YouSaid · the spoken record

John Vervaeke

lines on the record: 213
first: 2022-09-04
most recent: 2022-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“If you present it to them in that third person perspective, but if you get them to go in the first person perspective and imagine that they're dying and that the people that they care about are there with them, they don't show those responses. In fact, they show an increase in cognitive flexibility, an increase in openness. So I'm trying to say we might be putting the cart before the horse. It might not be death per se, but the kind of meaning that is present or absent in depth that is the crucial thing for us.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so first, I took it seriously, but now I want to say why there's some empirical work that makes me want to reconsider it. So terror management theory is you do things like you give people a list of words to read. And in those lists are words associated with death, cough, and funeral. And then you see what happens to people. And generally, they start to become more rigid in their thinking. They tend to identify with their worldview. They lose cognitive flexibility.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you're vulnerable in so many ways other than just the ending of your biological life. Because it's interesting if you rate what people fear most, death is not number one. They often put public speaking as number one. Because the death of status or reputation can also be a profound loss for human beings. You can drive them into despair.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The universe doesn't care about your personal narrative. You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life. It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness, and you step into the street and a track hits you and you die. That's mortality. Mortality isn't just some far-flung event. It's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way. So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm trying to get you to consider that your mortality is not an event in the future. It's a state you're in right now. That's what I'm trying to get to shift. So your mortality is just a, we talk about something that causes mortality fatal. But what we actually mean is it's full of fate. And I don't mean in the sense of things that are pre-written. What I mean is the sense of”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What aspects do I find convincing is that human finitude, being finite, being inherently limited is very problematic for us.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Becker and the terror management theory that have come out of it. There's been some good work around sort of providing empirical support for that claim. Some of the work not so good.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More pertinent, more pressing, more difficult for people to deal with. And so the meaning crisis is actually the intersection of perennial problems, finding existing existence absurd, experiencing existential anxiety, feeling alienated, and then pressing historical factors, which have to do with the loss of the resources that human beings have typically crossed historically and cross-culturally made use of in order to address these perennial problems.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An excellent question, and part of the argument I made in Awakening for the meeting crisis is there's two aspects to it. One is that there are perennial problems, perennial threats to meaning. And in that sense, human beings are always vulnerable to despair. You know, the Book of Ecclesiastes, it's all vanity, it's all meaningless. But there's also historical forces that have made those perennial problems.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, if it contributes to your life being meaningful, you are connected to it in some way. And it matters to you, and you matter to it in that you make some difference to it. That's when it goes from being just sort of true, good and beautiful to being a source of meaning for you in your life.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's meaningful is tell me what you would like to continue to exist even if you weren't around anymore. And how are you connected to it, and how do you matter to it?”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, the question that comes up for me, well, there's two questions. One is, why is that at risk right now? And then secondly, and I think you have to answer the second question first, which is, well, yeah, but why is meaning so important? Why this sense of connectedness so important to human beings? Why when it is lacking? Do they typically fall into depression, potentially mental illness, addiction, self-destructive behavior? And so the first answer I give you is, well, it's that sense of connectedness. And people often express it metaphorically. They want to be connected to something larger than themselves. They want to matter. They don't mean it literally. I mean, if I change you to a mountain, you wouldn't thereby say, oh, now my life is so fulfilling, right? So what they're trying to convey, they're using this metaphor to try and say, they want to be connected. They want to be connected to something real. They want to make a difference and matter to it. And one way of asking them.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I'm talking about meaning, I'm talking about what's called meaning in life, not the meaning of life. That's some sort of metaphysical claim. Meaning in life are those factors that make people rate their lives as more meaningful, worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure. Study that, what you see is it's a sense of connectedness. Connectedness to yourself, to other people, to the world, and a particular kind of connectedness. You want to be connected to things that have a value and an existence independent of your egocentric sort of preferences and concerns. This is why, for example, having a child is considered very meaningful, because you're connecting to something that's going to have a life and a value independent of you.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source