 When we started talking about purpose, it reminded me of a story when I was a very young CEO. My first week as a CEO, I was overwhelmed and I started working like crazy 14-hour days. In the end of the first week, the owner of the company invited me to his room and said, What are you doing every day? 14 hours I see the lights on at 10 p.m. What's going on? I said, I'm working. I'm working as hard as I can. I'm a CEO now. And he said, what are you trying to achieve? And I said, that's a really good question. And then he gave me an analogy that I'll never forget. He said, you know, we're all dancing in the dance floor, but from time to time you have to go up to the balcony and look at what's going on and look far and know what you're, you know. And for me that stuck as always have a vision, a purpose to what you're doing. So let's kick it off by what is for you, what is the meaning of purpose? What is it? So purpose is the why. You know, why am I doing this? You know, why am I giving this talk right now? I could be at the beach. No, wait, we're in lockdowns. I couldn't be at the beach, but I could be doing, you know, a dozen, two dozen, a million other things. Why am I doing this? What is the goal? Do I have a goal? Am I trying to achieve something? If so, is it a legitimate goal? How does it relate to all my other goals? So it really is this, the pursuit of a goal intentionally. Purpose is about, you know, being intentional. It's about knowing what you're doing, knowing why you are doing it. And it's a recognition of the fact that I can actually choose. I can be here or I can be at the beach. I can be somewhere else. I, you know, I can choose how to set my life. I can choose what values to pursue. I can choose how to live. I'm actually in control. And that means I've got a whole selection of values. I'm not set to go in one path. I can change paths. I can pursue lots of different things. So, you know, purpose is really that goal directedness. It's the idea that you are goal directed in every aspect of your life and every aspect of your existence. That is open to choice where you can choose. It's about being a valuer. It's about pursuing values in an intentional way, in a thoughtful way, in a purposeful way. Okay. I'm being told that something's wrong with the video. Is everything good? The video is not great. So you're kind of jagged. It looks like low quality bandwidth on your end. Okay. Well, we'll try. Anyway, so I wanted to continue. It seems like before we dive in more kind of detail, but it seems like there's a need, a human need. Is it psychological? What is it about the need of having a purpose? Because sometimes, you know, when you lose purpose, it seems like everything's going down, right? So what is that need that humans have to have purpose? Where is that coming from? Well, at the most foundational level, at the most basic level, it's the fact that we don't know instinctually, automatically how to live. That we have to choose our values. And because of that, if you think about the fact that we have so many values, there's so many things you could be doing. There's so many things you could be choosing. You have to consciously decide what's important and what's not. What's going to lead you towards your goals and what is not? What goals are worthy of having? From the most abstract to the most concrete, there's no automatic mechanism to make that happen. You have to actively pursue it. You have to actively engage. You have to actually actively think. And this is all the way at the level of survival, right? At the very basic of just as a human being to survive. We have no automatic knowledge of how to survive. So you have to, in every activity in life, from the basic activity of getting food. And you have to pursue certain goals. You have to pursue a certain path and you have to figure out what those goals are and figure out what that path has to be, needs to be. And that is at the very core of why we need purpose because we don't know how to live. We have to figure it out. We have to make the right kind of choices. We have to use our reason and allow our reason to help us solve the problems of survival. And then as you go up from survival, as you go up to living life as a human being with all the spiritual and material needs that human beings actually have. Well, it gets more and more complex. It gets more and more challenging. But all of that is part of living. And all of that requires us to be very goal oriented, to be very focused, to be very rational, to be very systematic about the values that we choose. And if we're not, then we flounder. If we're not, then we choose values that are anti-life or we waste a lot of time. Or we go in directions that are unproductive and unconstructive to a happy life or to a productive life. And the bad thing that happens as a consequence is unhappiness and lack of focus and depression and drift, not knowing what's going on. Why? So why is it so hard? Why do we see so many people confused, unhappy in the world around us? Why is that so hard to achieve? Why aren't we, it's not like a nature to us to always pursue something. I don't know if it's by default, we're not pursuing rational values. Well, but that's the point. There's no default. It's so hard because it's not automatic. It's so hard because it requires choices, it requires action, it requires thinking and reason. And it's so hard because at the end it is dependent on our fundamental choices in life. It is dependent on a fundamental philosophy, a fundamental morality. That is going to guide the purpose or lack of purpose in our life. And if the purpose in our life is anti-life, then you get this constant clash between the values that you're pursuing and the needs for self-preservation, the needs for living a life as a human being. And that clash manifests itself in anxiety, in stress, in unhappiness, and in difficulty in life, in midlife crises, in all of these kind of phenomenals where self-preservation requires a certain path because reality is what it is and human nature is what it is. And you are pursuing a completely other path because you're guided by, let's say, altruism, a philosophy that tells you self-preservation doesn't matter, what really matters, or living doesn't matter, or taking care of your needs or your unhappiness doesn't matter. What really matters is other people, what really matters is sacrifice, what really matters is denying yourself for the sake of others, what really matters is sacrifice. Then, even if you choose a purpose, let's say, in your career and you're successful in it, at some point that's going to clash against this other idea of, but wait a minute, what am I doing? I should be sacrificing, I should be taking care of others. And that conflict is psychological, that conflict is in every dimension of your life, and it causes people to rethink their life, to question everything. But then they still lack, okay, but what do I do now? Unless they will need to question their morality, unless they will need to question their most fundamental, the purpose of morality, the goal of morality. Then they are stuck with purposes that clash with their actually human nature, with actual requirements of happiness, with actual requirements of success qua human being. And that creates all these disasters. Would you say that a midlife crisis, would you say that a midlife crisis as we know it is related to that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a sense in which when you're young, you're focused on a few things, right? And you know, one of them being career, you know, if you're a better person, if you're a good person, you're focused on career. You may be one of romantic relationship and you're driven and you're full of energy and you're just experiencing life and you're coming out of the gate and everything looks possible. And you haven't really thought about ethics, morality is in the background, but for most of us it's altruism in the background. But you're just focused right now because you want to be successful, you want to do good. And many people who have been a life crisis are very successful people. People who have, you know, from their 20s on, you know, single-minded focused on this career and then they've got a family and they've got two kids and they've got a dog and they've got a house and they've got an old days of station wagon or whatever. And you know, everything looks like it's clicking, right? And then at some point I think the altruism and comes into the forefront and it says, what are you doing? On the one hand, isn't the good something else? Isn't the good that you've been taught you're entitled to something else and you haven't been doing that? But also, you know, why have I devoted myself long term to a family and a wife? What's the, where am I going with this? What's, what's the purpose of this? Why can't I just go with any young, you know, beautiful woman? Why can't I drive a sport? Why can't I do these other things? Why, if, if I'm not going to be moral because they usually put that aside, right? They put, I'm not really going to be Mother Teresa. Nobody wants that. Then, well, why this? Why career? What's the point in career? Right? Why, why follow that? Why, why family? Why any of these things? And there's no, there's no answer because they've divorced the fundamental abstract moral concepts, which they've never really articulated, never made, really made real. From the day to day life and that conflict manifests itself in, you know, in this midlife crisis. And then, you know, and you look at, and it's not just midlife crisis. Look, young people, young people experiencing this as well. There's a, there's a well documented phenomena and you can see it with, with people like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson and religion and Rick Warren, who wrote a book about, you know, purpose in life, the evangelical preacher. Young people who don't know what to make of their life. They don't know what to do with their life. They don't know why they should do anything. They don't know what the, what the purpose is and, and they're drifting and, and they're going nowhere and they're in their mother's basement and they, you know, they're attracted to crazy ideas or they're just playing video games because they don't know what life is about. And, and then you listen and, and, and, and then what happens is people, the self-help people and, and people who may be a little bit more intellectual than just self, self-help people like Sam Harris or Jordan or religion. They come about and say, yeah, there was a, you need a purpose, guys, let me help you find a purpose. But almost all of them, Sam Harris is a bit of an exception here, but certainly Jordan Peterson and certainly religion and so on. They say, yeah, life, and, and this is Jordan, right? This is what he says. He says, life is miserable. Life is pain. Life is suffering. And the only way you can deal with it is to find a purpose. And the real purpose, if you really want a meaningful purpose, a purpose that will really animate your life. It has to be outside of you. It has to be focused on others. It has to be on other people. He talks about taking responsibility. First, he says you have to take responsibility for your own life, you know, make your bed, stand up straight, do stuff like that. Take responsibility for your own life. But then to really achieve, he never talks about happiness because he doesn't think that can be achieved. That just happens. Then you need something external to use. Again, even the self-help gurus, at the end, in the guise of self-help, helping you, they sell altruism. At the end, it's not about how to achieve your values, your life, your happiness. It's about, in John Peterson's case, reducing pain. It's about eliminating struggle. But the only way to do that is by adopting some, in some form, adopting altruism or some kind of altruism. So let's go for the positive. Let's talk to an 18-year-old, a 20-year-old. They're ambitious. How would you guide them towards, you know, well, what would you answer if they ask you, okay, Aaron, what is the purpose of life? What am I trying to achieve here? And then maybe the next question is how should I go about figuring my purpose? Because I don't know yet. I just graduated. I don't know what I'm interested in. Where should I go? How should I start building my purpose? Yeah, so first, the purpose is the purpose of your life. There's no purpose to life other than life. The question is what is the purpose of my life? And what is the purpose of human life, if you will, as individuals? And the purpose is to live, to live well, to live as Inran described a life as a human being, as a life that is fitting for a rational being. So you can't, and this is what, this is the problem with most of the self-help guys. So some of them want a divorce purpose from morality. And some of them want a self-purpose in the frame of altruism. Neither one of those can be successful. I mean, you can give somebody purpose that's altruistic, but there'll be a clash and it'll destroy them. And you can try to divorce purpose from morality, but again, that'll clash and that'll destroy them. The beauty of objectivism, the beauty of Inran's ideas is that purpose is a cardinal value in morality. It is an essential part of what it means to be moral. It is an essential part of what it means to live. It means to pursue your life. And what is the moral purpose of your life? Well, it's happiness. It's to achieve happiness. It's to achieve that state of non-country, to enjoy it, and to counter the Jordan Peterson's of the world. It's not this momentary pleasure. It's not just having a party. It's not having fun. It's something much deeper, much more sustainable over time. It's a state of being that is a positive state of being, a belonging in this world of embracing and loving the life that you have. So that is your purpose in life. It's to live that kind of life, the kind of life suitable for a rational being. And to do that, well, you need to do, I think, two things. I mean, you need to do a lot more than that, but two things to start off with. First, you have to embrace morality. You have to embrace certain abstract values. You have to understand them, integrate them, and really, really understand how they adhere towards making your life purposeful, making your life valuable and ultimately leading to happiness. So you start with the most abstract values. And then you have to have more concrete values that lead you to those greater abstractions and ways in which to achieve them. And a lot of those values are going to be personal values. So you have to figure out what your personal values are. But let me ask you this. So it seems like there's a relationship between value and purpose. And isn't like a spiral, would you say that me is beginning my life, trying to figure out what my values are and being more purposeful around it? Is this like a spiral that grows and grows over time? Would you describe it like that? Well, absolutely. As you achieve your values, as you learn more about life, as you understand moral principles better, as your knowledge was abstract and at the concrete level expands, you know more, you're better integrated, your choice of values becomes more mature, but more informed and more meaningful. So it's a constant spiral. You're constantly learning, you're constantly proving. It's not like, you know, again, other than the abstract values, the universal values, it's not like, you know, you fix values when you're 18 and those are the values for the rest of your life. I mean, thank God, that's not true. I mean, the things I liked when I was 18, I, you know, I completely reject it. Some of them are rejected today, right? So you want to be able to grow and to learn and to integrate your knowledge into your values. And that's what purpose allows you to do. Purpose is this focus on doing that. It's about focusing on your values. It's about focusing on your choices. It's about focusing on your goals. And it's about prioritizing them, choosing between them, creating hierarchies of them. And it's not fixed every day requires you to reengage that purpose because every day there are new value potential values. There are values you might want to drop. There are things that there's new information, new knowledge, new ideas that you've encountered that will, you know, make your life richer. So purpose is the standing command, if you will. You know, focus on the values in my opinion. It's a huge abstraction because it covers self-esteem. It covers every, you know, it's one of the three cardinal values in objectivism, reason, purpose, self-esteem. It covers every human activity because every human activity, every individual activity is about values. It's about pursuit of the things that are important to you that you want to act again or keep. And it's, so it's a task. And as the value, it's that I am going to be focused on this. This is important to me. This is what I'm going to spend real energy and real thought and real effort to do. I'm going to figure out what's really important. And it's more than just what's really important because you have to be careful here of subjectivity. You know, a lot of times people say, oh, well, think about what's really important to you and what you love and then go pursue what you love. That's your values. But one of the important steps there is to make sure what you love is good. And what does good mean? Again, what is the purpose of it? It makes sure that what you love is life enhancing. It is truly life enhancing. And it is life enhancing relative to the other values you could, you could follow that or you could pursue that, you know, there might be more life enhancing than might. So it's a constant, you're constantly choosing and you're constantly creating hierarchies and you're constantly evaluating. And that's what it means to have a life of purpose. It's not you do it once and it's over. I mean, maybe what you do once is define the abstractions. But even then, I learn something about the objectivist ethics every, every day or every time I listen to one of our philosophers or, or every time I pick up one of our events books or one of our events essays and read, I learn something new. So even there, you're constantly evolving, you're constantly learning, you're constantly growing, and that's going to affect your hierarchy of values that's going to affect the purposes. That you have in your life. If you see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content. 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