 I usually ask my guests who were born during the Soviet times about the difference between the lifestyle back then and today and all of them say that during the time when they were going to be raised as a kid and go to the university and have a job, the people were more friendly, the life was more meaningful and they are struggling today to find the same values. So what do you think or even though they were under this regime but they are still nostalgic about the human relationship and all that stuff? That sounds bizarre to me. Okay. Completely friendly. Friendly when your neighbor might be reporting you to the KGB. Friendly when the state is all powerful and looking over your shoulder and monitoring what you do and what you say and what you think. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie The Lives of Others. It's an excellent movie about life in Eastern Germany during communism. It's anything but friendly. Everybody is your enemy. Everybody could call you in. I think people are delusional. They have false memories. They take the stress that they feel today and when we're children everything seems wonderful but they don't project it back as adults. They don't think about what life was really like, what their parents would really go through and older people that's all they knew. So yes, I think it's completely delusional. I think it's completely wrong. I have no doubt in my mind that free people are friendlier than oppressed people. Now they are struggling to find meaning and this is where we started the conversation by saying it takes effort. Life takes effort. Life takes focus. Life takes real energy and under communism it didn't in a sense. You were told what to do. You were told where to go, where to show up, how to live. You were told what's possible to you and what's not possible to you. Everything was dictated to you. So mentally it was a lazy person's paradise. You didn't have to think for yourself. That's great. But there's joy in thinking for yourself. The whole idea of finding meaning, what's more meaningful than thinking for yourself? What's more meaningful than a life of thought, than a life of effort, than a life of pursuing your own values. And people are looking for some external meaning out there to come hit them over the head. Again, a remnant of Christianity. I think Europe is dominated by Christianity even though it's rejected it. There's this idea of the meaning is out there somewhere. I have to go find it. No, the meaning is inside of you. The meaning is the choices you make about life. Meaning is about the kind of path of life you choose for yourself. Meaning is an independent, thoughtful life of reason. That is what meaning is. But that requires thought, that requires effort, and that requires risk-taking, because it's about you and there's no safety net in terms of thinking. And it avocizes certain independence. And unfortunately, because they grew up under communism, they were not trained to be independent thinkers. They were not trained to find meaning in their own lives. They were trained to look to the state, to look to others, to look to authority for meaning, for ideas. So in that sense they're lost. Hopefully the generation that's been born under freedom has more of a chance to be successful than the people born under communism. But yeah, it's completely delusional. Interesting. They live in a fantasy world. But it's probably right because so much stuff was done for you. But that doesn't lead to happiness. That leads to dread. And that leads to boring. And that leads to meaning less lives, not meaning full lives. Meaning less, to have a meaningful life, you need to exert effort. To have a meaningful life, you have to actually pursue values. When you don't pursue values, when things are just given to you, your life becomes meaningless. It's boring. It's dull. And it's ugly. But people forget the ugliness. People forget that. They become nostalgic because the stress of the moment leads them to think that something was ideally in the past. It was not. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to youronbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content. And of course, subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.