 It's actually very difficult to get off your ass and put down these distractions and focus on something sustaining and complicated and causing some degree of difficulty and anxiety. And many, many young people, I think, find it very difficult to do that. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. If you want to look at the happiest countries in the world you just find the richest countries for the most part and those are people when people say they're happiest but if you want to look at the countries where people say they have the most meaning in life you look for the poorest countries where people actually say they have more meaning because if you're struggling each day your work has a sort of meaning it doesn't have if you're fairly prosperous and protected. And so part of the question is what does one do if one's in a bullshit job and the glib answer is find a better job but you know maybe you can't find a better job maybe maybe or maybe you don't want to take the hit or you don't want to lose your health insurance or whatever so if you can't do that find meaning in other aspects of your life and you know and I have I have a lot of friends who live and have very rewarding jobs but I also have friends who don't have rewarding jobs and they go they do their stuff and then they do something else. Well I think we're seeing this with the great resignation you know we have more jobs available but more unemployed than ever and it's confounding a lot of economists around well wait a second we thought if there were jobs people would naturally take the jobs and we're now realizing that compensation and even happiness are not as important as meaningful work and for many meaning was lost once we had to work from home and we didn't have that connectedness we were just on screens all day. I wonder as a parent as you think through navigating raising children and this idea of happiness versus meaning you know how do you strike that balance and support your children as they navigate this I think it's easier for us as we are older to realize meaning in our life but for many of our younger listeners that search for meaning in the very beginning of their career is is very difficult. It's tough and it's particularly tough now um there are so many things trying to pull you away from meaning and purpose and sustained practice everything from you know Facebook to to Twitter to TV streaming services and everything we don't have to struggle for them anymore in this modern world I have my I have my iPhone next to me I could always check my email or go online and so on and so it's actually very difficult to get off your ass and put down these distractions and focus on something sustaining and complicated and causing some degree of difficulty and anxiety and many many young people I think find it very difficult to do that. Life there's just too many other other distractions and that's that's that's hard you know the book that's probably influenced me the most in my life is Mahali Chiksemi High's book Flow talks about sort of sustained experience when you're really into something you lose track of time you don't you forget to eat you just zoomed in focused on hard intellectual work but he does these surveys and a lot of people don't ever have flow in their lives they're always just you know just going around and never fully engaged so it's it's difficult I just appreciate the difficulty some things get you out of it music musical performance is a way of of getting a sustained attention focus sports certainly writing reading sometimes I'm early in the book you were you were laying out the argument of being able to explore and especially exploring these emotions in your mind and for myself I'm not into horror movies or anything like that however the music that I listen to is certainly on it can be very dour and it can be very dark and nothing makes me feel the way that that music does and for the average listener or somebody who just came upon it by chance I think it might horrify them where for myself I find it harrowing and and lifting and just so dramatic and and of course I think back to Wagner or some of the other more controversial artists whose music was so dark comparatively to to the other artists of the times and we're the first time there was a seeing a show live where I started to weep because of the emotions that I was feeling in in that performance and how much I chase those moments we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends that's such a good counter argument against those who would say well we just want to have happiness we just want to kind of boost up on the pleasurable emotions you know joy sexual satisfaction satiation you know exhilaration all those positive things it doesn't describe people we often enjoy sampling negative emotions we often enjoy sampling fear and regret and sadness in in the right doses in controlled circumstances but there's something um Michael Norton calls emo diversity which is the idea that that we we want to get a range of different emotions sometimes a full life involves getting this and that trying out different things so you know we you would imagine all of the sort of hedonistic theories of human nature would say we avoid being frightened because being frightened is bad and yet there we are going to haunted houses and seeing the most disgusting and terrifying horror movies or listening listening to songs that that you know that freak us out or make us cry so this is a wonderful case you touched on religion earlier and you think about all the great religions involve characters who suffer good amazing people who suffer and through suffering we come to worship them we don't go to movies to just see people experiencing happy for two and a half hours we don't go and seek out this entertainment that just is hedonistic and pleasure filled almost all stories that we share as humans across centuries generations cultures even have suffering baked into the storyline they have a hero's journey that we're drawn to do you feel that this is something that crosses all cultures and we all as humans are drawn to because you mentioned earlier you know some of the more happy cultures some some of these differences we're seeing and meaning even are cultural some things are cultural there's cross cultural differences in the sort of suffering people enjoy in the sort of pleasures people like there's also individual differences sometimes people don't like horror movies other people like spicy foods some people don't but there are also universals and I think you're touching on an important universal which is just like the lives we want to live require suffering and struggle the stories we want to watch and listen to and read about also involve the same thing you know you ask what is a story what does a story have to have to be a story and one answer I think a good answer is it has to involve somebody facing an obstacle it could be funny it could be the obstacle it could be a fun rom-com with couple friends get together it could be the most horrible Holocaust narrative of people trying to survive but you need an obstacle and this sets up the possibility of a hero's journey it but also sets up the possibility for somebody just struggling and as soon as you get to struggle you get the difficulty and you're on your way to suffering the obstacle doesn't even have to be surmounted you know Rocky finished the fight but he didn't win I don't want to run to spoil a lot of movies but some of my favorite sports movie they don't end up winning at the end but they they fight or not and it's interesting that that just catches us my favorite movie that ends that way is the bad news bears but the struggle that those children go through and what they learned about themselves and the connection that they had with their fellow teammates that they wouldn't have had without the struggle and the suffering of playing on this horrible baseball team and the only way that they were going to get to a place of feeling good about themselves is to figure out how to connect and win as a team rather than the uh be individually and I mean that that movie seeing it I'm 48 so I saw it at a very tender age which also set up probably a lot of wanting to connect with other kids as well and also feeling a bit of a of an outcast as that whole team was basically made up of outcasts and being able to see something that you could relate to and though I we can overcome together like we can we can become something that perhaps we maybe don't feel or are individually