make this cure this disease or reach this, you know, make or build this, you know, build this project or send something out into space.

[824] And I might not even see it myself, but I believe in it, right?

[825] Yeah, well, that thing that we unite around, that might be not so much a structure of dogmatic belief as a shared ideal, some of which is described in dogmatic terms.

[826] I mean, when I look at the abolition of slavery, let's say, I mean, you can certainly come up with any number of reasons why slavery is a good idea from the perspective of the slave owner.

[827] Now, the question is, how the hell did it ever get to be the case that people decided that that was a bad thing?

[828] And it looks to me like it's the working of that ideal across millennia really that finally manifested itself in that ethical decision.

[829] It's like well there was this idea and it's part of the Judeo -Christian tradition that we're all imbued with a spark of divinity that aligns us with God that we're supposed to act in relationship to that and there was a logical incompatibility between that and the force is that the economic forces primarily that that propelled slavery forward and so it's not just that we're united by a dogmatic structure we're united by a personality that's an that's the ideal towards which we're trying to struggle something like that and that has more that of that growth oriented element that you're describing right like i mean i've been struck repeatedly by this idea recently and perhaps it's not particularly original that the figure of christ in the west is at least the consequence of a millennia long, millennia's long discussion about what constitutes the ideal.

[830] Look, we haven't agreed exactly because it's too complicated to fully agree on, but I do believe that we feel guilt when we fail to live up to whatever that implicit ideal is.

[831] Right.

[832] Yeah.

[833] Yeah.

[834] No, I agree.

[835] So, yeah, so I do think that, you know, what you're talking about of this central, you know, that we all kind of rally around is inspirational, right?

[836] It gives people a reason to be optimistic, and I think there are, and I suspect you agree with me, just based on, you know, seeing some of your, some of your own discussions on current trends.

[837] There are reasons, I think, to be concerned that we have a growing amount of not just people, like hyper -individualism of people not you know, having shared, you know, shared culture, but also just the, the associated pessimism and cynicism.

[838] You see this in the anti -natalist movement.

[839] Right.

[840] You see this in some of the activism that is associated with the social justice movement, which is not, you know, I think most of us would agree that there's more work to be done in any area where you might say there's still unfairness or injustice.

[841] But there's this notion among at least a certain component of a certain portion of these activists that is it's not going to get better, right?

[842] It's it's permanent.

[843] And that it hasn't got better.

[844] It hasn't.

[845] It hasn't.

[846] In fact, we just, so at the Challey Institute, when you did my introduction where I'm a scholar at, we actually just ran a survey that will probably be released by the time this podcast airs, where we recruited a thousand U .S. university students from all over the country.

[847] And we asked them questions about progress.

[848] And we asked them specifically connect.

[849] to their college experience because what we were interested in is what are people learning, you know, you hear all these criticisms about colleges and indoctrination, but we wanted to ask students, what are they actually, what do they think they're learning?

[850] And so we asked them, based on what you've learned in college so far, do you think the world has gotten better over the last 50 years?

[851] And we even gave them specific examples because you could say, well, it depends on what you mean, it might have gotten better, right?

[852] So we had to, we had examples like into pop things that we knew based on the even progress and other you know other data points that had gotten better like poverty right that you know poverty has been decreasing um and radically and immensely right and so what was amazing to me and i can i can actually bring up um so i don't get the numbers wrong um so we asked people based on what you've learned in college so far, is the world getting better over the last 50 years?

[853] And not even 50 percent of students said yes.

[854] So half of students don't think that the world has gotten better.

[855] And we asked the same questions about the U .S. has the U .S. gotten better and very similar answers.

[856] Only about a quarter of the students of U .S. college students said that they're optimistic about the future of the world based on what they've learned in college so far.

[857] Only 11.

[858] percent of U .S. college students said that their college experiences has made them have a more positive view of the U .S., whereas 45 percent said that their college experiences made them have a more negative view of the U .S. The rest said their view hasn't changed.

[859] And only half of students are optimistic about, say they're optimistic about their own future and their ability to make a difference in the world.

[860] So I could go on with with all these statistics, but essentially we, you know, we found a number of reasons to think that students, well, let me back up a little bit.

[861] So if you think about objectively, if you think about American college students using, you know, using the terms that are often used in this discussion, which is the concept of privilege, like if you think about the concept of privilege, to be born in America, to live in America, and you've already kind of won the lottery.

[862] I'm not saying America is the greatest, you know, the greatest place, but compared to a lot of places in the world, there's opportunity.

[863] There's, you know, there's a lot more opportunity here, right?

[864] So only a small percentage of people have that privilege already, right?

[865] And then on top of that, only a minority of people get to attend university.

[866] I mean, the vast majority of the world doesn't have the opportunity to attend university, right?

[867] Right.

[868] So at some level, it seems obviously true that if you have the privilege of attending university in America, you would think that you should be pretty, you know, you should be pretty optimistic about your situation in life and have a lot of gratitude about it.

[869] But what we're finding, and of course, these aren't, you know, this is just a poll.

[870] These aren't experiments or anything.

[871] And we're not, and we're not controlling for personality or, you know, other people.

[872] potential factors.

[873] But we're getting a snapshot of college students not being very, one, many of them not seeing that, you know, there's been progress.

[874] So where are they learning in college where they're not saying, wow, like maybe things aren't perfect, but they've certainly gotten better.

[875] They're not seeing that.

[876] And then on top of that, they're not particularly hopeful or optimistic about the future.

[877] And they don't seem to have a real sense of agency, right, that they can make a difference in the world.

[878] And again, you would think that if you were, you know, if you were sufficiently blessed to live in the United States and go to college, that might, you know, from my perspective, that might come with a certain level of responsibility, right?

[879] That's, you know, you're very fortunate and you have a duty to do something in the world to help others, to make a difference, to, you know, to make your community and your society better.

[880] but it seems like a good portion of students aren't particularly optimistic about that and don't really see that they have a place.

[881] Well, I talked to Tupi and to Bjorn Lomberg and to Matt Ridley.

[882] These are all optimistic sorts of characters who've done a lot to document the radical improvement in absolute terms of human existence over the last, especially the last 30 years.

[883] And all of them know that they have a market.

[884] marketing problem, right?

[885] It's like, yeah, well, why isn't this compelling?

[886] Because it's just, it's an uphill battle to get this information out there.

[887] And the question is why.

[888] And it seems to me that it has something to do with, it's in some sense, too materialistic.

[889] Like, not that that's bad exactly, because isn't it good to have enough to eat and all of that?

[890] But there's some impetus, some spiritual impetus or something like that that seems to be lacking.

[891] And then there's a other issue.

[892] I don't know if you thought about this or not, but, you know, in the Christian tradition, there's an apocalypse.

[893] There's apocalypse.

[894] And it's sort of projected in some sense out into the spiritual world.

[895] So the end of the world is at hand, but who knows when?

[896] Well, so it's projected, like utopia is projected.

[897] And so then you might ask yourself, well, what happens if it isn't projected?

[898] Is there a utopian and an apocalyptic tendency in human thinking?

[899] And if so, what happens if it's not contained within a religious structure.

[900] And so I would wonder, to what degree the pessimists in your survey have apocalyptic visions of the future?

[901] Because there's certainly no shortage of suggestions that we're facing, continually facing something that looks like an apocalyptic nightmare.

[902] And it isn't obvious to me that that's the case.

[903] Right.

[904] Yeah.

[905] Now, you see this with what's become almost a religious environmentalism, right?

[906] of it's very apocalyptic.

[907] Depending on who's talking and on what day, it varies from we've only got like a decade left before the planet turns into an uninhabitable hellscape to, you know, on the more optimistic side, you'll see some people say, well, we can still do something to mitigate it, but you do see, again, there are plenty of environmental activists that I think are very practical, very solution -oriented, very entrepreneurial, who are thinking about technologies and strategies to make.

[908] Yeah, Longberg is like that.

[909] Right, right.

[910] But then there's a, but there is an element of these activists that it is almost like an apocalyptic meaning, you know, meaning making religion where, because the reason I say that is because it seems to accompany this antinatalist and view of, it's almost as if the best, so how you might ask, well, what's that?

[911] got to do with meaning?

[912] Well, it's almost as of what they're arguing is the most meaningful thing that humans can do is go away.

[913] Yes, well, you see that.

[914] Surrender the planet to the other species because we've screwed it up.

[915] Well, and the thing about the apocalyptic, like, I mean, when I grew up, the apocalypse was basically the threat of nuclear war, which seemed very real and seems to have at least vanished to some degree in terms of what people fear.

[916] And maybe that's because the actual risk has declined.

[917] I would say that's the primary reason.

[918] I mean, it isn't obvious to me that Russia is going to attack the United States with nuclear bombs.

[919] So, and China and America, well, it's not a full -fledged Cold War yet.

[920] So, but, you know, back in the 60s, there were many people who were entirely convinced that everyone was going to be starving and that we were going to run out of resources by the year 2000.

[921] I mean, the population bomb, Ehrlich's book, the Club of Rome, all these people said, oh, we're going to overpopulate the planet, and we're going to run out of resources.

[922] And we didn't, and we aren't going to, by all appearances, we're going to peak at about $9 billion.

[923] And it wouldn't surprise me at all if in 100 years the fundamental problem is that there aren't enough children.

[924] I mean, I don't know, and who knows, because 100 years is a long way away.

[925] But that apocalypse, those apocalypses didn't occur.

[926] and we have the environmental apocalypse.

[927] And it'd be interesting to see that the more pessimistic students that you described, do you suppose they would, would they be more likely to fall into the search for meaning camp?

[928] Would they be the ones that were more susceptible to alternative quasi -religious beliefs?

[929] Do you know any of that yet?

[930] Because it would be interesting to look at all that relationship to views of the future.

[931] Yeah.

[932] No, so there are some data, there are some data points that I can bring up, not from, not from my survey, but that I think speak to this issue and other issues you raised, including that the materialism issue that you brought up about progress.

[933] So for one, there has been global data looking at meaning across different countries.

[934] And as it turns out, people in poorer countries report higher meaning in life than people in richer countries.

[935] Even when, you control for religiosity the effect remains.

[936] Religiosity explains part of it.

[937] Religious people have more meaning.

[938] But even when you control for that, that remains.

[939] So what's the story there?

[940] Well, it could be that in poorer countries, people are naturally more interdependent, right?

[941] You're not as individualistic.

[942] You have to help each other.

[943] And so you can very, you can, it's much easier to see how your life matters, right?

[944] People depend on you.

[945] Well, you know, I just interviewed, a man who was held in Guantanamo Bay for 14 years and released.

[946] And he came from Mauritania.

[947] He came from a tribal society, like literally a tribal society.

[948] He's not even one generation removed from that.

[949] And he went to be educated in Germany when he was an older teenager.

[950] And when he got to Germany, he was alone in a room for the first time in his life.

[951] And he said it really upset him.

[952] And he said, we weren't talking about meaning specifically, but that the meaning in his life was the interdependence with all of his family members, whom he was never isolated from, ever.

[953] And he said, specifically, he talked about his mother and said that she was an eternal source of meaning for him and that that dissolved very rapidly when he was isolated and individual.

[954] And he suffered repeated bouts of depression before he ended up in Guantanamo Bay.

[955] And so I'd never talk to somebody who had come from a tribal background like that and was struck by that degree of interdependence.

[956] I mean, we don't know.

[957] And, you know, the students that you're describing that are pessimistic about the future, many material things have improved.

[958] But maybe we are more atomized than we were 50 years ago.

[959] I mean, I don't know.

[960] I think families are more fragmented than they were 50 years ago, arguably.

[961] Yeah.

[962] And some people, I think Putnam, again, have argued that social institutions that pull people together have become much less prevalent as well.

[963] I think did he write bowling alone?

[964] Was that Putnam?

[965] Yeah, he did.

[966] Yeah.

[967] Yeah.

[968] No, I think that's true.

[969] I mean, that's one of the things that I've been, you know, I've been thinking out because I naturally lean, you know, kind of libertarian, classical liberal.

[970] And so I think one of the, you know, This is something I'm, you know, as a psychologist, I'm, you know, I'm always talking to people in this space because it's, if you're very, if you're smart and have high self -control, high trait self -control and are relatively successful, then it's, it's pretty easy to be libertarian and think, well, you know, I can choose whatever I want to believe in and I don't want to tell anyone to do anything.

[971] The extreme libertarians, like I don't want anyone to tell anyone to do anything ever.

[972] But, you know, one thing I'm always, telling, you know, telling these people is, but that's not how most, that's not how most people are.

[973] And one of the challenges that comes with, with the success of the free market, which I'm a big advocate for, is affluence, right?

[974] Like, markets have made, you know, capitalism has made societies wealthy.

[975] And, but potentially have created this psychological vulnerability that, that, that you're talking about.

[976] So on the one hand, yes, we've progressed.

[977] in many ways, along material lines, but to what extent has that potentially contributed to or created certain vulnerabilities in our social lives?

[978] Because I don't have to even get along with my neighbors if I have enough money.

[979] I can just hire people to do things, right?

[980] I can just pay people for services without actually having to compromise or negotiate.

[981] And it turns out Or develop attachments, or cooperate.

[982] Yeah.

[983] Or inspire or mentor or lead or any of those things, right?

[984] And then also you don't do those things that you pay other people to do, which is a form of loss often as well.

[985] Right.

[986] So I think this is a, you know, taking us back to the unifying religion idea, I think this is a good example where you might need something in a free market society, you, you know, having religion is a good counter.

[987] And people, that's not a novel, of course, that's not a novel observation, because a lot of people have talked about, I've talked about this.

[988] In fact, you know, I'm in a business school and one of the growing areas, popular areas that, that people are interested in is ethical leadership.

[989] And the idea is people have looked at, and, you know, people have looked at like the financial crisis and all this, you know, the crony capitalism and corruption of big business and these things.

[990] And people are like, oh, yeah, markets are great.

[991] But if you have people that do bad things and make unethical decisions, they can exploit people and they can take advantage of people.

[992] And so there is this kind of ethical leadership movement.

[993] Like if you want the market to work, then you need people to follow certain ethical rules, not just laws, but in certain ethical principles.

[994] And in a lot of ways, that's a secular repackaging of, you know, what might have been in the past, it's just like, well, you have two, you have a business world, but you also have the separate religious world.

[995] And that religious world is where you get your morals, right?

[996] Your business world might tell you how to how to sell a product.

[997] But if that, if selling that product makes you sin or makes you violate, you know, certain moral rules, then that's a check.

[998] on you.

[999] It's like, I'm not supposed to do that.

[1000] But if you, if you strip away that, that moral framework and say, well, anything goes, it's all about making money or it's all about material gain or it's all about it's all about maximizing quarterly profits, which also makes it very short term.

[1001] Right.

[1002] So, so these things, you know, so in a lot of ways, these, I think these belief systems balance that.

[1003] And part of the pessimism might be that you, that you do have in our, you know, materialistic culture, the sense of, well, I'm just supposed to be, well, you see this a lot with the privilege talk.

[1004] It's because the emphasis is always on billionaires or rich people or you always see this like, well, your life's horror, you know, your life's going to be horrible because you don't have, you know, you're not a billionaire, which of course, nearly no one is, right?

[1005] It's a weird fixation because it's like the modal experience is not that, right?

[1006] So.

[1007] Well, it isn't obvious that that would be an advantageous experience to begin with.

[1008] I mean, along with that comes the same responsibility as running a small country.

[1009] Right.

[1010] So that's another thing, too, is the fixation on privilege in terms of, well, people are rich or it neglects the privilege of having, you know, having loving parents, or, you know, having access to nature.

[1011] Or, I mean, there's just so many things in life that don't boil down to, um, to that material well.

[1012] And so that might be, that might be part of the issue, you know, like you raised with, with, with people like Marion to be, you know, I've talked to, I know Marion, we've talked about this a lot as well as because he's, he, this is something that he's grappled with is why, why can't people be like, wow, like, I'm just really, really thankful to be alive right now because it's, it's demonstrably better, um, than it was.

[1013] you know, 50 years ago or 100 years ago, certainly 200 or 300 or 400 years ago.

[1014] But yeah, maybe there is attention that.

[1015] Well, have you done anything in your lab like a qualitative taxonomy of meaning?

[1016] So imagine, because one of the things I've sort of thought through is, you know, where do people derive proximal meaning?

[1017] And so I kind of thought this through as a clinician.

[1018] You should probably be about as educated as you are intelligent.

[1019] or there's a lack.

[1020] You need a career or a job, especially if you're conscientious.

[1021] You need a vocation if you're creative.

[1022] You need to spend your leisure time in some intelligent and productive and non -self -destructive manner.

[1023] You need an intimate relationship.

[1024] You need a family, et cetera.

[1025] You can list maybe a dozen things that seem to be proximal sources of meaning.

[1026] But I don't really have any idea how those rank order.

[1027] You know, I mean, what is it that people require to make the, feel both secure and exploratory?

[1028] Is that a stable network of family and friends?

[1029] Like, what's on top there?

[1030] Do you have any sense of that?

[1031] So we have done studies where we've just asked people to tell us what makes your life meaningful.

[1032] And it is qualitative.

[1033] They just write.

[1034] And then we use human coders, and we've also used coding software, you know, scanning software.

[1035] And not surprisingly, I mean, the most common response to that, the most, you know, the most frequent word uses in these narratives are about relationships, family and friends.

[1036] And so it certainly seems to, and that's more than people write that more than they write about religion or anything else.

[1037] We looked at this also among, to make sure there wasn't something dramatically different between believers and non -believers.

[1038] We matched a sample and we recruited.

[1039] Because as you know, in the United States, even though a lot of people don't go to church, we're still talking about less than 10 % or so of the population that will self -identify as totally atheist, right?

[1040] Because people are, like you said, people are spiritual, but not religious.

[1041] So we recruited, we specifically recruited a, you know, a sample of people that said, you know, they were the real deal like hardcore atheists.

[1042] And we recruited a sample of believers.

[1043] largely because we just we thought well that's one dimension that might you know people might write about different things and they didn't you know basically everyone said the same thing when what gives their life meaning which was family and close relationships and people did talk about it you know so the the coding picked up a few other things like people talk some things about community they talked about hobbies they talked about careers but that was the family was you know was way up here and those other things where we're down here.

[1044] So one thing would be very interesting then would be to see what sort of social networks the pessimists have.

[1045] Yeah.

[1046] Right?

[1047] I mean, if you have a posity of social networks, especially perhaps at the familial level, but maybe, you know, friends and family are in some sense somewhat interchangeable.

[1048] I doubt it, but perhaps they are.

[1049] Maybe that's one of the things that sets you up really badly for optimism about the future.

[1050] Yeah.

[1051] Yeah, no, that's a good point.

[1052] And, you know, one of the, you know, one of the things that concerns me, of course, it's, you know, it's possible you could say, well, young people are, you know, maybe more pessimistic and they're college students and there's something kind of edgy or, you know, about being cynical and, you know, they're going to go out of this.

[1053] And, you know, all that's, all that's certainly possible.

[1054] But it seems to me like it's just would be way more beneficial for students to be able to say, hey, this.

[1055] is a, this is a real, you know, again, using, you know, the term privilege, this is a real privilege to be here.

[1056] I'm taking a space that probably millions of people around the world would, would love to have this opportunity.

[1057] And that comes with responsibility.

[1058] But that doesn't seem to be that, you know, that if you talk to people about responsibility, that gets you almost no one.

[1059] Well, that's funny though, you know, because when I went on my tour for my book, I went to about 150 different cities.

[1060] And one of the things that brought the audience, the only thing I would say that brought every audience I talked about it with to a complete silence was the idea that meaning could be found in the adoption of responsibility.

[1061] And so it was peculiar because my original attitude would have been much like the one you just expressed, which is, well, you know, good luck selling responsibility.

[1062] That's what parents and figures of authority do all the time.

[1063] But the thing is, they don't sell it as a source of meaning.

[1064] Right.

[1065] Right.

[1066] They sell it as a moral obligation.

[1067] And that's fine because you can see the moral obligation element.

[1068] But what they don't explain is that in undertaking that moral obligation, you find a sustaining meaning.

[1069] Right.

[1070] No, I totally agree.

[1071] I mean, one thing that, you know, that I think that is, is interesting where people miss, I think a lot of people misunderstand meaning is they get that it's social.

[1072] Well, it's like you can tell people, people find meaning in relationships.

[1073] And that makes total sense to people.

[1074] But in our society, people often think of relationships in a very, I think about the meaning of relationships in a very superficial level.

[1075] What I mean by that is people just like, well, you need people to like you and to support you.

[1076] And you see this in the way we often approach things in academia, which is students want to feel supported.

[1077] And so you see this very caregiving approach to social relationships, which I just want, you know, we need to make sure there's no bullying, which, you know, okay, we all agree on that.

[1078] We need to make sure that people are nice to each other and that we have inclusive environments.

[1079] but and that's all great but to me that's not meaning you need to matter like so here's a way here's a good example well that might be the meaning of one kind of security that's rather maternal in its orientation but it certainly doesn't exhaust the range of meanings that we might be encouraging university students to pursue right so imagine so here's an example imagine that you were we'll use work just for you know it'll be something people can understand imagine you were on a work team.

[1080] A team got put together to work on a project.

[1081] And everyone on that team was very nice to you and very kind to you.

[1082] No one ever said a bad word to you.

[1083] No one hurt your feelings.

[1084] Everyone was very supported.

[1085] But when it came time to get the work done, no one was interested in your contributions.

[1086] In fact, they were like, oh, you know, you don't need to worry about this.

[1087] Jordan will take care of it.

[1088] Oh, that's fine.

[1089] We all love you, Jordan.

[1090] You know, you're to, um, okay, so think about that scenario and think about a different scenario on which, yeah, maybe there's more conflict or, you know, maybe it's not high fives all the time where people aren't supporting you, but your contribution is valued.

[1091] You're making a significant contribution to the team and people, and you're needed.

[1092] People are like, yeah, well, that would be more akin to a sports team.

[1093] Right.

[1094] So I, but oftentimes we, I think in our society, the first approach is what people think of.

[1095] And maybe like you said, it's a more of a maternal thing that it's like, well, we just need to support people.

[1096] But the problem with that is that's not a recipe to feel like you matter.

[1097] In fact, people don't like, over time, people figure out that, you know, people are just pitying them and they don't really need them.

[1098] They don't really like them, you know.

[1099] So, you know, people need to have some skin in the game.

[1100] They need to be making a contribution.

[1101] This actually connects to the argument that I have against things like universal basic income, you know, which we, we can or don't have to get into.

[1102] But the idea is it's great to think about taking care of people that, you know, that we like that.

[1103] It feels good to be like, oh, yeah, well, we want to help people.

[1104] But oftentimes, just taking care of people isn't allowing them to have agency.

[1105] It's not allowing them to make a meaningful contribution.

[1106] It's, in fact, it could, you know, one of the predictors of the desire to die by suicide is feeling like a burden.

[1107] to you know and so you can have the opposite effect where people feel like well the most meaningful thing I can do is to opt out because I'm not making a contribution and so I'm very concerned about any kind of movement even as kindhearted as it seems that's just about well let's just be nice to everyone and make sure everyone feels included and loved and supported and that's all great but that's to me that's not that's not meaning we want to live in a polite society of course, but people need to be able to make contributions and people need to be able to feel that they have.

[1108] Well, you could even look at that from a big five perspective, big five personality perspective.

[1109] I mean, that provision of basic care is an agreeable value, right?

[1110] So it's a reflection of trade agreeableness.

[1111] And well, on one end, trait disagreeableness is more associated with competition and conflict, right?

[1112] And there's utility in that as well.

[1113] So even by identifying taking care of people as the only value, we don't even exhaust the utility of trait agreeableness.

[1114] And then there's the meanings of duty and industriousness and orderliness that are associated with conscientiousness and the meanings of creativity that are associated with openness.

[1115] And you could maybe put security for neuroticism on the same axis as care, conceivably.

[1116] But there's also meanings of extroversion.

[1117] And none of those are addressed with this.

[1118] sole focus on providing security to people, let's say.

[1119] I mean, I don't know if using the big five framework in that way is a good way of parsing up the universe of meaning, but, you know, we do know those dimensions exist.

[1120] Yeah, no, yeah, that makes sense.

[1121] So, yeah, so I think that, you know, when we talk about even social meaning, it has to go beyond just simple connectedness or having, you know, having a lot of friends.

[1122] I mean, this is why if you look at like the loneliness literature, this is what people can be surrounded by people who love them and still feel terribly lonely, right, and still feel totally isolated, even though they're in an environment where everyone's being, being kind of where they have a lot of social interaction.

[1123] And so, you know, that one of my concerns about, you know, some of the, some of the movements that we're seeing that.

[1124] Again, going back to the pessimism thing, that seem to come from this idea of, well, there's not going to be any jobs for anyone.

[1125] Everything is going to be automated.

[1126] And if you do do something, it's just based on luck because some people are really smart.

[1127] And so, you know, they're going to be privileged in the cognitive economy.

[1128] And then there's going to be people that can't really do anything.

[1129] And so if you're, if you're a kind -hearted person, what you do is you just say, well, we're going to financially provide people.

[1130] We're just going to take care of people.

[1131] But to me, that's pretty insulting.

[1132] But it may not address the core problem, which is...

[1133] It may not address the core problem.

[1134] But I think it's very arrogant to assume that you have the answers for who can and can't contribute.

[1135] I mean, when I worked in when we were starting with, you know, my history, when I, before going to graduate school and I worked in social work and outpatient from clinical mental health, one of the things that we, we did because it wasn't outpatient clinic is, and we had people with severe, we had people with severe schizophrenia.

[1136] Some of these people really couldn't hold down jobs.

[1137] And, you know, they were on disability.

[1138] And, you know, they had a really hard time.

[1139] But many of them, many of them did, even though they were severely mentally ill, or in some cases, in another group that we worked with, had severe developmental disabilities.

[1140] They still wanted to be contributing members to society.

[1141] And so what, you know, what the goal of a lot of the work we did was was to integrate them.

[1142] This is why it was an outpatient, you know, program was they needed some support, right?

[1143] They needed a caseworker to check on them.

[1144] you know, they needed an employer that was open -minded to, you know, finding ways for them to contribute.

[1145] But, you know, I had this one client I worked with who, I mean, you wouldn't want him in an office place.

[1146] You just, but he was a very talented programmer.

[1147] And so they, this employer, you know, this was way before the remote work phase.

[1148] This was decades ago.

[1149] But this employer figured out, well, this guy can work from home.

[1150] He does good work.

[1151] He's got a methodical mind.

[1152] But he's just, you know, he can't be around people, you know, everyone else won't feel, it won't create a good opposite environment if he's here because he, you know, he has auditory hallucinations and he's very paranoid and he self -medicates with alcohol and then that makes things even worse.

[1153] And so he just adds a layer of chaos to the workplace that, you know, we don't need.

[1154] But he can do, but he actually does good work on his time scale when he can do it.

[1155] And so he had, you know, he was, he was working.

[1156] Like he was doing something.

[1157] And then we, you know, I had clients and another job I had that had severe developmental disabilities.

[1158] And but they, you know, they wanted to go to work.

[1159] They wanted to do something.

[1160] They wanted to have the dignity of feeling like they had a job to go to.

[1161] And so those are just.

[1162] couple examples, but that kind of experience, that kind of practical experience stands at, you know, at odds with a lot of what I see in a very more academic discussion, which isn't based on anyone's real life, it seems.

[1163] It's based on these hypotheticals of, well, jobs aren't that meaningful and, you know, some work is boring or monotonous.

[1164] And so the best thing we can do for these people is just make sure they have a universal basic income or whatever so they can just do whatever they want with their time.

[1165] But that, you know, like you said, that might not get it before.

[1166] That brings its own hazards.

[1167] Right, right.

[1168] So we started this discussion talking about Ernest Becker and a rather unidimensional view of meaning, but your walk through your research, and this discussion indicates that you've, as a consequence of studying this for so long, you've developed a much more multidimensional sense of meaning.

[1169] That's not reductionistic in the same way.

[1170] That's not merely defensive.

[1171] That can't be reduced to the terror of death or defenses against that.

[1172] And so is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we close?

[1173] No, I think we covered a lot of the areas that I'm interested in.

[1174] I mean, one thing I'll just, you know, I can just add that.

[1175] Because you're absolutely right.

[1176] like I've what I've tried to do and this is part of what I like about being a researcher is I've tried to just kind of follow the data like I have I have ideas of course I have and I have my own biases and but I've tried like with a nostalgia work I talked about I try really hard to you know test hypotheses but then look you know kind of see what's going on and then that gives me ideas or make observations in in the rural world and that gives me ideas and so you're right, I have gone kind of on this journey where I definitely started out in this more kind of defensive approach because that's what I learned in graduate school and have moved more towards this explorative, growth -oriented kind of creative approach to meaning.

[1177] And I do think they are connected through some of the attachment and social and cultural security systems and frameworks we talked about.

[1178] But now, so I'm even going further in the direction of looking at like how meaning contributes to things like entrepreneurship.

[1179] Because as you noted before, there's a certain level, even if you look at the developmental literature on attachment, like you talked about the studies where the little kids, you know, when they venture away from mom, mom's the security that gives them, you know, that makes them feel like there's something there that will protect them, which makes them a little bit more willing to explore.

[1180] Well, if you scale that out on a society level and we look at topics like entrepreneurship, which involves risk -taking and putting yourself out there and oftentimes failing repeatedly is that can you imagine that same kind of framework where you know a society that has existential frameworks whether they be strong social relationships, religion, other cultural worldviews that provide the type of security that encourages people to innovate.

[1181] and to take risks.

[1182] And so that's kind of the direction I've been going in more recently, which I think very much connects to this overall project that we've been talking about because we need that, right?

[1183] We need risk takers.

[1184] We need people who are optimists who could look at the same set as data of everyone else and everyone else feels pessimistic to be like, no, I think there's a solution.

[1185] We just haven't figured this out yet.

[1186] And I think those people are often inspired by meaning, right?

[1187] You need, meaning is in my world, another way to say this, meaning isn't an outcome variable.

[1188] It's a predictor variable, right?

[1189] It's, you know, because we tend to think of meaning as an indicator of well -being, which it is.

[1190] But in addition to that, I would say it's a cause.

[1191] In fitness research, they've done some studies showing that when people think about what's important, what's meaningful in their life, they're more likely to exercise.

[1192] When you feel like your life's meaningful, you've got like a reason to get up every day and do something.

[1193] And sometimes that something is take risks to try new things because you want to make the world better.

[1194] You want to make life better for your family.

[1195] And so I think that we just have to be really careful about that.

[1196] Like that's an important element of life.

[1197] And if you have too much cynicism and nihilism and pessimism and antinatalism, And, you know, people don't have any, people don't feel like they've got something to strive for in the future, then not only we're going to see psychological and social decline, but we'll see economic decline as well.

[1198] And we won't be able to solve the problems that people say they're really concerned about, such as climate change, if you don't have people that believe in the future is worth saving to begin with.

[1199] Those are excellent words to close on, I would say.

[1200] Thank you very much for talking with me today.

[1201] It was very interesting.

[1202] The time flew by.

[1203] It did.

[1204] Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure.

[1205] My pleasure.

[1206] Good luck with your research, and hopefully we can talk again at some point.

[1207] Yeah, I would love that.

[1208] Thanks a lot.

[1209] You bet.

[1210] Bye -bye.