Welcome to The Meaningful Sh!t Show with your host, Vincent. In a world full of selfishness, blaming and scapegoating, Vincent aims to inspire inner work with deep topics and insights on emotion regulation, personal development, psychology, philosophy, and the trauma growth healing process. Hey everybody, welcome to yet another episode of The Meaningful Sh!t Show, and today I will talk about how nihilism, absurdism, and existentialism made me happier. Starting with two quotes.

First one from Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the individuals strongly associated with nihilism. The quote is, God is dead, and therefore nihilism, therefore all the things that God told us to do have no consequence anymore. Second quote is by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who is more associated with absurdism and existentialism to a certain extent. The quote is, if God is truly dead, all things are permitted. So what Dostoevsky is trying to say here is that there is no ethics, no morality, and that there's not really that much of a moral compass that you can, like, everything is permitted.

There is a case to be made for everything. Cool. So that requires some unpacking because even these quotes are pretty esoteric and vague and like sort of abstract. And of course, when we were talking about these philosophical movements, they are very high level, right? So this is not really an episode where you get to learn everything about nihilism, absurdism and existentialism, the history and what it all encompasses.

That's not really the type of channel that I have. I more talk about what did it concretely mean in my life, but I do like to go over a little bit of history. So modern nihilism, think 18th and 19th century, with the main person that everyone associates nihilism with is Nietzsche. So Nietzsche saw nihilism as the result of the decline of religious and metaphysical certainties, hence God is dead.

And it's a philosophical belief. It suggests that life is without objective, without meaning, without purpose, without any intrinsic value at all. So it often questions the existence of the absolute truths, and it rejects traditional values and believes in the existence basically of the absolute truths and all of these things. Let me start over again. So it questions and oftentimes rejects the existence of absolute truth and traditional values and beliefs.

So nihilism explores the consequences of a world without inherent meaning as well. So that's what Nietzsche dives into in his various works. And he mainly, nihilism challenges the established norms and prompts and comes with deconstructions of those that they don't necessarily make sense. Prompts individuals to reconsider their own values and beliefs in the absence of absolute truth, because that of course recontextualizes everything. And the impact of nihilism on modern thought extends to, of course, discussion and ethics, but also goes into existentialism, which I'm going to talk about as well, and the nature of reality.

One of the things that I oftentimes associate with nihilism is, I am not sure if it's a quote from someone, but being lost in a moral relativistic landscape. In the process of nihilism, you discover that everything is relative, and then you're kind of stuck in this swamp where you're not sure what's up and down, and everything is complex and ambiguous. So, I'm first going to talk about what nihilism did for me personally before I go into absurdism and existentialism, which in a way are more useful or effective philosophical movements to build your life on.

But nihilism is very, very important, I would say. So, let me just summarize it again, because it's a lot of information. So, core idea of nihilism is to believe that life is devoid of inherent meaning, purpose or value. Like, we can discuss until we're blue in the face, but that's where it comes down to. You cannot point at anything that sets these as an absolute value. So, commonly, the response to meaninglessness from a nihilistic perspective is a sense of despair, cynicism, apathy, and even wanting to join the destruction of things, because various systems of belief that have been set up, if you look at it from a nihilistic perspective, you can see that you can deconstruct it.

They can be destroyed, and sometimes people associate nihilism with actually the destruction of that, which in a way is kind of weird, because destruction is meaning by itself. Like, why would you have to destroy something that's not true, and what are you going to replace it with? So, the key approach is that it embraces the lack of meaning as an insurmountable truth, sometimes leading to inaction and rejection of all moral and ethical standards, so problematic.

And like I mentioned, mostly associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, although he also criticizes nihilism and seeks ways to overcome it. So he does understand, hey, I'm burning things down, and what do I do with clearing? So let's keep going. So, personal story. Like, why am I shooting this video on nihilism? What did it do for me? So I kind of like think that part of my, I think my nihilistic phase has been like kind of long, but I do have this memory.

It's like the first time that I took psychedelics, I took mushrooms. I remember that I looked at the world around it. I looked at everything that was happening, everything that was happening in my head, and I saw how much power my mind had on my perception, how much of my reality I was really creating myself because of how I look at the world. So sometimes I've talked about this in context of context versus content.

So we think a lot is the moment that we look out in the world that we're seeing content, we're seeing data, we're seeing shapes, we're seeing, you know, that it's like mainly content. But really, there's a lot of data that like sort of like flows into our eyes, but it goes through a filter, very fascinating subject to dive into as well, like how that filter exactly works.

There's like various layers to it, but not going to go into that. But what it comes down to is that these layers add a lot of context so that we don't have to do a lot of like sort of processing when we see a ball. We kind of already know it, it's a ball. And even if we're not seeing certain properties of that ball, our mind kind of like fills it in.

It's not important. We've concluded what it is, so we're not analyzing it anymore. And that seems fine, especially if you're thinking about something like a ball, but that becomes like very profound if you think that that happens for everything. That means that so much is being filled in that I would almost say that it's 99% of context that you bring and 1% content, which is like sort of polar opposite for like a baby, for example, they don't have that much context yet.

So fascinating. So I got into nihilism from the perspective of deconstructing everything. I saw that my perspective was inherently like I had a lot of influence. My mind had a lot of influence on it. And I could also see that I could very easily adopt another perspective and that would it would seem equally true. That's pretty scary from a certain perspective, because that means that you're not sure of your reality anymore.

But at the same time, I had the intuition that anything that I would color in there, any belief system that I would adopt, would have the same problem. So what nihilism offered me is somewhat of a toolbox to deconstruct things. So a deconstruction tool. So I could deconstruct some of the secular values that I was raised with, some of the codes and norms and rules and where they were coming from and why one should do a thing and not do a thing and why certain people do it one way and other people do it in a different way and that neither of them is right or wrong.

At least that's what I got to. And then, of course, towards the end as well is to deconstruct deconstruction itself, which, of course, nihilism is great. I mean, it's useful to deconstruct things, but is deconstruction like sort of an end goal? Does it lead to happiness? Maybe it's quote unquote true as far as we can determine, but is it effective? Does that lens help me to build a very happy, fulfilling life?

And I mean, the obvious answer to that is like kind of like, no. So that puts you like in a sort of a predicament, because you can, a lot of people associated with that, and I would say as well that that was sort of part of the process. Some things become dark, depressing and negativistic, because there is no meaning. I can't just say, oh, these are the rules that God gave me, or this is just the way that the universe works.

No, it's all super subjective. So I don't know. Especially if I adopt the nihilistic perspective, that tells me that even if I go looking for meaning, I will never find it. Now, that's of course like sort of a fallacy by itself, because the searching of meaning one always has to do by themselves. You can't really... You could trust a book on that, but like why would Nietzsche be right?

Did he do everything? So there's still homework on my end. What I also realized that this problem that you can deconstruct these concepts is inherent to any conceptual system. It's inherent to language, because a conceptual system, the map is not the territory, so the map can never describe the entire territory, because there would be no point of having the map. You could just be in the territory by itself.

So why do we have conceptual systems? It's useful. There are abstractions, we create models, and those help us navigate the world. They make survival more effective. So I saw as well in the deconstruction of deconstruction that there was no other, like there was no like savior philosophy that would replace it, replace my, for example, secular upbringing with something that was true. I couldn't like switch in Christianity, I couldn't switch in Buddhism, I couldn't switch in non-dualism, like solipsism, like all of these perspectives could be deconstructed.

Of course, I did not deconstruct all of them, but I went through a couple of deconstructions myself. I realized that it is okay that things don't make sense, and I can poke holes at it, because the Nietzsches of this world did this as well, and they spend a lot more time than I, thinking about these things. So I could, although it is trusting an authority, of course, but that did give me like sort of like a perspective in someone or inspiration to conclude that my perspective is not like that weird.

So that was like kind of sort of nice. I always like it, and this is great of the age that we live in, that we can always sort of check if someone else has been having the thoughts that we just had, and if someone else thought about that and like made a philosophy out of it. And usually that's the case. It's fascinating. So let's go through like examples of deconstruction that were important for me.

So one of the deconstructions that I did for myself was the materialistic paradigm, because that's what I was very much like raised to believe, and most of us in the Western world are. It's almost like the moment that you can start touching the materialistic paradigm. Like I feel like something that Icky coming over me, like it's something that you're not supposed to do. You're not supposed to lift that part of the curtain.

We all know that there is trickery behind it, yet we're all in this business of not calling out the trickery. Because the materialistic paradigm and sort of signs, which the two I feel like are very interwoven, it really comes down to a lot of observation and measurement and models that are made. Because what is materialism? I don't have a full exhaustive definition for you. But it buys into that the universe is made of matter.

There's quarks and gluons and atoms and molecules and all of these things that we can't really see, but we can use science to prove, quote unquote, prove that they are there. Because we model out, well, if they would exist and we would conduct such an experiment, they would react such and such, and then we carry out that experiment. And then the moment that our predictions coincide with what we measure, we know that our model is holding water.

Now, of course, there's a little bit of a problem there, and that is we can have a bunch of phenomena that happen and we can have a bunch of models explaining them. And that's, of course, what you see on the cutting edge of science as well. And even in weather modeling, there's just different models that work in different ways and are predictive in some ways and not predictive in other ways.

So that doesn't mean that, for example, weather or quantum mechanics necessarily is one specific way. There's just different ways of modeling it. So in other words, like if I have the territory, I can draw a map that maps sort of the altitude. So I can navigate the hills and stuff like that. But maybe I need a map that navigates or that highlights the waterways and how deep they are because I actually have a boat, right?

So both are true. Both are predictive. You know, the analogy is not perfect, but you get what I mean. You can focus on different aspects, and different aspects can still be useful. And that's ultimately what science does. In a way, people say, okay, science discover what's true. And I kind of like questioned or I deconstructed that. And it's like, no, it doesn't really have necessarily anything to do with truth, as of such, but it has to do with usefulness and predictability.

Because science could ask a lot of questions that are not useful. And of course, the hypotheses that we end up doing research into are hypotheses that are useful, that have humanity's stance to gain something with that. So there's a bias. There's a survival bias. There's a funding bias. There's a career bias. So, you know, it's a bias system, just like every other system. So other things that I broke down is, of course, like observation itself, how prediction works, statistics and probability, what those really are and are not, right?

Like statistics and probabilities is actually sort of interesting. It's definitely some sort of like a meta-truth, but it's not really like true in the world itself. Like if you assign probability, like if you really look at it, probability doesn't really exist from a certain perspective because things happen in a particular way. From our perspective of being, you know, interacting with time the way that we do, for us probability exists and it's useful because then we know like what matter, what things that we measure could do.

And because we can measure that over time, we can do many different experiments, we can create this whole school of probability, which is useful. But if you try to switch your thinking in a slightly different way, you can sort of see like the human bias in there. And in a way, I would say that probability is just, it's a model, it's an abstraction. It's a meta thing that we create, but it doesn't really have like this core substance that's actually in reality.

It's a way of talking about reality, which is interesting. If probability doesn't really, quote unquote, exist, like, I mean, I hope that you can switch your mind in thinking about it in that way. I find that fascinating to realize what that probability is a higher order thing, you know. Subject-object paradigm, of course. Like, how can I observe something when I'm part of the thing that I'm observing?

Like, we're all part of a system. So these are one of these, like, sort of, like, quote unquote, dirty secrets of science. I feel like, don't lift that curtain, like, people would poo poo you. Because the moment that you start questioning that, you can't do anything anymore, right? Like, it's like biting your own teeth, as Alan Watts says. And that doesn't mean it's not productive or effective to create a subject-object paradigm, but the moment that we make a distinction between us and the thing that we're measuring, we're doing something interesting and tricky.

And sort of, like, on the deepest level of quantum mechanics, we see the problem there. For example, measuring something creates or changes the state of the particle. And that creates, for example, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that we can know how fast a particle is going, or we can very precisely know the speed, or we can very precisely know the location, but we can't know both. And don't ask me to explain that.

That's why they have the Heisenberg compensators in Star Trek, right? But that's fascinating to me, and it showcases that science is something that's created by humans to do something in a predictable fashion that was a better map, better model than some of the models that we previously had. So in a way, science and materialism is great at prediction. It's super effective. We make all kinds of really cool technology with it and satellites and space and nuclear bombs and all of these things.

The fact that it's useful doesn't mean it can't be deconstructed, that there isn't human biases in there, survival biases, as it must be, of course. And remember that a model that does not predict how things will go is a worse model than a model that does. So we have a bias there. We want models that are very predictive in nature. That's sort of the test of how good a model is.

If you have a map and it sends you the wrong way half of the time, it's not a very good map. So it's all measured in usefulness and not necessarily truthfulness. And it's a little tricky. I find these things very hard to explicate. But I hope that you can see that there is this distinction between usefulness and truthfulness, and that they're at odds with each other in a way.

Another element of deconstruction that I did is around survival. It's one of these other things that, as humans, we just kind of accept and see everything through that lens. But there's a lot of things that you can deconstruct about survival, the base reasons behind that. One of the interesting things that I find, that I think about is if you throw away your bias completely as a living creature, and you're just like, okay, well, I don't really want to maintain this form.

That, of course, means that you're going to die. So you're always biased, and there's, of course, billions of years of evolution that sort of like instills this in us to keep surviving and to actually ingest, like the way that the food chain works, we ingest plants and creatures that are quote unquote lower to us, and we transform them into our bodies, which really, if you think about it, it's kind of like fucked up.

Of course, that's a judgment, but one could feel like that about it. It's really interesting, and it also leads to all kinds of questions, like why does it have to be this way? There is so much energy in the universe, seemingly infinite, and yet we are here on this cold rock, fighting for these little tidbits of proteins and carbohydrates that we have to extract out of each other.

And it's kind of brutal in a way, if you think about it. It's also beautiful, but it's also brutal. But you can deconstruct it, and you can see how it doesn't make any logical sense. Why would I choose to maintain this form? What's better about this form than the decomposed form of me if I stop eating, or all the things that I would otherwise eat that then get to grow?

And of course, the only answer to that can be selfish. And that's one of the things that we necessarily sort of have to accept. We have to accept that bias, otherwise we die. But it's a bias nonetheless. There's nothing inherently true about it, especially if we take the nihilistic perspective. So those are some of the things that I used nihilism myself. I would say as well, I alluded to it earlier as well, it was like a little bit of a safety blanket for me for a while.

Because I would say that I was like in like a classical nihilistic phase that kind of like felt kind of like dark and disappointing. And I was just discovering things that I thought I was sure of, like I couldn't really be sure of anymore. So that's kind of kind of scary. But there was a safety blanket, and listening and reading about nihilism gave me a sense that it's okay.

It's okay that I can poke holes at these things. That's true. Others have thought about that. And they're still here. So I'm not like crazy or deluded or whatever. It's a valid perspective. But of course, we want to go beyond. So one of the things that is great about this world is that I'm not the only one who is thinking about that. So I want to call out absurdism and existentialism.

Both, I would say, doctrines that accept at the heart that life has no intrinsic meaning. So let's take absurdism first, most associated with Albert Camus. So while agreeing that life has no intrinsic meaning, Camus does reject nihilism, which leads to despair and resignation. And he instead proposes that we must confront the absurd and find a way to live with it. And the absurd is basically the fact that the universe is, nihilism says, irrational and meaningless.

Yet we as creatures have a search for order and meaning. So we're in conflict with the universe. But that's not necessarily a bad thing to be in conflict with the universe. It's just something that comes with our bias. And what absurdism really focuses on is to not embrace that, to embrace that as not a problem. One of the examples that is oftentimes associated with absurdism is the myth of Sisyphus.

So the myth of Sisyphus is a Greek mythological figure that is doomed by the gods. I believe it was because he tried to get the gods to eat his son or something like that. I might be mixing things up here, classical education failing. I might be wrong to or might be right as well. But anyways, he got punishment by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill, but whenever he would reach the top of that hill, the boulder would roll back down.

Now, there's something absurd about that as well, right? Because Sisyphus is struggling consistently. It's a lot of brutal effort to roll that boulder up, and yet it doesn't do anything. It has no meaning. He's doomed to do it, but there's no meaning to it. So what Camus sort of proposes is that probably Sisyphus finds happiness in the struggle itself. Of course, he goes into more detail that I can write right now, but I hope that you can sort of get in that mind space where initially you frame something as extreme suffering.

But then if you sort of recontextualize it and compare it to other parts of life, maybe it's actually not that bad. You have a lot of security of what's going on. Yes, it's grueling work, but you know what that is. You know exactly what is going to happen. So I would imagine after like the umpteenth time Sisyphus is not even desperate about this anymore. He just, you know, walks down and starts rolling it up the hill.

And I can sort of compare that with like I did a lot of trail running. So I can imagine I can compare that to, you know, the uphill is great and the downhill is great. So when the uphill was done, I would look forward to the downhill. So, you know, although there's absurdness in there, there is also meaning that can be found in that, although it is clear that that's meaning that we superimpose on these things yourself.

So again, what I like about absurdism is that there's someone that thought about this, created a body of work, really a school philosophy and thought about this. And that just helps me to consider, hey, does this philosophy help me? Does it help me to think about these moments where I'm feeling, you know, I'm feeling that struggle, I'm feeling that that friction between the meaninglessness and the fact that I want meaning.

Does it help me? And the answer for me, it does. Like I've sort of accepted that as in my heart as a sort of like a brutal truth or something like that, quote unquote truth, a perspective that I can adopt to make it bearable because that's really what absurdism is about. So embrace the absurd, find contentment in the struggle against meaninglessness, the struggle against meaninglessness is the meaning.

Now, how's that for a brain twist or a pretzel? Let's go on to the next one. Existentialism. So existentialism is a chiefly 20th century philosophical movement, embracing various different doctrines, but centering on the analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of supposed free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad now.

That vibes with me immensely, immensely. And one of the proponents or persons that are usually associated with it is Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote Existentialism is a Humanism, which is a talk he did at a university. So it's a very short book, and it's really focused on his core idea, is that he wants to be able to communicate this philosophy as well.

He feels like these philosophies that are just written down and nobody reads them, or only the professional philosophers, they don't really create the change in the world that he wants to create. So the core idea of Existentialism really is to emphasize your individual freedom, choice and responsibility in creating personal meaning. Personal meaning, you get to create it. So the response to meaninglessness is to just encourage people to actively create their own meaning and purpose through authentic choices and actions.

And that is a big responsibility, because that means you just get to choose. You just get to choose. And that reminds me of the Dostoevsky quote of if God truly is dead, everything is permitted. And existentialism buys into that. Existentialism, I remember reading this book of Jean-Paul Sartre, and he argues that if there is no God, although he hopes there is, and goes into these ramifications of that.

So I wouldn't say that existentialism advocates necessarily that God is dead as nihilism does, like sort of dissolving that framework provided by religion. But that's also an individual freedom that you have. So you get to choose your personal meaning. So that, what existentialism then informs us to do, is to live authentically, making deliberate choices and taking responsibility for one's life and values. And that's a big one.

That is an owner mentality versus a victim mentality. I feel, although you can definitely bring an owner mentality to nihilism, it's easier to get into a victim mindset. Because from the perspective of us little humans, it's kind of bleak. We don't want that because we want meaning. That is something that seems to be instilled in us because we see that across the globe, that if there's meaning, we're happy.

If there's no meaning, we're not happy. Also reminds me of the excellent book by Viktor Frankl, Men's Search for Meaning. I talk about Viktor Frankl a lot. He's one of my favorite authors. Very, very influential. But Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in a concentration camp. And one of his observations was that his fellow people that were taken captive, the ones that would linger in the past or fantasize about an unrealistic future, they would wither away and die because they could not bear with the meaninglessness and the suffering in the exact moment that they were in.

And the ones that created some kind of meaning in their suffering were able to get through it. And if people in a concentration camp can create meaning in such an absurd circumstance, I think that I can sort of man up, person up, and do the legwork to create my own meaning as well. Like, let's face it, the situation is a little bit different. Not to minimize the suffering that you and I go through.

We might not be in a concentration camp, but that doesn't mean that we don't suffer. It's always relative, so it's not a thing to feel guilty about. That's not the purpose. But it's an inspiration. I feel like it's an inspiration that there are people that create meaning, and those people, I wouldn't say, arrive in a captive situation, but at least they survive. So existentialism, therefore, resonates with me a lot, and as far as I'm concerned, it is not at odds with nihilism, and this is what I like about it.

They work together. They basically say, it's like, yes, yes, there is no meaning. Correct, we cannot find it in the universe. But, of course, existentialism gives us that road forward to actively create our own meaning. Now, how do we do that? That ties into all of the different work that I've already talked about. In a way, when I started with my episodes on values and beliefs, that's what comes after this.

In a way, it is great to start doing this work once you've identified that some of the, like the values and the web of beliefs that we grew up with, to accept that or to discover that it's horseshit, that it can be deconstructed. And then picking up the pieces again and constructing the meaning that feels right to us based on our values. And probably that will mean is that we pick up a lot of the pieces of the things that we just deconstructed, not because they're true, but because we like them.

It fits us. It, you know, matches the color of our soul. And no longer do we have to defend those things and judge other people for making different choices because now we know, now it is all completely arbitrary, and we have to choose things that fit in our own personal meaning. It is my conviction, and it's not something that I can prove, but if the entirety of humanity would do this, that would be a net positive for the world.

Like some people would think, if everyone just willy-nilly takes responsibility and creates their own framework, it's going to be chaos. And from a certain perspective, that's true, partially because it's a lot of work to create a framework like that, so it's handy to grow up and have someone give you a framework that probably is going to work for you, like 80% or something like that. But the key word is there is responsibility.

If everyone would be taking the responsibility to do that, the world would be a quote-unquote better place. I just don't think that that's in the heart of every person. A lot of people don't really want to do that. They just want to ride on the meaning that their society created. And if they didn't have any particular deep suffering or their personality doesn't guide them in that direction, they will never think about these things.

And as far as I'm concerned, that's fine. I mean, not everybody has to be a philosopher. One of the things that I really like about existentialism as well, from the same book from Jean-Paul Sartre, is how he talks about the decisions that we make. It's these deliberate choices, that these are the decisions that we make for the entirety of humanity. And that sounds very melodramatic, but there's something that I like about that.

It coincides with different things that I do in my exercise routine, in my interpersonal effectiveness, in my general morning routine, things like that. Don't try to make decisions and shrug on the fact that not everybody can make the same work. I should say that you realize that if everybody would do that, things would be like bad, but you just do it because it's just you that's doing it.

So there's like two parts to that that I find important. First of all, the fact that you feel that something is the right choice for the entire humanity, so like that responsibility to use your circle of concern that's super broad, doesn't mean that everybody exists or agrees with you, but you've considered it. That's the important part. The important part is that you've given it a real like, I'll try to really think of this decision, this action that I'm about to take.

Would that be great if everybody would be taking that action? So although embracing the fact that even if all of us would do that, we would all come to like different actions and different decisions, but that's powerful because that creates like sort of something that I really like, which is you can live up to your highest standards all the time. It's not like, you know, like fat, a fat diet where you're just eating healthy for two weeks and then you lose a couple of pounds or stones or whatever, whatever, where you are in the world, kilos.

And then you switch around and just do the same thing again. That's, in my perspective, like that doesn't work. It's like stupid and it creates like this acting in and acting out dichotomy. If you look back at my episode on addiction, there's a lot that I talk about the acting in, acting out paradigm. But what we're trying to do is live within integrity all of the time.

That does mean that we have to create standards and values and rules and routines that are sustainable. Right? You can't go from never working out to working out seven days. It doesn't work. Like you have to embrace that it's a journey, that it's a path. Having that mindset, that understanding that you are choosing your path with like a sense of gravity, like you are choosing this for the entirety of humanity, like you are really making like you're making God's choice deciding on your path, not your goal, not your where you're going to end up because we can't control that.

Right. It's about the path, like the routines, like everything that I talk about in other episodes. It's so important for a sense of meaning is to work towards a distinguished goal. Like it's very, it's very essential. And these goals are arbitrary. It doesn't matter. Pick one. Which I'm partially sitting on Jordan Peterson's chair now. Like he talks about this a lot. Like research shows that people that are working towards a distinguished goal, a goal that always like sort of moves away from them, they're getting closer, but they never quite attain it.

They're happier because you're constantly in a state of, you're going for something, you're seeing that you're making progress, yet you're never like kind of like done. So because if your goal is like very like, you know, checkbox kind of thing, it's like, I want to work out 10 times in my life. You know, after time 10, like it's like, okay. And now what? So it's important to design these goals in such a way that they always balloon, they always stretch, which partially sounds like Sisyphus.

Yes, you're constantly pushing a rock up a hill, and then it rolls down or you discover, actually you're not at the peak of the mountain, there's a peak after that. Now, that analogy works beautifully. And I think that in that situation, a ton of happiness is there. Discovering that there is a peak, celebrating the fact that you reach the peak, but going for the next one or for the next iteration, the fact that it rolls down the hill doesn't really make that much of a difference, really.

Because you can see as it rolls down the hill, and then you get to push it up the hill yet another time. So you did it a hundred thousand times, and now you get to do it a hundred thousand and one times. So there's always something that can be created and can still be meaningful. So it requires a little bit of mental gymnastics, a little pretzeling of the mind, but I hope that you feel the power of this and divine responsibility that you can accept.

At the same time, knowing that you're going to make mistakes in accepting that responsibility, but that's okay. It's about being on the path. It's not about being like a Buddha tomorrow. No, it's about really being serious about your path and really trying to choose your path like you're choosing the path for the entirety of humanity, and not just you're choosing the path for you, and you're just like, know that you're not making the best choices, but you're just kind of like, oh, I hope other people make better choices.

So I think that's super powerful. One other thing that I want to highlight here is that, although if you adopt a mindset like that, oftentimes what will be the funny thing is that the things that you do are not drastically different. They're probably going to be 1% better or something like that. So it doesn't create this huge effect right away, but it will create a compounding effect.

So that's another reason to be gentle in this process. When you adopt, and it takes time, of course, to adopt a new philosophy, again, you don't become a Buddha in a day, and you will never become a Buddha because that Buddha is a symbol. You can never get there, and that's kind of the point. Or you can get there, you're already there, right? You are already the Buddha, so you're already done.

I mean, I don't know. I'm talking about the path of enlightenment in this case. So there's all kinds of strange loops there, and paradoxes, and they are all there by design. They're supposed to be there. Okay, I think that's where I'm going to round it up. As you can notice, I get really, really enthusiastic about these things because it brought me a lot in life. I hope I did justice talking about that.

I hope I communicated the passion that I feel for these things, and I definitely hope that it will contribute to lives down there because that's what I do on my divine path. This has been Vincent for The Meaningful Sh!t Show. Thanks for tuning in, and I will see you next time. See ya.