 Discussing ideas and how to do them, not correct or not correct. Also, we cooperate a lot with books, books of people around the institute, especially Eingrang, the name of the person I am. She was a writer and also a philosopher. And we translated her books in German. Now we have five books of her. Three of them were translated, and two other are in German. But there are five. Now I'm working on one more, the operating zone. And also, one more opportunity is to attend activities that tend and tend to be out of places. Here, information about the next one. Next, we'll be in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Now, we are requesting to call you later than you are. Georgia was still calling you later than you are. How do you feel about that? I feel a big other international senior, educated for young people like you, as a student. The last time I was in Athens, I attended, I was very sweet, and I was in the last part of the session. There were very good sessions, many high level speakers, a lot of communication, and also, so exciting places. Athens, Amsterdam, maybe, maybe in the Netherlands. So if you want to have more details about yourself, you should go a little bit to the place, and go directly to the website, and then go check. A good point is that if your application will be good enough, I think this is going to be a good sponsor. Almost 100%, almost. So it's a good chance, very good chance, to go and attend such an interesting activity. But of course, to have good application, you need to know more about topic, about ideas, the concept, so you should really prepare yourself before you go to the application. So this is why we are here. We can give you some ideas, and also, we plan to continue activities in locally, the Georgia language, we can come and see again, and discuss one or another topic, which we can cover and have you cover. And so it's not only one, but it will be the challenge. How long do you want me to talk about it? Also, I can't think of any other. We are going to have the heads, related to this author and philosophy, which is objectivist, and we will have essay content. And we'll have prize cash money. So it will be one more motivation. So we'll fix rules in a few days, and other numbers, and of course, it will be... How much do you? Informal. So now, let's return to the today's topic. I already introduced a yellow look. It is economics and businessmen at the same time, practical businessmen, and he is also an outstanding speaker. Also, he runs a YouTube blog, and you can go to the yellow look YouTube channel. You have a lot of information, about many, many different stuff, even stuff. Originally he is from Israel, now he lives in America, and of course now he concerns about the situation in Israel, and last few videos about Israel, and if you are in the topic, you can read it and check his position. He will ask later, actually, the major topic. Come here, then. Yeah. Come here is a teacher. He works here in Georgia right now, and he is also focusing on personal development, people who will find themselves, achieve the goals, and navigate in the reality, so he is a specialist in this subject. Maybe he will check his website, and maybe he's actively sometime near future. Maybe he'll do the ice-cream. You're active. So, now, what you are going to do today? I was feeling the gap. Yeah, I know. Hello, I'm Tasha, I'm from the University of California, here, so the main issue, why our guests are here, so five I haven't mentioned the rest of the thing, but I would like to summarize. So, we've got a campaign, it's fair to know it works, in your general style, so that's why we decided to try everything is quite important, especially why. So, we want to be successful, to achieve everything we wanted, that's right, that's right, so we decided that this meeting should be connected to trying, trying, and trying. So, our guests decided that the issue would be number four, to achieve happiness. That's connected to our campaign, and I'm very happy that you are here, and thank you, so I will sit here, and I will listen to you, so thank you. Thank you, and I was very happy to organize seven, so we should find her. Thank you. So, now I will give floor to Kame, he will just give you a little introduction, and then, we'll have us, yeah. Also, in some words, thank you. Good afternoon everybody, it's really a pleasure to be able to be with you this evening, this afternoon, and what I want to do is I'm going to moderate for MC the event this afternoon, just so that there's some level of control. We'd love to just welcome you, we're gonna have our main event is the speaker by Mr. Speaker, Mr. Youngwood, he's gonna discuss things with us, and share some thoughts and ideas and philosophies for about plus minus 20 minutes, and then what we will do is we'll open the floor to a session of question and answer, okay? And before we actually get there, what I will do is I'm going to actually just introduce our topic, and you know, when we think of the term happiness, happiness, I'd like to just pose this to the audience for a quick second. Happiness, and you can tell me very quickly, is it an intrinsically motivated thing or is it extrinsically motivated? Very quickly, intrinsically or extrinsically? What do you think? The first one, always. The first one, intrinsically, personally, all right? Now, may I just see by show of hands, who doesn't really like to be happy? Oh, hands go up. We all love to be happy, obviously, right? There's something to do with the secretion of certain hormones and enzymes in our body when we are happy compared to when we are actually anxious and worried and those types of feelings, they are maybe. So one of the things that I'd like you to take away from this session today is there are going to be some new ideas, new thoughts about how we go about this journey of navigating to become really happy. We can't be happy all the time, naturally, but there are ways that we can deal with challenges and different types of obstacles that we face in life that will actually not deplete our happiness, that might be able to let us just navigate through them in a way that we've got the tool to be able to do that. So just if I may share with you my personal idea about happiness, and I haven't spoken to Mr. Harry Groot. In fact, I'm ready for the first time. So if there are any similarities or it's a pure coming to me, it just shows us that the stars are aligned. I think, and this is what I truly believe, that happiness is definitely personal happiness is definitely linked to your purpose. And for me, those are absolutely interconnected. You know, many people say, oh, if I had more money, I'd be happy. If I had a better car, I'd be happy. If I had something which was all outside of ourselves. But you know what? If you are truly living a purposeful, full life, then regardless of how much you have or what you might possess, you will be happy. That, I believe, is the most fundamental thing that is attracted to or attached to our sense of being happy. Now, I like the word joy, because joy and happiness to me are slightly different. They are linked, but they're slightly different. Happiness sometimes is determined by what we're going through and what we might be experiencing. But joy is a state of being. That's our absolute mindset. It's got to do with our emotional and psychological position at that time. So just a few thoughts that you might want to be pondering as you go through this afternoon session. We're really happy that you were here. And if there's anything that you might need, I think there's water outside for a little later in the afternoon to get thirsty. Right now, ladies and gentlemen, we also want to apologize for the slight late start. But without further ado, I'd like to invite or introduce you to our main speaker for this afternoon, Mr. Yamaguchi. Thank you, thank you. And thank you. And we're gonna, I think, agree on most things, maybe. We'll see. But it's interesting because joy and happiness, to me, are exactly the opposite, right? Exact opposite. Joy is the momentary thing that you feel. Happiness is what sustains you long term. So that's interesting. So thank you all for being here. And it's actually fun. And if you were refreshing right now to actually talk about happiness because the world is crazy and depressing and upsetting and maddening. And it's not just in Israel, but it's in Ukraine. And it's in everywhere. There's just bad things happening all over the world. And in that sense, I can't say I have much joy in my life. But I can say that I'm a happy person. And that happiness is something that pervades my life in spite of all the ups and downs and the horror and the frustration and the madness that goes on around. And I think it's a really, really important idea that we need to dig into. So I wanna start with this. I think the most important thing when considering happiness. And I consider happiness the state of a being, this long term state of being. Aristotle said in a sense that you couldn't actually know if you're happy until the very moment before you died because it's like looking back and seeing what kind of life have I lived. Now, I don't think that. I think you can tell at every point. But it's about a state. It's not about a momentary experience. So you might be able to have fun at a party but that doesn't mean that it's gonna add to your happiness or the happiness is the state in which you live on a long term basis. So I'll take, if you let me, we can do questions afterwards. Okay, thanks. I think the most important thing about happiness is the most important thing is to want it. Now we all say we want it. Everybody says, I mean you asked them and nobody raised their hand about not wanting happiness. Everybody says they want it. But are we really committed to it? And I think people all say we want it but are they willing to do what is necessary for it and as a culture, as a world? Are we oriented towards happiness? Do we orient the way we think about the world and we think about life towards achieving our personal happiness? And I think the world is aligned against us. I think our educational institutions are aligned against us. That's why I like the idea of having something at a university talking about happiness. And I think most importantly our moral code is often aligned against us. Our ethics are often aligned against us. Because most ethics, most moral codes, morality, good, evil, right? What is the good? The good is almost always defined as something outside of us. Something to be done to other people. How you relate to other people. And morality today gives us almost no guidance in terms of how to live our own life. How to live our life as individuals. I agree completely you will find happiness for purpose. But what is purpose? How do we define purpose? How do you discover your purpose? We get very little guidance in the culture. We get very little guidance from our morality about that. We're told by morality what's the most important thing in morality today in our moral code tells us what's the most important thing you should do or not do? It's all about how you do what? How you treat other people. But I think, I think, and this is Ayn Rand's kind of revolution, and this is going back to Aristotle. I mentioned Aristotle earlier. I think the most important thing about morality is how you treat yourself. Is what you choose to do with your own life. And it's how you think about doing with your own life. Imagine if one of the principles of morality was find a purpose. For Ayn Rand, there are three cardinal values in morality. Three main values in morality. Reason, which is our tool for knowing, our tool for knowing the world, knowing reality, understanding it, and evaluating it. Purpose, and the third, which I think is fundamentally crucial to happiness, is self-esteem. And I'll talk about self-esteem in a minute. So reason, purpose, self-esteem. Those are her three cardinal values in morality. And they're all focused on how you can make your life the best life that it can be. How you can live the best possible life in this world. And the goal of morality, according to Aristotle, what was the goal, anybody read Aristotle? The goal of morality, according to Aristotle, is achieving what he called eudaumonia in Greek. I'm mispronouncing it, because in Greek it sounds completely different. It means flourishing. It means success. It means happiness. Conventional morality, as we have it today in our world, doesn't talk about morality and happiness in the same sentence. Indeed, morality is often the opposite of happiness. Don't do what's good for you. Don't pursue your purpose if, I don't know, somebody else has a claim on your time. Don't be self-interested. Don't do what you think is good for you. Do what other people, what's good for other people. Focus all your efforts on that. Now, maybe other people becomes part of your purpose, but then it's your purpose. It's your chosen purpose. Morality doesn't tell us you need that choice. Morality tells us your focus, your orientation should be external, should be on the other people rather than on you, on what's good for you and what will lead to your happiness. So I think the first thing about happiness is that you need to want it, which means you need to want your own well-being. You need to want your own happiness. That needs to be a priority for you. It needs to be something you really are seeking. Now, seeking happiness, you don't go directly from here to happiness. Happiness is an outcome. It's a consequence of certain actions that you take, of the values that you choose, and of achieving those values. So let's talk about the three values that I mentioned, the three cardinal values that I mentioned, as I think is most important. First, I said, is reason. Why reason? Why reason? Why do you think reason is an important value? It's a tool to explain to all the objectivity, exactly, but it's the only tool we have. The only tool we have to know the world out there is to use our senses and to use our mind and understand it, figure it out and understand it. There is no other way to know the world. Everything that we have around us at the end of the day is a product of human reason. Somebody had to invent a light bulb. Somebody had to figure out electricity. Somebody had to figure out how to build a building. None of us have the gene for that. It's not instinctual. And through emotions, you will not discover how to build a building. Even when they went from caves, our ancestors went from caves to building little huts, somebody had to figure out how a hut would stand, experiment, test, do what we do with reason. This is our tool. It's what makes us human. What makes us human, what makes us different than animals is our capacity to think. It's our capacity to observe the world, integrate its information, come up with new ideas, test them out in reality, figure out what works and what fails. There is no other way to discover the world out there. And you're not gonna be happy if you fight the world. If you say, I don't care what reality is. I don't believe in gravity. I don't like gravity. So I'm gonna jump off the building and fly. That will end your life very quickly, not a path for happiness. The first thing you have to do to be successful in life is recognize reality, recognize facts, recognize what is true. If you can't recognize reality, you can't deal with the world. You can't function in the world. You're just gonna constantly jump off the buildings and expect to fly. And guess what? As much as you expect to fly, you won't, unless you invent a flying machine. But then again, you're gonna have to use reason to invent that machine, and you're gonna have to take reality into account. So a commitment to reality, a commitment to facts, a commitment to what is, one of the ways to deal with the stuff that's going on in the world, the horrible stuff that's going on in the world is to recognize that you have no control of it. It is what it is. You have control over your life. And one of the important things in life to do is to be able to identify that which you control and that which you do not. It doesn't mean you don't get angry with it. It doesn't mean you don't get mad, particularly when it's human beings doing this stuff. But I can't control it. I've got my life to live. I can't completely obsess about this. I tell people, one way to move towards happiness is to stop watching the news. You can't change the world in that sense anyway. Oh, listen to the news, but just a little bit. We become consumed. Our social media feeds are constantly bad news. And news is always gonna tell you all the bad stuff that's going on in the world. It's drama. They're not gonna tell you about the good stuff that's going on in the world. And there's wonderful things going on in the world. But we're not gonna get that in our social media feed. Only hear the bad stuff. So reason, reality, facts are so, that's the beginning point. That's the start. Purpose. You've gotta know where you're going in life. You've gotta have an idea of what your goals are, of where you're heading. And happiness comes from achieving those goals, from moving in a particular direction. Whatever that purpose you have chosen, you are going to take steps in order to get there. And the purpose is typically not an automobile or a bank account or something like that. It's typically some kind of achievement that is always gonna be further ahead of you. You're always gonna be striving. But as you attain the goals, as you attain the values in the direction, you gain that kind of satisfaction. You gain that sense of, I can achieve things in the world. I can be successful. And from that I think ultimately comes this sense of happiness. So purpose, purpose is crucial. Most of us, our purpose, and this is an ideal, is our career, is the work that we do. You know, everybody says the most important thing in life is family, and family is important, right? But I always judge what people actually think is important and what's not by how they spend their time. Most people spend most of their time at work, not with family. And we're rich enough that if we wanted to, we could work a little less and spend more time with family, but we don't because it's not about the money. So why are we at work all the time? What is it about our career that provides us with so much satisfaction? It's the, what's that? The outcome. It's not the outcome in terms of money. Yeah, it's the fact that at work we set goals. We move towards achieving those goals. We push ourselves. We try it, we use our minds to continuously further who we are as human beings. And that process, that growth that we get in our career is where we are going to achieve the kind of sense of satisfaction and happiness. So career and taking that career seriously, taking your work seriously, when you see people who are really happy, it's people who've chosen careers and work that they really love, that they really care about, that they're having fun, they're achieving joy while they're achieving happiness, right? They're moments of joy. It's hard, the work is hard, but the happiness comes from the satisfaction of knowing you're achieving things and knowing you're moving in a particular direction for a particular goal. And that happens to us primarily again in our careers. Now I don't want to scare young people because particularly in the modern world, it's not like you're gonna have one career and it's not like right now you have to choose what that career's gonna be and if not, life is a failure. It turns out particularly today that you can have a purpose and you can change purposes and you can change careers and you can change your work and you can adapt. And you know, one of the things to be successful in life and to be happy in life is to learn how to deal with failure. You're all gonna fail. At some point in your life you will fail. You'll fail in relationships. You'll fail at work. You'll fail, your purpose might be wrong. It might not be, you might think you wanna do this but you know, I've had five careers I think or five different things. I've loved all of them, not the same. It's like everybody says they love their kids the same but they don't really, right? I've loved them all but not exactly the same. But everything was a step forward. Everything was growth and that's what you want. You want to live a life where you're constantly growing, where you're constantly doing something that's even better. That's even in a sense more fun. That's even more interesting. That's more challenging. You don't get to be happy unless you challenge yourself. Unless you push yourself. Unless you try really, really hard. You know, in exercise they say no pain, no gain, right? If you're not, it's not quite with happiness. You don't have to suffer in order to be happy but you have to work in order to be happy. You have to put in the effort in achieving your purpose to be able to attain happiness. And finally I'd say self-esteem. Now what do I mean by self-esteem? Self-esteem is not somebody from the outside patting you on the back and saying good guy. In America there's a whole self-esteem movement where we give ribbons to everybody and we give titles to everybody and we treat everybody really, really nicely and we think they're gonna get self-esteem. You cannot get self-esteem from other people. You have to give self-esteem to yourself. It's self-esteem. Esteem means valuing yourself. It's really, really, really important to value yourself. You're all you have in a sense. You are what you are. You're one of a kind. You're unique. And you're inside your head. You're not outside. So valuing yourself is the beginning of any process towards happiness. And what valuing yourself means is knowing that you deserve to be happy. That happiness is something that's okay for you to be. That you deserve it. And that you'll do the work necessary to achieve it. It's knowing that in this world that we live, this crazy, nutty, insane, in some places or sometimes even bad world that we live, you can't survive. You have that confidence. I can do it. I can achieve. I can pursue values and I can attain values. I'm not horrible. I'm not dreadful. I'm not committed to a sinful life. I'm not committed to unhappiness. I can actually attain stuff. I can achieve my purpose. I can pursue values in this life. Having that confidence, having that sense of yourself is going to be so, I think without it, you can't have a good purpose and it's very difficult to attain it. Because again, to have a purpose, to achieve something, you need to be acting. You need to be confident. You need to be willing to challenge yourself. And to do that, you have to have that confidence that you can actually achieve it. Again, the confidence doesn't come in a day. It's something you build up over life. It's something you build up by challenging yourself, succeeding, and in a sense, patting yourself on the back. Don't be afraid to say to yourself, even though I know there are a lot of people out there who say this is not good. Don't be afraid to say to yourself, you did a good job. Good for you, you succeeded. I'm pat on the back. I'm gonna eat an ice cream today to celebrate my own achievement. So, achieve, recognize their achievement. You know how, you know people, I know a lot of people out there who achieve great things and then they go, yeah, it wasn't me. It was luck. It was this. It was that they'll never take credit for themselves. Not only in public, but in their own mind, they will never take credit for themselves. Let me tell you, those people will never be happy. They'll find excuses always to be unhappy because they'll always deny themselves and they don't take in that sense their own life and their own progress and their own growth seriously. They're rejecting and denying it and putting it to the side. I think one of the ways in which we attain happiness is by recognizing our own achievement, recognizing our own goals, recognizing our own abilities. So, reason, this is our tool. Purpose, we wanna have something we're striving towards in every action in life. You wanna have something, you're going a direction, a purpose, a reason why you're doing it. A lot of people out there are drifting. Drifting is a person with no purpose. They're just, one day they do this, one day they do that. They do whatever feels good. You know, maybe they even take drugs because drugs make you feel good, right? They don't need happiness though, but they make you feel good. So, they're drifting, they're all over the place. There's no focus, focus, focus. Doesn't mean that's the only thing you're gonna do in life, but at least at every given moment, focus on something. Something is the goal. And then have the confidence, have the self-esteem. Have value yourself enough to want to be happy, to want to be successful, to want to achieve. That to me is at the highest level the formula for happiness. Those are the kind of things you should be thinking about. And, you know, we can get into kind of some of the details and of course answer your questions. So, thank you. Of course. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to open, if you direct your questions to me, you can ask them to do that, we're all in the same space, but I just wanna control the room, the room, okay? So, I think you had something you wanted to ask us. What's the difference between the happiness and the reality, and how can you know when you're young and when you're not? It's a good question. And I think particularly when you're young, it's very difficult because I don't think you have enough life experience and you have enough content to be able to tell. Ayn Rand defined happiness as, this brings in joy. She defines us as a state of non-contradictory joy. It's where you can have joy without the contradiction, without the stress, without the anxiety, that often comes with it, right? So, when you're just, you're at the state where you just feel comfortable in the world. You're feeling at home in the world. But that doesn't come immediately. That is something that you need achievements, you need goals, and you need to find your purpose, which is hard when you're young, right? This is part of the angst that we all face when we're young is we're trying to struggle and figure out what is our purpose? What do we actually wanna do with our lives? But at the end, what you feel is this, is just state of contentment. But it's more than contentment, this state of, I feel good about the world. I feel good about my life and I feel good about the world. I'm happy, you know, I'm using the same word. I'm glad I'm here on this planet right now doing the things that I'm doing. That's kind of the state of happiness that you would achieve. That makes sense? Does that help you? And we'll unpack it like this, please. Okay, if there's a follow-up question, I'll just take the one from the lane, you know. We don't turn our dreams into the goals to do the things that we want, but we'll truly be happy. Because if you don't feel the sense, you don't know what happens next. So do agree with that, or do you think that truly that happiness is like worry, just like fear at the moment, but also there's a lot of ways to feel happy, but for my life happens, I think that I do a lot of things to be happy. I do feel happy in this moment, and then I'm like, thank you just like. What I do is happy, but not happiness. I feel happy in this moment, but it's not like, you know, the happiness. Sure. So I think when you talk about I feel happy in this moment, but it's not happiness. To me, that is joy. What I feel right now is joy, but what I'm lacking is this constant, you know, the state of mind, which is, I think, happiness over the long run. And I think that, you know, that's absolutely the case. I can feel joy in the moment, but it doesn't last and it doesn't fulfill and it doesn't give me anything, and therefore it's not contributing to my long-term happiness. Oh, because first of all, all of us feel sad sometimes. All of us feel some anxiety and some stress. I don't think you have to feel it in order to be happy, but you're gonna feel it because you're alive and things don't always go your way. And as I said, sometimes you fail in life and sometimes you're gonna fail in life. And part of the question is what your attitude towards failure is going to be. For many people, failure is like an end. Oh my God, I failed, I'm incompetent, I can't do this, I should just stop, life sucks, it's terrible. I'll give you an example. Why do you think there are a lot of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and in a place like Israel and not a lot of entrepreneurs in Europe? I mean, per capita, there's a lot more entrepreneurs in places like America and Israel and not a lot of entrepreneurs in Europe. Part of the reason is the attitude towards failure. In Europe, as you fail, you're a loser. And don't try again, don't do that again, it's done, you're out, it's finished. In America, in Silicon Valley in particular and in Israel in particular, failure is something you learn from. Okay, I failed, now what? What do I learn from this failure? And I try it again or I try something different but I learn from it because the assumption, the psychological assumption is you're always learning. You're always figuring out. Success doesn't just come naturally. It is no way for it to happen. Now, so you're constantly learning, the same thing with sadness and stress. Why am I feeling sad? What is it about reality or the world? What is the reason? I'm learned from that. I don't wanna be sad to the extent that I'm causing the sadness, I wanna get rid of that, to the extent that it's external. Can I get rid of it? Or is it just stuff that I don't have control over and then you adjust your estimation of that? So the idea is that you're constantly evaluating based on the standard, is this good for my life or bad for my life? And if it's bad for your life, you reject it and if it's good for your life, you embrace it. And look, you won't always know. So as you said, sometimes you think this elite happiness but it doesn't, absolutely. Part of life is experimenting. It's trying different things. What did you say this program is about? Try, try, try, try, try. Absolutely, we wanna experiment. We wanna... It's not a fact. It's not selfish. See, I'm gonna say something very controversial. I think to be selfish is good. If selfishness is properly defined. That is, I think selfishness is taking care of self. That means it's taking care of your body. It's taking care of your mind. It's doing what's really good for you in the long run. Thank you. Thank you for that. We've got a few more questions and I'm conscious of time. So he had something. You wanna do a follow up quickly on this and then I'll come back to you. Would that be all right? Okay, go ahead, so I'll give you the floor. I wanna say I'm in a long word but we are thankful that you're here. Thank you. Five years ago, I was at school. We had a lecture at the University. It was so informative. I was filled with happiness when I was already in university. It was opportunity to listen to you and lie once again. Thank you. And it's one more question. I feel like there are some words that seem to be defined by the hard work and you want that to happen. I feel like it's quite hard to define what the objective will happen. For me, it stems from freedom and it's quite connected to freedom because I was written sarcastically, John Paul Sartland, he believes that every being except for human has the opportunity to not help itself accountable for the old head thing that happened to them except human because we may not be responsible for the bad circumstances around that but we're definitely responsible for the outcome. And as I was written in Sartland, I didn't have time, I just got into a lot of it. I didn't have time to hear about it but he's saying, it was a sighting thing that hear about the ways that suffering itself comes to life and it's connected to life and there's always suffering in our lives and we should have the tools to deal with it. And to go back to Sartland, we are responsible for the outcome of bad circumstances. We should, and what you have been saying was we have to have the tools to not suffer any more. And so to have the freedom, freedom is hard to have as much as tools to have the better outcome from the bad circumstances and to have as much as tools in it to be successful. And to success comes with the way to achieve success comes a lot of failure, a lot of neglect, a lot of going and fighting against the odds and I mean a lot of stress generally. And if life is unending, I mean if suffering is perpetual, if it's permanent and it has always been destroyed with the fight that is quite bad, where is the part that happened? So I reject that. So I reject Kierkegaard and I reject Sartre. I don't think they're right, I think they're wrong. So I don't think life's about suffering. I don't think suffering is permanent. Certainly we all die, but death doesn't have to be perceived as the culmination of suffering. I think suffering is the exception, not the rule. I think particularly in kind of our modern world in which we're not struggling to feed ourselves in which we live pretty comfortable lives, suffering is not the essence of our lives. Indeed, I think the goal is not to avoid suffering. The goal is to achieve happiness, not the same things. So I wanna move towards the light, I don't wanna just avoid the darkness. Now maybe moving towards the light requires some avoidance of darkness, avoidance of suffering, but see Kierkegaard and I think Sartre implicitly assume that the very essence of life is the negative, the very essence of life is suffering, the very essence of life is darkness. We're always moving towards darkness. I don't, I assume that happiness is possible, that success is possible. It's just a question of how to get there and sometimes that success will require suffering, sometimes that success will require stress, but the essence, the purpose of doing it is not the stress and the suffering, that's the trivial part, the purpose is the happiness and the achievement that comes from that happiness. So Rand, Ayn Rand's whole orientation is positive. It's not about ignoring, avoiding pain and avoiding negatives, it's about orienting yourself towards achievement. So it's, I encourage you to read Rand's virtue of selfishness as a counter to Kierkegaard and Sartre. Right, we'll go with your question and then you for the question. You mentioned that you don't have a lot of suffering to achieve happiness and I think what is it? You have to suffer to know what is happiness and know what kind of thing happiness is all about. If you're not a sufferer and you can't feel it. I know that's what you think and I know what that's what a lot of people think, maybe even a majority of people in the world out there think I don't think it's true. I think it's way too negative. I think it's the idea that in order to experience pleasure, I have to experience pain, but that's just not true. We are born with the mechanism to experience pleasure just like we're born with a mechanism to experience pain and you can take a baby and before it's experienced pain, you can do something pleasurable to it and experience pleasure. Indeed, most babies experience pleasure before they experience pain. So the idea that we are determined by some negative mechanism, mechanism of pain and suffering I think is way too pessimistic. It comes from a philosophical context of a negative view of the universe and the negative view of man's place in the universe. I view it the exact opposite. We experience pain and pleasure and very early on we figure out we prefer pain to pleasure. At least if we're healthy, there are a few sick people out there who prefer the other way around. But healthy people prefer pleasure to pain and we strive towards pleasure and we can experience pleasure and therefore can experience happiness. In the context of yes, there's also pain but pain is not necessary to experience it and indeed, you can engage in an activity that has no pain involved and you're experiencing pleasure. Are you experiencing happiness? You don't have to inflict yourself with pain but again, we live in a world where people are not expected to be happy. People expected to suffer more than to achieve joy. That is kind of the assumption. I think it comes much from our religions. Our religions are very negative. We're born with original sin. We're born in kind of a context that is very negative to human life and human happiness and human success and I think that's what we need to break away from. That's just one theory. I think it's a wrong theory of human life. I think the orientation should be towards the positive accepting the fact that negative stuff happens. You can't avoid pain, right? I worked out two days ago and God, do I feel it right now, right? My legs are painful, okay? But am I letting that occupy too much of my mind? No, it's a consequence of working out fine. Go on. What I'm pursuing is the positive. That's the direction, that's your orientation, that's where you're heading. And again, you're never gonna avoid pain. You're never gonna avoid some suffering. Minimize it though. Fantastic. You have a question and then we're going over to the next. First of all, I want to thank you. Through? So my answer is no. You cannot achieve happiness through delusion and remember the three pillars of happiness, if you will. Reason, purpose, self-esteem. What's the first one? Reason. Reason is a negation of delusion. Reason says, facts, give me reality. I have to deal with this world as it is. I can change it. I can shape it using my reasoning capability and my physical action in the world. What's reality? That is. And that's not a delusion. And I know modern philosophy tells you it is, but it's not. We all see basically the same thing. We're all seeing the same thing. It's why when I pick this bottle up and you pick the bottle up, we all know it's round so we all pick it up exactly the same way and we all drink it because we all know it's water. You might think this is a delusion that it's water but it's a weird delusion that we all have it exactly the same. Nobody here in this room views this as Coca-Cola. And there's a reason for that because reality is what it is. And if you didn't have the tool to know reality and if we didn't all have the tool to know reality we wouldn't have survived as a species. A species that can't observe reality dies. Evolution takes care of that. So I disagree with most modern philosophers in that reality is what it is. And we have the tool to observe it and that tool is our senses and our reasoning capabilities. And delusion is fantasy. It's another world. And it will only, if that's your focus, if that's your orientation, then you will never be happy. Indeed, it is a guarantee that you will suffer because you live in an actual world and that world is working on you and you're working on it. And it doesn't care about your delusions. Your delusions will only cause you your actions to deviate so you won't be able to achieve purposes. You won't be able to achieve success. You won't be able to achieve your values and your goals. So very, very much leave delusions alone. I mean, you can do it like fantasies. You can engage in them once in a while and you can play video games and so on. But when you're serious about life, when you're serious about the world focus on reality and facts and what's going on around you. Thank you so much. Oh, just a second, sorry. We have, yes please. Yeah. I'd say this is the importance of having self-esteem. A building that confidence. Yes, once in a while life comes and bam, slaps you in the face, things fall apart out of your control or even in your control, you just fail. And this is what's important to know that happiness is still possible, that success is still possible, that the world has not changed. Yes, you know, you have not succeeded in it in this moment but the success is possible and you just have to get up off your feet and it's hard and start over in whatever it is. You know, again, we're going to fail. There gonna be things in life where we're going to fail at them and you've got to be able to have the confidence to start over and to engage and that confidence comes and it's having the sense of esteem for yourself. I mean, the way I think about it is my life is too precious. I only live once. Very short period of time, like I'm getting old and its time frame is getting shorter and shorter all the time. I don't have time to waste on self-pity. I don't have time to waste on being depressed. I don't have time to waste on suffering. I want to, you know, you suffer, suffer. Get it over with quickly and move on, right? Accept the new reality, adjust to it and move on because life is too short and too precious and you only have one shot at it. So don't waste it. Everything in life is easy to say and hard to execute but that's what you just need to do. What I'd like to do is just thank you. I want to make a comment about that if I may. Sure, of course. But before I do, you just got a question that you have. Shouldn't there be a limitation to self-esteem? Yeah, I mean, I think limitation is reality, right? If you have a self-esteem that's detached from reality, you think, you know, you can be Michael Phelps in swimming, you can't. So that's a false self-esteem, right? If you esteem yourself where it's disconnected from the facts of reality, then you achieve this destructive egoism. But as long as you're attached to the facts, as long as you're attached to reality, as long as you're attached to what you're capable of, and if you want to be more capable, you realize the kind of work that you have to do in order to achieve that, then I don't see how it becomes self-destructive. The self-destructive when it's detached from reality. So narcissists, the whole idea of narcissism is detached from reality where the world centers around me. That's not egoism. That's narcissism. Everybody, what's that? Delusion. Yeah, and that's delusion, yeah. Thank you so much. I just wanted to respond. So first of all, I'd like to just comment that I've made here in today the first writing of what some of you do. So we might not share exactly, and I think we don't. We don't share exactly the same beliefs and on everything, but there are definitely similarities and things that we are definitely unifying on. One of the things that I wanted to just add to this is you have to be able to forgive yourself. Because what happens is, you mentioned we're going to fail. We're going to not meet the mark. Life is all about aiming and shooting for a mark, but you're going to miss it sometimes. And the biggest problem comes in where we beat ourselves up so badly that we are reluctant or unable to get up again and keep trying. And that's the point where you've got to say, it didn't work, I fail, or I miss the mark, but I'm going to forgive myself and you try again. You might pivot, as you said. You might just change directions, try to do something differently, learn from what you've not succeeded at and make a bit of time. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to kind of bring this to a close if that might be the case, because there is another event this evening, right? At the University of Georgia, where Mr. Yonan's book is going to be. Do you want it to start? Yeah, I can. Okay, take it from you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Today we have another lecture, by the way. It should be about self-fishing, as you already mentioned. If you are interested to listen about that issue, you are very welcome. It will take place in the University of Georgia, in Saqqa Square, room number 519, six o'clock. We are stopping at six o'clock. It will be like two parts. The first part will be panel, kind of included in some of our colleagues, and then break some food and then lecture of, yeah. Virtue of self-fishing is the title of our activity this evening. You are very welcome. If you have time, just join us in the place. Great, thank you. And of course, Skam, and try to apply. Thank you so much. Thank you. And by the way, I was just thinking that maybe, I can even text you more. You can. Thanks.