Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World | Clay Routledge | The JBP Podcast S4: E54

you could you can kind of think of existential psychology as having like a dark side and a light side in some ways and terror management and becker that was kind of you know the the the edgier dark side which is ultimately what meaning about is it's a defense system right like people are afraid people you know people are aware of these vulnerabilities and it makes them afraid and so they dogmatically cling to beliefs in order to reduce that fear so that's right so it's an extension of freud's notions of religious belief as a as a defense mechanism and and you can see the freudianism sleep slipping through there and that is the issue is it what's the difference between a defense and an adaptation right and you know on one hand culture you could say that your identification with your culture allows you symbolic immortality but you could also say yeah well it builds your house so you don't freeze to death in the winter too right so it's not just symbolically present preventing your death say let's say or protecting yourself against your fear of death it's actually stopping you from dying which is not a trivial issue [Music] hello everyone i'm pleased to have with me as a guest today dr clay routledge he's a faculty scholar in the sheila and robert shelly institute for global innovation and growth professor of management at north dakota state university and senior research fellow at archbridge institute dr routledge studies among other topics meaning belief atheism magical thinking existential economics and entrepreneurship he is the author of nostalgia a psychological resource and supernatural death meaning and the power of the invisible word he has published more than 100 academic articles co-edited three books and written numerous pieces for outlets such as the new york times the wall street journal newsweek harvard business review and the national review i first ran across his work in newsweek where he wrote a interesting article on what you might describe as the potential moral failings of universal basic income and it's failure to address people's need for meaning in addition to their the necessity for economic security i looked up his website and and found that his lab does unique work there aren't a lot of psychological labs that are concentrating as intently as dr routledge on meaning and belief and and that sort of thing and so i thought it would be very much worth talking to him um especially also given his emphasis on economics which adds an additional twist to his interests so welcome dr rutledge clay thank you very much for for agreeing to talk with me today thank you for having me on dr peterson it's a it's a great privilege to be on your podcast well so so fill me in a bit uh tell me what your lab has been doing and how you got interested in doing what you're doing and also how you managed it because your research interests i wouldn't say are exactly center of the road by academic psychological standards so but you've been very successful with it yeah so i mean i'm a bit of an atypical academic in a lot of ways one when i was in college i didn't even think i was supposed to be there i remember i had a high school guidance counselor who said well you're not college material so you know you need to figure out you know a job that that you can do when you graduate but why did he think why did he think you weren't college material i'm a late bloomer i i wasn't a great i wasn't a great student i you know um this was this was decades ago and you know now i'd probably be diagnosed with adhd or something like that i mean i was just a very active young young male who you know wasn't particularly interested in sitting still in classes and reading books and things like that i wanted to be engaged doing you know doing active things so i wasn't a great student and you know but i think i was just kind of a late bloomer and then by the time i graduated and i i thought well i should go to call i should you know give it a shot and i went to a local community college and i pretty much worked um often times full-time as like a security guard and a bunch of other jobs i was uh i've done martial arts much of my life and so i was a part-time martial arts instructor and i was just going to college and i was actually originally a criminal justice major because i thought well i should probably do something like be a police officer you know something a little bit more more active yeah and you know i didn't i i wasn't really into that took a psychology class which is common as part of a criminal justice major and i was like oh wow this is this seems pretty cool and so i got him you know i got interested in psychology but even still when i you know i finished my psychology degree i had no intentions of going to graduate school i i spent a few years actually working in outpatient clinical mental health and also in social work which we can get into later because i do think that some of those experiences have you know have really influenced how i think about things just you know the practical experience of working with people in the community um sometimes it was because of severe mental illness sometimes it was just you know people that had you know real social dysfunction and you know a lot of problems in their family and in their in their personal lives right so you had the opportunity to do something that was clinical to bring your knowledge down to earth so to speak yeah absolutely and i you know i just had an undergraduate degree i wasn't a psychologist like a clinical psychologist or anything i i was basically a social worker an outpatient caseworker but i had you know dozens of you know clients that i was responsible for you know kind of checking on them making sure they were medication compliant or doing the things part that where they were supposed to do as part of their treatment plan and it was a very it was a very interesting and educating experience i did that but then decided you know you know i want to go to school i want to try graduate school i had a professor who was as an undergraduate who she was very much like you should you should go to graduate school you would be great it would you know you would do really well and you know i just wasn't super confident about it but then i took the gre and i did you know pretty well i think and and i applied to a few i only applied i think four programs i got into two of them and then i went to school at the university of missouri so that's a long way of saying when i started school which was in september of um 2001 then that was when right when the um 9 11 happened like it was within my first week or two of of classes in fact i remember i went in graduate school in graduate school yeah i remember i went to this really um i had this anova like you know when you're in grad school you take these quantitative site classes out of class i think it was just called a nova and you know i was in this class and then you know it was kind of announced that hey there's this attack happening and i saw some some of it was unfolding before i left the house in the morning but we didn't know what was going on and then i was in this grad seminar and our professor actually sent us home and said everyone needs to go home there's a terrorist attack something happening so this was at the very beginning of my first semester of graduate school at the time i was in more of a personality and social psych like health lab it was an alcohol lab and so we were really looking at like very practical um very practical outcomes related to risky behavior and as predicted by individual differences but when 9 11 happened i just started thinking about i mean it just really astonished me how you had um these people that are because of a cause or something they believed in are willing to you sort of override their self-preservation instinct um and you know and die in in the service of an ideology yeah well that was something that really compelled me too i was very curious all the way through my graduate school career about what it was about belief that was so compelling that people were willing to risk their lives or to kill or to commit atrocities all of that so what is it that belief does that's so psychologically significant that it seems to override everything else it's a hell of a question right right and so it just happened by chance that i was at the university of missouri um doing my you know starting graduate school and after this happened and i was thinking about these questions there was a a scholar there um dr jamie arndt who this was his whole area of research was he was in an area i don't know if you're familiar with called terror management theory yes and and so he was doing research in his lab not on terrorism or anything like that but on this notion of what does it mean to be an organism intelligent enough to be aware of your the inevitability of your on mortality right that's based on ernest becker's work the denial of death which is a great book i think he's fundamentally wrong but it's a great book nonetheless he's wrong in a very interesting way and he's very very smart person so the denial of death is a great book and i'm familiar with some of the major researchers in the in terror management area i've met a couple of them and we've had some discussions excellent so yeah so that's how i kind of got started and you know so i so i ended up changing labs which people might not you know your listeners and viewers might not really know what that means but that's kind of a big deal it's it's it's kind of a dicey thing to navigate in graduate school as you get accepted typically you know you're accepted by a person to work with them in their lab um and then to be like well i want to move to a different lab it's it's kind of a big it's like switching an apprenticeship right right and it can go quite wrong yeah so it's risky it's a risky move but i you know when i started grad school i wasn't i wasn't really sure what i was doing i went to a small one as an undergrad i went to a small commuter college and there was no you couldn't work in a lab there wasn't anyone doing research so it wasn't like what a lot of like you know my own students have the opportunity for you know undergrads to work in my lab and get a sense is this for me so i had no idea um so when i started i really didn't know what i was getting into and so when it you know when i when i had the opportunity to potentially change labs i you know i negotiated it carefully so no one would be offended or anything it certainly didn't want to hurt my own future prospects in the field but everyone was fine with it what did you find compelling about terror management theory and can you outline it a bit for everyone we could have a bit of a discussion about that as well yeah yeah of course so what i found compelling about it was and i do have you know i do have um some issues with it i'm not in total agreement with it in its purest form but what i found compelling about it was really the writing of ernest becker that it is based on which is this notion of what does it mean to be so smart that in a lot of ways where you know as becker pointed out humans are have godlike imaginative capacities right we can we can fantasize about all sorts of things we can do all you know we can engage in all sorts of mental um exercises in which we can which has allowed us to transform this planet right and even send people into into space what does it mean to have that intelligence yet at the same time know that you're a biological organism that no matter how smart you are you can't outsmart your your own demise and not only that that it can come without warning so you can you can exercise and wear your seatbelt and drink green tea and everything else you're told to do and maybe if you're lucky you'll avoid an early death but that doesn't change the fact that you know when this podcast is over i could take a walk out the door feeling pretty good about my day and get run over by a truck and you know so that's what you know so so what becker and then ultimately some of the terror management scholars pointed out as or they argued was that's that's so it's always kind of in the background right um the threat of mortality it's not you're not con we don't you know we've got things going on we're not consciously thinking about it most of the time but we're aware of it and becker tried to bring closure to freudian psychoanalysis and so people are interested in freud could read becker because he did a good job of modernizing freud and he claimed that we needed an immortality project to set up against the mortality and the terror that it held for us and that we were compelled to identify with large-scale systems in an attempt to muster a kind of immortal heroism as an antidote to the to the terror of death he thought of that i think essentially although he wavered someone in the book essentially as delusional and i think in some sense from my perspective that was where he went wrong because i'm not i'm not convinced precisely that it is delusional in its fundamental essence but but plenty of people would debate that i think you and i are on the same page about that i would agree i don't i don't think it's delusional and you know there's you know some other issues maybe i i think that people can take with some of the theorizing but ultimately the terror management theory for people who you know aren't familiar with it is is taking those ideas of becker of saying that well because of this awareness and mortality which becker our dude would otherwise be paralyzing if you didn't have this hero project to engage in um that and that's why the book's called the denial of death right at some level you have to deny that that's it right this and and you have to transform yourself into something symbolic and so one of the arguments that that becker made is as humans live in kind of two kind of two worlds we live in the material physical world that you know every morning when you wake up and have your aches and pains and need to go to the you know go to the restroom you're you you become well aware of your animality right your creatureliness but we also live in this imaginative symbolic world where we're able to create works of art world religions all sorts of you know all sorts of interesting things and that world is the world of meaning that we we seek to create and ultimately that is the the world that's immortal because i know that you know i'm gonna die um but i can be part of a project like you said i could be part of a heroic project that outlives me so in in a lot of religious traditions that might be very literal right and they're a belief in an afterlife but becker also argued that we have the ability to engage in symbolic immortality projects as well so passing down our genes or creating works of art or you know building communities or things that outlive us um to the extent that i can say part of myself um is is in those projects then part of myself lives on um even if even if i don't physically and so that gets into you know that takes us back to the to the terrorism idea because you know one of the arguments was that well you know you're gonna die and there's not much you can do about that but if you if you invest yourself in something bigger than yourself and that thing lives on um then you have some type of immortality and i don't do you remember that movie braveheart yeah i interviewed the director a few weeks ago on my podcast oh really well there's a great scene in there where he's trying um william wallace is trying to motivate the the people to overcome their their fear of what is clearly a lopsided battle all right um and he does like everyone he and he has this speech where it's like you could all go home and right now and maybe you'll live perfectly fine complete lives and but one day you'll be old on your deathbed and you'll look back on this and maybe you'll you know maybe you'll wish that you would have gone for it right because this is a bigger this is going to be a more enduring a meaning project than you just going home and you know having a normal normal life course um and so part of what got me about becker i mean becker said at the beginning of the denial of death that he never read jung and that was a big mistake because much of carl jung's writing centered on the immortality project from a different perspective than freud jung didn't consider the participation in the hero project as delusional he thought about it as centrally adaptive and it seems to me i mean the attack i've taken is that the meaning that people derive from being embedded in significant projects is an antidote to the terror of not so much mortality but fragility i would say because there's actually things you can be a lot more afraid of than death i believe and that that's not illusory i mean it can be right it can become delusional but it's not reasonable for me to believe that the projects that we undertake the heroic projects let's say even such things as raising a family are the denial of death they're an attempt to extract meaning out of finite life and and i suppose it's also too much of a cognitive theory for for my liking because it doesn't take other elements into account like the existence of a religious instinct let's say or something like that so despite that i have a lot of regard for the book i think it's a brilliant book yeah yeah no no i agree with you and but that's that's kind of how i got started is i i so i entered this lab at the university of missouri and we were doing so the idea was the people who started terror management theory i think they wrote like a theoretical article or something and presented it maybe like at a social psychology conference in the the early 80s and people were like hey that's all sounds really cool but it's totally untestable and so i think that was the initial reaction and then so what what they did is they tried to create a series of hypotheses that they could test and one of them um you know the most common one but certainly not the only one is what's called the mortality salience hypothesis which basically is if it's true that you know the awareness of death is the thing that provokes our investment in these belief systems and as well as the self-esteem project which you know becker talked about a lot then temporarily heightening people's awareness of mortality should in turn temporarily heighten their defense of these systems right right so that's when they started doing experiments that was solomon greenberg and posinsky correct right yeah they wrote a book uh called the worm at the core the on the role of death in life that came up in 2015 i haven't looked at that book i've talked to greenberg and and solomon about about their work before they'd be good to have on this podcast actually i hadn't thought about that so so yeah so so they would bring people into the lab and and remind them in various ways of their mortality and then look at the effects on their beliefs the putative effects they also had a hell of a time publishing their work to begin with was resisted quite quite stringently quite assiduously by people in the field yeah i think so i mean in a lot of the resistance it seems to be this is to philosophical it's too abstract it's hard to pin down and understandably because i mean one challenge you know one of the challenges that people have made to the theory is when you make people aware of the mortality or when you heighten people's awareness mortality regardless of how rigorous of a control condition you have so you can say for instance well maybe the problem with death is that it's it's separation it's isolation right and so maybe it's really a social thing maybe maybe it's you're being separated permanently from loved ones and so it's triggering these defenses is something social so you can try to control for social exclusion or things like that but one of the challenges is regardless of what type of um control condition you have um by nature death is a it's it's a real thing it's not an abstraction and it's multifaceted it's multi-dimensional because you do worry about all these things right we and there is um there are some israeli um social psychologists who were also victor florian i don't know if you've heard of him um and mario mikelinser they were also doing this kind of existential psychology and they were looking at um the awareness of death more through this multi-dimensional perspective that when people are the the fear of death isn't just a fear of annihilation which is kind of what becker focused on but it is the fear of on there's uncertainty about what's gonna happen after you die there is so there is a social element of it too which is i'm gonna be separated from the people i love um there's a fear of pain i mean so there is a whole bunch of other stuff packed in there and it's hard when you when you make people aware of death you're bringing online all of that stuff and so how do you it's a bit it's a bit complicated to disengage yeah it's not obvious too whether like death is a subset of an uncertainty or uncertainty is a subset of death terror i mean part of the problem with becker's theory is that a lot of beliefs are actually representations of way to ways to act in the world that stabilize the world right so if you have a theory about something you act it out and you get what you want then you validate the theory and you indicate to yourself that your knowledge is sufficient to protect you from uncertainty well the ultimate uncertainty in some sense is your annihilation i mean you can make that case but you can't say that all belief systems function to specifically inhibit the fear of death i mean that he would say that that's the worm at the core which is of course what what solomon greenberg and poginski talked about in their book and and but i'm not i'm not even completely certain of that because like i said i think there are things that you can be more afraid of than death pain right might be one yeah yeah so it yeah so i agree with that so there are the kind of hard-line terror management people that take the position you just articulated which is this is a this is the core this is the core existential issue um but then there are people more like me who sees death as one of a number of potential existential threats and in addition to that um even though early on in my in my career because i worked in the terror management lab and so i was largely we were largely running these types of studies where you make people aware of their death and then you know you you measure a bunch of things um after that i really started getting more into a more what i would consider a more complete existential psychology and this is an oversimplification of course but um you could you can kind of think of existential psychology as having like a dark side and a light side in some ways and terror management and becker that was kind of you know the the edgier dark side which is ultimately what meaning about is it's a defense system right like people are afraid people you know people are aware of these vulnerabilities and it makes them afraid and so they dogmatically cling to beliefs in order to reduce that fear so that's right so it's an extension of freud's notions of religious belief as a as a defense mechanism and and you can see the freudianism sleep slipping through there and that is the issue is it what's the difference between a defense and an adaptation right and you know on one hand culture you could say that your identification with your culture allows you symbolic immortality but you could also say yeah well it builds your house so you don't freeze to death in the winter too right so it's not just symbolically present preventing your death say let's say or protecting yourself against your fear of death it's actually stopping you from dying which is not a trivial issue right right of course and and and so there you know and then there's but there's the second side is you know we might call the light side which is more of what people might be familiar with in the positive or humanistic psychology tradition which is humans aren't just trying to defend you know they're not just in this defensive mode we also are explorers we're growth oriented right so part of what we're striving for isn't just to you know to defend the world as we know it it's to create new beliefs and to explore new ideas and so you know even when i was in grad school because there were some positive psychologists in the department and then i was in this terror management lab you know i had the opportunity to work with with different to collaborate with different people that was what was great about our program is they very much encouraged um people to go work with with other professors so even starting in graduate school i was starting to explore the tension between psychological defense and psychological growth motives um you know so this idea is that you you need both right because um like in artistic or creative pursuits sometimes you can do things that bring you so outside of the structures that provide you know um protection that provides psychological defenses that they can leave you very vulnerable right um to anxiety and to chaos right as you know um and then so you might kind of retreat a little bit look for your protection um and so balancing that yeah that's just like when a child you see this in children i mean when they start to explore they move out away from usually their mother but it can be anybody they're stably bonded with they move out to explore until they hit a threshold where the fear of being isolated overwhelms the compulsion to explore and then they run back to become to be comforted and then they explore next time a little bit farther and that meaning that's associated with exploration isn't the same thing as dogmatic protection from uncertainty right so there's at least two things going on there there's the the orienting that dogma gives you in the world which is your crystallized knowledge let's say but there's the meaning that's intrinsic in extending that knowledge that also seems as a it's like an existential antidote to suffering and to even to mortality assailants because you get lost in that right and that's yeah you get immersed in that engrossed in that and and that's central to the idea of meaning i think yeah yeah totally i totally agree with that and so i became i became very much interested in that and you know i was using these kind of regulatory self-regulatory models of like approach avoid behavioral inhibition behavioral activation right and so that was something i became very interested in was what shifts people towards you know a threat shifts people towards defensiveness right because you you face a threat and then you're like well now's not the time to be super creative or open-minded now's the time to be vigilant right to shrink yeah you saw that after 9 11 right everyone was shell-shocked and retreated for a while in a state of surreal existence right right yeah so that you know so that's kind of how i got started um in existential psychology and then i ended up you know this is going to seem like a like it's a bit off message but it connects which i ended up studying the psychology of nostalgia and it turns out there there wasn't you know there's there's a long history of the theoretical writing and you know kind of case study and anecdotal writing on nostalgia speculating things like it's a neurological disease to it's a it's a form of repression and all these different things but there wasn't really much empirical research on it except in the area of marketing and marketing researchers were doing they were doing some neat stuff but they weren't interested in kind of getting down to the mechanics the psychological mechanics of nostalgia instead what they were doing was just seeing does nostalgia predict consumption right does if you're nostalgic for something do you want to go buy it and but why you know they weren't really answering why so i started doing research in in the psychology nostalgia again this was in grad school and part of my motivation for that was similar to the to the ideas we've been talking about you know people turn just like people are aware of their the our ability our temporal consciousness right our ability to move the self through time allows us to go into the future and think about our mortality as we've been talking about so that we we think that's somewhat unique to to to humans right that we can think long into the future and think about a future without us and so what i thought was interestingly that might provoke us to turn to the past because if i'm thinking about a future and it makes me anxious or uncertain i can look to the past at meaningful memories and i can i can kind of comfort myself to be like no you know i've i have had a good life i have people that care about me i've done interesting things and that can make me feel um that can kind of reinstate or you know boost my meaning if i'm feeling you know feeling potentially meaningless because of the inevitability of my mortality so that's why i started studying nostalgia as a as a as a psychological defense but what's cool about doing research as you know is you might have ideas of how things are and so you you know you propose hypotheses and you test them but then there's also this kind of discovery process you know why you're doing a bunch of studies where you you're looking at the data and you're just thinking oh wow there's some there's a story here that i missed and what i was finding when we were doing nostalgia research um is we were asking people to detail and writing a memory that makes them nostalgic and and so we have all these like long narratives of people talking about nostalgia and one thing that i i thought was interesting but did not expect was how much of these narratives were actually kind of future focused and what i mean by that is people would say things like when i was a kid i used to spend summers at grandma's house and it would you know these this this was awesome and it was a great time and a and i and i'll always cherish these memories it makes me sad that my grandmother's no um longer alive and so that's gone i i can't return you know i can't return to that experience but it makes me hopeful for the future because i want to do that for my grandchildren someday and so what what i saw in a fair amount of these nostalgic narratives were was this kind of self-regulatory processes where people were like dipping into the past to bring to mind a memory that they found particularly meaningful and that felt that that was comforting it was also a little bit sad you know nostalgia is a ambivalent emotion but then they were using that was inspiring them like that was motivating them that was saying you know what that was special so i should you know i should orient my life in a way that allows me to reproduce something well right well that's the purpose of memory right i mean people think that the purpose of memory is to remember things as they happen and that's that's really rather shallow conception psychologically i mean you remember bad things so you don't repeat them and you identify good things so that you know what good things are and you can pursue them it's it's a very pragmatic process when it's when it's well when it's fun when it's properly functional there's no reason just to have an objective record of the past in your head you want to mine it for significance and so it's very interesting that that nostalgia took that future oriented turn so you think people get meaningless let's say and they get a little bit desperate so they turn to the past and they look for things they search for places that were meaningful they think oh that was valuable maybe i could pursue that in the future yeah yeah i think so and that and so i've now done dozens and dozens and dozens of studies on on on the psychology of nostalgia and which has you know led me and not just me but you know a number of other researchers to to kind of position nostalgia as this as being a motivation as having this self-regulatory or motivational purpose which is exactly what you just said which is i might be experiencing loneliness or even boredom or uncertainty or you know something's going on and i don't feel totally stable in life i'm missing something and so i reach into the past um and and i think it's it's good to think about it that way i re it's not because a lot of there's a popular conception of nostalgia that it's hiding in the past that you're avoiding your problems that you're avoiding the future and so there's a very negative attitude in some in some quarters of like nostalgia is bad because it gets in the way of progress but my argument is no what happens is you're not running to the past and hiding you're reaching into the past to pull into the present experiences that will help guide you and then that puts you on the path forward that and you know now we've done a number of studies um in which we find that you know after people engage in a nostalgic writing task that they subsequently feel more optimistic and motivated and also it also increases actual behavior so when people write about a nostalgic experience which is typically social it's typically an experience shared with loved ones they subsequently want to go out and do things with people right they're like hey that was really good i should do that again and so i think that's that really got me thinking more about this not just a growth oriented approach but that people move back and forth between defense and growth right and you can also imagine that that could become pathologized like anything you know i mean if you're you know people fantasize about what they want and then out of those fantasies they can derive goals and begin to act in relationship to those goals or they can just spend more and more time elaborating the fantasies and not moving at all and that can lead to delusional thinking if it's taken to an extreme but that doesn't mean that fantasy per se is a pathological activity just that when it becomes a substitute for action then it can become pathologized so yeah yeah definitely i mean yeah you know i always say nostalgia is like a lot of things that um are generally good for you that you know people can i mean there are people who over exercise right that you know physical fitness is good but there are people that spend too much time at the gym and then it ends up causing injury um because they're you know they're doing too much of a good thing right there are lots of people who drown from drinking too much water as it turns out as well so you know anything in excess can be a poison yeah so i'd say for the you know for the typical person you know nostalgia is a a relatively healthy activity that helps them kind of figure out what's important in life do you know what elicits it in particular is it loneliness or what are there particular listening factors yeah yeah so there's two general classes of nostalgia triggers one is very obvious because it's just you know what we call sensory inputs which is you hear a song come on the radio or somebody puts like a photo up on social media and so that's a direct trigger of reminding you right the smell right scent yes scent evoke nostalgia is very powerful so there's those what you know what we call direct triggers and there's what we call psychological triggers and they tend to be negatively at negative affect um typically loneliness but other things as well so so we've done this where we've induced we've used like emotion inductions we've had people watch you know watch video clips that either make them happy or sad or have a more neutral affect and so it's not just the case that any emotion provokes nostalgia it tends to be negative emotions so when people feel sad when they feel loneliest when we ask people um loneliness is the most common trigger um but we've also looked even at boredom we've done these experiments where we have people do these really really boring tasks where they're just spending a period of time writing down concrete mixture you know the formulas for concrete mixtures or things like that so it just seems like a meaningless task which which which increase subsequently increases nostalgic feelings um we've looked at me like meaning threats we've had people read existential philosophy essays that remind them of how insignificant their life is and you know that that increases um nostalgia but because of the social nature of nostalgia and that is most nostalgic memories do involve um time spent with with loved ones so do you suppose that's a is that a an analog do you think of the security seeking behavior that that we discussed a little bit earlier you know when a child goes out and explores and then hits a wall they return to something comforting and you know almost all higher cognitive functions are elaborations of something that's much more basic so i mean affection between adults looks like it's an elaboration like deep affection it looks like it's an elaboration of infant attachment circuitry and so you you you make people bored or you you put them in a bad mood and then they return to the security of social interactions in the past and you could think of that as purely defensive but it also indicates to them what they did find meaningful and they can use that in a positive way yeah yeah i think exactly that i mean in fact um we've looked we've done some work looking at nostalgia and attachment theory and it does seem like nostalgic memories kind of you know they're basically bringing online these attachment schemas these frameworks that people use and in fact when you look at interactions between people's scores on attachment scales it is the people who score high attachment security or what you know modern psychologists would say low attachment anxiety or low attachment avoidance right so these are these are healthily attached people who had decent maternal relationships and right that's another indication that this isn't psychopathological right so they those people get the most social benefits out of nostalgia one when you look at the content of their memories people who have are high in attachment security those people have their nostalgic memories tend to be more social and they tend to be more intimately social so nearly what i mean by that is if you ask somebody to write down a nostalgic memory or to just share with you a nostalgic memory for nearly everyone it's social but if you if you look at the writings of people who are um high in attachment security um they tend to get into more intimate or more detailed uh they it carries more themes of law of love and like strong body and so again like the attachment system they're really saying they have a secure they have these very deep secure bonds they s they approach the interesting you know to see if people who are indulging in in nostalgic memories that are associated with attachment to see if their animal more analgesic to pain because they right because they know that loneliness and social isolation look like they're pain related phenomena at least according to people like yak pancep and so hypothetically bringing to mind a social attachment memory that's deeply meaningful should make you more pain tolerant we used to use this thing that i referred to as a finger crusher which it wasn't it was just a weight a weighted blade dull blade that pushed on a finger here like that yeah and then it the pain sums across time until you tell the people take your finger out when you think a reasonable person would and you can ask them when does it hurt and then you can measure when they take it out and you can do it with a couple of fingers to get a good you know repeated measure and we tested i never did publish this study but we tested at harvard with an undergraduate we had people interact with a dog they had to like dogs and then tested them for analgesia afterwards and they were more analgesic as a consequence of interacting with the dog hmm that's interesting yeah no that would that would be that would be a really cool study it's not the same thing but there and this isn't research i did but so there were some researchers that looked at um nostalgia in the context of feeling of actual physical feelings of of warmth and the idea was was kind of like what you're talking about like we associate relationships with comfort and warmth and emotional warmth right and so they did things like manipulate the temperature in in the room and in the lab and then had people you know kind of estimate it and you know people in the nostalgic condition thought their room was warmer and yeah i would say that is analogous you know and that's a good example too of how these these sources of meaning are not merely cognitive right i mean one of the things that i studied pain responses for quite a long time in their differentiated form and so frustration produces a pain like state disappointment does grief does and people use tactile contact as a mediation for pain and for grief and it's about the only thing we know of that's actually useful for grief real touch and pain one of panceps one of the people that was um uh affiliated with pancep did massage with premature infants in their incubators and accelerated their growth up to the rate of normal neonates and the the effects this was three ten minute massages a day the effects were uh measurable six months later in terms of physical and cognitive development and so these aren't these aren't cognitively precisely cognitively mediated meanings they're they're really embodied it's interesting though because you can call them to mind which is a abstract cognitive representation of something that's much more physical and tangible but they're not delusional and they're not just meaning systems they're something far more basic than that right do you know what the what the state of the the science is on i remember years ago there was a there was a lot of excitement about um some social neuroscientists that were they were arguing that social pain the the neurosystems built upon the same frameworks as physical pain and so that it may be that you could even i think they were you know doing studies where they were giving people um like acetaminophen or i can't remember yeah that was paul meister yeah um i don't know what the status of his research was but i regarded that as pretty well established i mean if the pain system is very very ancient from an evolutionary perspective you'd expect it to have branched out and differentiated into all sorts of higher functions and if you look at the drugs that affect response to frustration disappointment grief they tend to be opiates so that's another line of evidence that's all documented quite nicely in jeffrey gray's book the neuropsychology of anxiety because he talks a fair bit about the difference between pain and so that would be physical punishment what it elicits as a state which would be pain-like and anxiety say which is elicited by threat of punishment and not punishment itself and opiates are good at moderating punishment-like responses pain essentially so i think it's well established in the animal literature some of that the human researchers caught on to that but yeah it was the annual researchers who nailed it down yeah yeah so so you know so that's kind of the the area that i you know started doing work nostalgia specifically um that kind of branched me away from just thinking about while we're doing these kind of defensive studies right where we threaten people and then see what they defend both intentions just out of curiosity another thing that would be interesting is that if if nostalgic memories of attachment ameliorate feelings of depression because depression looks like a pain phenomena as well at least in some of its manifestations yeah so i don't know if there's i haven't done anything looking at actual like clinically depressed people so most of the nostalgia work i i've done has been and you know for lack of a better term what we call the normal population right um so i haven't you know done work with with clinical groups but certainly in in our research among you know the the normal population we find that nostalgia does have effects that you would you would you would predict would reduce depression because it does reduce loneliness it does reduce negative affect it does reduce anxiety it increases positive emotions and it does things that um that counter that counter depression like it increases optimism and inspiration so you know but it's an open question about wall what if you looked at severely depressed right but no all those pieces of evidence that you cited do suggest that at least with normative levels of depression it would be it would have an ameliorating effect so yeah so and there you know that that is a i know there is a whole nother literature on reminiscence therapy and you know that the stuff we've done has been more experimental um but i think that i think you could in you could certainly connect nostalgia is a big part of the reminiscence therapy well um the reason i think that you know we haven't really is because a lot of the reminiscence therapy um people they're not particularly interested in basic scientific questions so they're not trying to tease apart the specific um you know cognitive and affective mechanisms they want uh something that works right so they kind of deliver a whole package and and so in the reminiscence therapy work a lot of it is what we would consider in the experimental world kind of confounded right because they're doing a bunch of stuff at once they're bringing to mind nostalgic memories but they also typically are in the context of a group setting where they're they're talking to other people and sharing memories with other people so then you know you have to get into well is it the nature of this conversation that they're having with people where they're talking about you know things that are really important to them or is there something specific about the actual memories that they're that they're engaging in but what i think our research does is it complements that by saying well if you just isolate the experience of bringing the mind the nostalgic memory in a laboratory cubicle where people are by themselves and you get these positive effects it suggests that at least part of what's happening in in reminiscence therapy is this individual level experience of bringing nostalgia nostalgic memories to mind revisiting reconnecting with them and then i'm sure it only helps if you have the opportunity to talk about those memories with other people and share those memories in fact that's a new area of research that we we don't have anything published in yet but i had a phd student who actually just graduated and this is what her dissertation was on is what she called shared nostalgia and her argument was what we do in the lab is not very typical of how most people actually experience nostalgia which is people tend to be nostalgic when they're around others you get together with family members and you talk about you talk about memories um you especially in the context of loss you go to a funeral or um what do you do you're sad of course but then you talk about memories you shared with that person and oftentimes people are laughing and you know you know trying to honor that person's life but also trying to connect over you know over the meaningful memories you had together so a lot well it reminds you of your affiliation with those other people too which would be a great thing to have happen when you're experiencing a significant loss yeah absolutely so i do think that um there's there there's some more research to do in that area and we're like i said we're just kind of getting started into how to act how do people actually share nostalgia and might it serve even beyond the individual and beyond like the more interpersonal relationships we're also interested in nostalgia at the cultural level because there are there are ways that we might pass down traditions and rituals intergenerationally that connect so so i might have a lot of things that are different in my life and the experiences that i've had at the time period in which i grew up than somebody 20 30 40 years older than me but to the extent that there are things that are passed down in the family or in the community that can connect me to that person that might help with intergenerational community life right and so for just to make social cohesion period right now if if we're strangers to one another and then we can identify elements of our past experiences that we share maybe like shared love of a particular band or something like that then we're identifying areas of commonality and perhaps decreasing our distrust of one another i mean robert putnam has demonstrated that you know communities tend to be more generous politically when they view those in the community as importantly similar to them and so you can imagine that going through the search for a shared past and identifying commonalities might be also a way of generating a shared history across time as part of what unifies people together yeah absolutely so this is what we call collective nostalgia what you just articulated which is um i might you know i might have not never met somebody who lives across the country um but to the extent that you know that we have as americans that there is something that we've expect um that we identify with like even music like you said or or or a movie if you remember when um i don't think they were particularly good movies but when the the new um star wars movies came out people were really excited about them because there was you know there was this collective nostalgia of we all remember when we were um watching the original star wars movies and that was you know kind of like a a quintessential late 70s early 1980s american you know thing to do that we could bond over and yeah well it's part of it's part of experiencing a shared myth it's not trivial i mean it's true in one sense but it's not true at all in another i mean we don't exactly know what it is that bonds people together in a community family a community a nation any of those things and the idea that it's shared positive memories is well that's got to be part of it yeah yeah i actually talked to a a a screenwriter a while back about this and he made an interesting point he was talking about how because we have um the way with the internet and with all these different entertainment options we have now you know his argument was we might be losing some of the the shared media shared entertainment now people talk about this when they talk about news all the time they say oh people consume different news but to the extent that he was making even the point that we have all these like dedicated children's programs where he was talking about when he was a kid he had to watch whatever his dad was watching and so his dad would introduce him to western movies or whatever and the whole family would watch the same thing and and so you had this shared cultural um artistic experience that that connected you but now he's like you know you know you might the kids might be in the backseat of the car each with their own screens watching totally separate things and you're listening to your own thing and the whole family isn't crowded around the tv together when one room sharing the same experiences and and so we might have very very individualistic very tailored media experiences that make it harder to have those socially connecting um entertainment yeah yeah well it makes it harder to communicate too because you know to communicate with anyone you have to mostly share their experience and then talk about a little bit of variation i mean if you're totally opaque to one another in terms of what you've experienced there's so much to talk about that you can't even gain a toehold and you do wonder if this incredible explosion of of entertainment options let's say but it's far more than that it's it's cultural options does produce well perhaps does heighten the probability of the kind of fragmentation that we seem to be experiencing right now yeah well that might be why every so every now and then something's popular enough to where ever like not everyone but a decent chunk of people rally around it it becomes the thing everyone's talking about so like game of thrones that might be an example where there's some kind of program that is either so well executed or it just you know delivers the goods in whatever way whether it's a movie or television show where enough it becomes a cultural phenomenon but a lot of the times it's not that especially i don't know if you watch like streaming like netflix or things like that but like you can now kind of you don't even have to turn on it's not like we all have to turn on the tv on monday night 7 p.m if we want to watch something because that's our chance now we can i can watch a show that you watched five years ago so not only is it the case that um there's a ton of options they're delivered at you know individual times i can watch i can i i can um you know what do you call it when people binge i can binge watch a show that you know you're not going to watch for another year if you watch it at all and again i don't know if they're you know well it's very peculiar too when you think about it that we have the opportunity to you think about something like a marvel movie with its that cost hundreds of millions of dollars that we have the technology that enables us to experience that singly i mean it's it's completely preposterous i i've been associated to some degree with one traditional culture and they use dance music storytelling masks religion it's all integrated into one thing and they all participate in that simultaneously and that's really the core of their culture i mean without that they're not a people and when you're not a people to be a people is to be very much the same as other people in important ways and that's part of what makes peace and you do wonder the the increasing atomization of our exposure to cultural material what that leaves us to have in common right so there is a provocative argument that some have made um people like i don't know if you're familiar with patrick deanen and you know some of these um you know like catholic traditionalists and i he wrote that book why liberalism failed and you know i'm not and it's not my expertise to i don't know anything about like political history and so i can't really you know i can't really like litigate his case form or make a case against it from that perspective but from this perspective of psychology i think that he's on to something and his basic argument is the success of liberalism is its ultimate failure in that if total individualism means that i owe you nothing right that i that i can reject whatever you know i can reject whatever culture i was raised in and forged my own path and in many ways that you know we can think of that as being as being good because it can mean we can uh escape being oppressed or you know we can get rid of bad systems that are barriers to my liberty um but at the same time that also means there's you know you're it's the atomization that you're talking about that it can be very alienating and it can get ultimately it can get to a point where what he calls anti-culture which is it's not just individualism is another culture which is what cultural psychologists you know tend to argue that there's collectivist cultures and individualistic cultures his argument is that it's an anti-culture because it's a rejection of culture and again i might maybe i'm um misrepresenting his you know or oh i'm certainly oversimplifying it maybe i'm misrepresenting this case a little bit but that is that's just one well it's at least an open question how much we have to have in common with one another to live in something approximating mutual understanding and peace i mean it can't be nothing you know and the people who've i don't attend church but i have some close friends who insist upon its utility and who are very intelligent people and part of the argument they make is a cultural arguments like well at least for one hour a week cynical about that though you may be the entire community is doing one thing that's the same and so there's a point of focal union there and of course the churches used to be the center of the towns and and and orient the town towards temporality all of those things and so we don't really know what we've lost when we lose those shared those shared rituals and and shared beliefs right and and we don't know what we've lost when when when part of the part of the reason we've we've lost is of course people are you know people don't believe and so people are becoming non-religious but you know i have an argument that you know part of belief is is is it kind of an individual difference and so it could be the case that there's always been varying degrees of people who are extremely committed to a faith versus people who are just tend to be more skeptical regardless of the state of scientific knowledge and this gets to you know what some people have argued as like the extreme male brain idea is it related to interest in people and interest in things correct oh good oh i always wondered about that yeah so the people who are interested in things are much less likely to be religious believers i would presume correct correct so there is an argument that some people have made that um that so that religion is very much relies on social cognition right it relies on the same neural processes um involved in thinking about people like like you just said because to spirituality you have to animate the world with minds in a way right you have to anthropomorphize you have to so you could have a in fact in some in some cultural traditions that you know we have our big five personality model of course but some cultural traditions they have a spirituality dimension of personality uh you know it's recognized that people just naturally vary in the west we tend to be a little bit more blank slateist about about religion people tend to think well you just decide to be religious or you were raised it's just a matter of cold cognitive belief rather than a temperamental proclivity right so um but you know but at the same time we we say things like people have a calling or and maybe secular people don't say that but they um but people kind of recognize that there's individual differences in what in what people some people are good artists right some people are just more artistic and some people just so some people just more likely to see the world as as a little bit enchanted whereas others are just more naturally skeptical and so um so let's just assume for a second that that's true that there's this individual difference that's always existed where you've had some people that are just more interested in things like you said and so they might even be somewhat at the extreme they might even be somewhat mind blind that religion might not even they might not even totally understand it because they can't really tangibly grasp it um whereas other people are you know they're they can see the world is more magical um and even so if that's always existed then what you what you might find is in the past when we had a less individualistic culture everyone went to church not because everyone necessarily believed at the same level of commitment but people didn't have this attitude of well i'm not going to go because i don't believe people had more of a well i this is the thing that we do well it was also the case i think to some degree that you know part of the reason that we don't believe now is because we have a variety of things we can believe in and the farther back you go in history i mean imagine a medieval town where christianity dominated there might have been some jews there who would pause it in an alternative faith let's say but christianity wasn't so much an explanation of the world as it was the explanation of the world so i mean maybe you were a brilliant iconoclast and and you doubted certain things but you didn't have an alternative schema of representation at hand like you do now so right yeah it was the only game in town so so yeah so i do think that's part of it but but maybe there is a benefit even though we have more things you can believe of course you know it people act like it's weird if you say something to them like well maybe it's good from time to time to submit to things that aren't you know a hundred percent in an alignment with what you want to do and what you believe right maybe there are you know maybe there are benefits to being part of a community project and there's a recognition that it's full of people with individual differences that there are going to be people that are devout believers and then they're you know going to be people that are more skeptical but there's something there's a place for everybody in this in this community i mean we do this with with other things like like sports i mean some people just aren't good athletes no matter how hard they try but at least in american culture and i assume it's the same and they're similar in canada we think that kids should have a go at it and we think that it's okay if if you're not naturally gifted it's good for you there's benefits from participating in physical activities and it's fun and it's a way to have teammates and to connect with people and to maybe learn leadership skills or learn what it's like how to win and how to lose and you learn all these life skills and it's fine that some people aren't that you know just aren't that good at or kind of clumsy or whatever and so i'm not trying to say that religion and sports are by any means the same thing but another the point is in other domains we recognize that there are individual differences and that doesn't preclude them for participating in in the project um and that there might be benefits for having them more i mean i know this is a a loaded term now in academia but inclusivity but there might be benefits for being inclusive and saying that that you know there's a place in religion even for people who are more skeptical and i do think that might be the case i'm not 100 sure but i do think that that might be the case outside of outside of the western world again i think in the more individualistic cultures we're more apt to say well what do you believe what do you think as an individual what do you want to do um as opposed to what is your duty to do or what it is and what's your relationship to the collective correct well you could also imagine that it might be it might be something like a difference in fundamental cognitive metaphors as well and those could be different niches so imagine that the so just for the benefit of the audience the biggest difference known between men and women in terms of individual differences is interest in people versus interest in things and men are more interested in things and women more interested in people on average the difference is about one standard deviation which is very large by the standards of such things and so you could imagine that maybe it's more uh acceptable more understandable for people who are primarily interested in things to view the world mechanistically whereas so that's a metaphor the world is a machine and there's a kind of determinism that goes along with that but also a logical analyzability and and and a reductionism and a decomposition that would all go along with tool formation let's say whereas you could also visualize being as a spirit and that also makes sense because the community in some sense is a spirit and other people are spirits and so and animals are spirits they have they're they're personality-like and so to view existence itself as characterized by personality would be a different approach but one that would have its benefits and and and detractions just as viewing it like a machine might right you know i'm often struck by the fact that you know it seems to me that engineers engineer types are more likely to be critical of mythology and narrative religious in nature particularly because it it doesn't align with their mode of thinking but they tend to pick up their mythology in in in the form of say science fiction it it comes in a more implicit level right you're actually getting to um to a series of studies that that we did lucky looking at at this so there was there were some surveys that came out a number of years ago that found that um the more secular people were the more likely they were to believe in ufos and when i say that's perfect that goes along with jung's analysis of visions of ufos in the sky right he thought those were those were replacements for religious revelations the angels essentially descending from on high yeah yeah exactly uh michael shermer and i talked about this because he you know he's written about this before that he's got a great quote that um ufos are like deities for atheists or i i can't remember exactly what it was but it was something something to that effect but what we so there there's these surveys that find that the more secular people are the more likely they are to believe in ufos and not just ufos in the sense that well we don't know what these things are but they're they're likely to believe that there's intelligent alien life among us um so they're really taking a leap of faith so so that those surveys existed but what we were interested in in our lab was well to what if religion um is about meaning which there's a lot of you know studies looking at the the existential benefits of religion including meaning making we're like well if a religion is about meaning um and people who aren't religious might be so they might be more vulnerable to not having meaning and thus more likely to be searching for meaning would they be more likely would that explain why they're more likely to believe in ufos so in other words from from like a methodological point of view what we did is we took we looked at this correlation between lack of belief and um religion and a positive belief in aliens to see if it was mediated see if that relationship is mediated by these these meaning making um variables and so there there's these measures that maybe you're familiar with called the presence of meaning which measures to what extent you actually see your life as meaningful and then there's another measure called the search for meaning which is basically to what extent you're currently looking for for meaning in life they tend to be negatively correlated not always but it makes sense that they are because the more you feel like your life is full of meaning the less in need you are to go look for new meaning and so what we found was what's um we found a support for a mediation model in which the less people believed in god the less meaning they reported having the more the higher they were in search for meaning which in turn predicted their belief in aliens and you know have you have you expanded that to political belief because one of the things i look i i heard this survey once from the gallup organization in canada now you know you may know this you may not put canada has had its bouts of separatism right quebec our french-speaking province has put forward the plans to separate a number of times and has come very very close to breaking up the country and quebec was the last country in the west really to radically abandon catholicism it was a really catholic country until like 1959 and then it just disappeared and now quebec has like the lowest birth rate in the western world or close to and very many um out of wed uh common law households rather than formally married and and you know whereas in the 50s the typical family had 12 children it's like one now so radical transformation a very short period of time that dovetailed with this rise in quebec nationalism and i always thought well you know catholicism disappeared and the state became the religion and then i saw a gallup poll that indicated that if you were a lapsed catholic you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist i thought well there is evidence that when the religious instinct falls out of the religious domain it plummets down to something like the political level and then political the political becomes religious and so you are seeing that people who are less formally religious so and do you distinguish between dogmatic belief and spiritual belief because that's often distinguished but in any case they're more likely to believe in these extraterrestrial events any any work at all on the political end so i haven't done any empirical work on the political end but what you just said is is exactly what i was thinking now there is some work in this this model of compensatory control so they're not looking at meaning they're looking at um a sense of control in life and they and they've found like the the there's there's a paper on it and i'm trying to remember the name of it it's called something like god or government and basically what they find is the less religious the society is the the more people want big government and so the idea is that people want some kind of controlling structure that helps make when when you feel personally out of control that helps order the world and if a society moves away from religion they tend to be more interested in in government which isn't exactly what you were saying but i i i i it's close though it's close i mean it it it indicates like your research seems to indicate is that there is this fundamental impulse towards something approximating religious belief and so then you might think well in most cultures particularly traditional cultures that need is fulfilled by the totality of the culture it's relatively integrated and everything is oriented in the same direction whereas in our culture that's fragmented to the degree that it has that's all gone away but that doesn't mean that the desire for something like coherence is has and i can't see how it can disappear because who wants incoherence yeah i mean that's uncertainty and and trouble and maybe that's driving part of this search for meaning that you're describing yeah i think so and one of the things that's really fascinating about this because when i was doing this work and i was writing um i was writing a book on on all of this so i was doing empirical work but i was also looking at broad trends so if you look in the u.s at the areas of the country that are the least religious so you can look at that both in terms of self-identified religiosity but you can also look at church attendance and you know other indicators of religion those are the places where the new age industry is thriving right so like on the on the coast right so you can look at that broad level of analysis you can say the more secular parts of society tend to be the ones that go more in on new agey stuff they also tend to be though and then this gets to what you're saying they also that also tends to um connect with the political activism and i remember this happening during um during maybe the early trump administration years that you'd see these articles and places like the new york times like these weren't fringe outlets you'd see articles where it's talking about like witchcraft the resistance witchcraft so they're like people so there were there were witches that were trying to cast spells against republicans and and donald trump and and they you know they were there were these articles totally unironic like and you know it wasn't like they were presenting this and saying like wow these people really believe this stuff um they were just presenting it as this is how it is right there's these people so imagine this is this is something i've read that as it's analogous to what you're saying that as belief in dogmatic the dogmatic traditions of religion decline there's a corresponding increase in the number of people who claim to be spiritual so there's a separation between spiritual and dogmatic and so it's really easy to criticize dogma say well do you really believe that concrete thing why not make it more abstract well it's less susceptible to rational criticism and so that's advantageous it's more individually tailored in some sense but the problem is it lacks structure and the ability to unite people you know and obviously the problem with new age spirituality in some sense is that everything goes right and there's no uniting see the thing about dogma because it's codified and traditional everyone shares it and then you can think about it in terms of your own speaking your own thinking as well like you and i can have this conversation because we accept a whole variety of things dogmatically we can experiment on the fringes a bit you know we don't have to dig into what each of us means by every single term so we stand on dogma and make a foray out into investigation but when you when you get rid of the dogma well you get rid of the blinders and the constraints but you seem to also get rid of the structure and the coherence and the thing that organizes the community and it certainly doesn't appear to me that new age thinking is more coherent than say catholic thinking not not at all right well so yeah so you're actually getting into you know exactly what we what we observed as it is it appears that a lot of these new age alternative beliefs are motivated by the need for meeting um but they don't seem to do a good job of providing meeting because remember they're inversely correlated but with the with the presence of media and i think for the reasons you just articulated i mean when we have a meaning framework of what some people might call dogmatic framework everything you just said like it organizes us and not only that but it calls it gives us responsibilities and duties so with this anything goes um new age stuff you can just say like well i'm not really into that i'm into this but if we all if we have a shared um religious belief that says well you have a duty to do this like you have a duty to take care of your family you know you have a duty to help your neighbor um it takes away the the the selfishness right it takes away the well i don't want to do that i want to do this other thing and you know that it might be that a lot of things that provide meaning are well you talk about this um in in your latest book i just read um about um um responsible the connection of responsibility to meaning like these dogmas give you responsibilities where i think about a lot of the new age stuff it's like you're not responsible for anything um you you know no one's saying that well you have to do this or you have to do that you can it's almost like a it's a consumer experience of well this works for me or this doesn't work for me and you know um yeah the problem is atomization but also that lack of well and we should talk about meaning a little bit i wrote a paper a long while back about different kinds of meaning and they're sort of paradoxical because there's there's the meaning that exists when something really unknown happens and that's a funny meaning because you don't know what it means but it's meaningful it's significant and maybe you go out and explore it but then there's the meanings associated with things that are fixed right that are already in place and it seems like you need a balance between both of those two to have an optimal experience of meaning because one takes you way out on the fringes where you know you're atomized and insane and the other well locks you into a structure that that has no escape and no room for you so the meaning is this umbrella term but decomposing it into its constituent elements also seems to be useful and and that would also allow for the investigation of what meaning suits what situation because sometimes what you want is the meaning of security right you want constraint you want not that i don't want all those choices and other times that's not the case right yeah i think so so i edited or co-edited a book on the existential science of religion um a couple years ago in one of the chapters that that's um one of the contributions to the book was making this argument that religion functions um as a meta choice um and it's for what you just said so if it so it actually provides it promotes freedom because people think of religion as being like restrictive right often they're like well i can't do the things i want to do because religion's telling me i have to do here's all the things i have to do right here's all the rules that are imposed upon me but this argument was religion at least done in a healthy way as a meta choice in the sense that there's this this behavioral economics type of research where if you have too many choices you're paralyzed by indecision so if you narrow down if you have too few it's suffocating right so there's an optimal level of choice in which you're free right you're not overwhelmed but you can you know you have options and so what religion might do well is function as a meta choice which is i can reduce to one choice this the system i can buy into the system that sets up these parameters and as a as a guidebook for how to live so i don't have to think about every single little thing like i'm buying i'm making the meta choice of buying into this framework but that in itself is a choice because you could reject you could say well i'm not going to do this anymore yeah well you can think of it in that sense as something that's more akin to and i'm this isn't reductionistic it's more akin to a game i mean people aren't annoyed when they play monopoly that they can't bounce a basketball off the center of the board right they're happy because they've adopted this set of rules and it enables a kind of cooperation and competition that's enjoyable and constrains choice to something approximating an optimal uh range yeah and you could say well we could play monopoly or we could play katan but fine you make that decision you got to play something or you play by yourself in a corner and that that issue of being overwhelmed by choices that's that's something that that that people don't seem to be quite as as uh what would you say they're not quite as aware of if you tell people about that they think oh yeah i know what you mean but we our society and maybe that's because of its individualistic nature as we recoil at constraint we fail to see the fact that we do want our choices narrowed to a range of i mean look what's our working memory capacity four items something like that right our field of conscious choice is very narrow and so when we're presented by options that exceed that constraint and there's other constraints it's very easy to become anxious instead of free right yeah yeah it's and so this is i mean and of course there are a number of of people who have you know put forward ideas like this talking about the idea of ordered liberty or disciplined freedom you know that you get more freedom when your life is disciplined like if you if you if you don't have um certain rules that you live by then your life can descend into chaos pretty quickly i mean people do this even when they think about something as simple as going on a diet right so if you if if somebody gives you advice like if you went to you know if you went to like a nutrition person or you know you hired like a trainer or someone to help you lose weight or get healthy one of the things they would tell you to do is if you know if you don't have certain foods in your house you're less likely to at night be tempted to walk into the kitchen and eat a bunch of cookies if they're not there but that requires a choice of not putting them there so it's not it's not a restriction on your freedom right you could get your car i guess to drive out to the store and get cookies but you're less likely to do it if you set up your your environment in such a way that removes temptation um and so there's a lot of even very little things we do in life that are like that right we there you know some people might say life hacks right where we learn well if i do if i do this then um i know myself and i know i'm the type of person that after a long day's work if i come home i'm gonna i'm gonna drink too too much beer and so i'm just not gonna keep beer in the house i'm gonna make beer a thing that i do only if i go out with friends i mean there are people that make these choices because they have they know they have vulnerabilities to um you know over drinking um and so i think there's a lot lots of things in life that even beyond religion or you know other systems in which like you said we kind of implicitly understand that you have to set up guardrails and rules and people don't scream well that's anti anti freedom they think that's just being sensible and being and being reasonable um but when you talk about certain things like like um like religious traditions or faiths for some reason it seems to at least in you know in the in the kind of modern western secular world people seem to think that that's that's more appropriate it's also i think partly because more academically oriented types thinkers have proposed critiques of religion that are very that reduce it to a single dimension and then criticize it along that dimension and so the atheist types like richard dawkins and he tends to think that belief in god is like belief in a proposition a stateable proposition is god real like is a table real and it isn't obvious that that's the proper way to formulate that issue and you can make it absurd almost immediately by reducing it to that sort of representation but there's multitude of functions that religious traditions serve and even people like becker you know he basically reduced it to a single dimension it's a defense against death anxiety it's like well it may be that but it certainly isn't only that it's it's a very very complex issue right and so but people run into these critiques marxist critique religion is the opiate of the masses or the freudian critique which is well god is essentially a projection of the father an infantile projection of the father it's like well yes sometimes in some cases and in some ways but but wait like and i guess it depends too to s to some degree and maybe you could tell me what you think about this it seems to me that the core of a culture is something that's essentially religious by definition like if you look at what unites people across geographic geography and time there's some central conception of the world as spirit that brings people together implicitly and explicitly and then if if you dispense with that well well then what well you you've demonstrated that well you get people adopting rather odd beliefs so that's a kind of heresy essentially so there's an automatic tendency to produce heretical religions that's th that's the consequence and maybe some of those are political and they're fragmentary yeah no i i agree i mean that that's actually why i started looking at the individual difference level of analysis not because i was particularly interested in thinking about spirituality or religion or any of these things as an individual difference but i was interested in is if there is people did this in the when they talked about the need to belong you can pretty much get everyone to agree that humans are social and have a fundamental need to belong that's not controversial so you can use that as an example and you and what researchers did well they said well if that's true then you would expect there to be natural variability everyone might have some basic need to belong but there are going to be some people that are very very oriented towards belongingness whereas others aren't going to be so much and so that individual difference isn't a case against the basic need it's saying that the basic need manifests you know differently across the continuum and so that's pretty much my argument i think for for religion and spirituality is that what you just said i i think it's true if people if a society abandons religion um they don't really become secular they start investing in all sorts of other things you know what we might call like a substitution hypothesis to fill that space of you know of the of the role that or the multiple roles that religion was playing in their society but then a quit an important question you know which we talked about a little bit is just because people are turning to different things to fulfill that function doesn't mean they're actually doing a good job of fulfilling it right just because people are turning to politics as a substitute religion or ufos or new age beliefs doesn't mean those things are actually doing a good job of providing meaning um so so let me ask you this then so okay so we we've kind of uh come together on on on a hypothesis here is that there there is some need for union around a centralizing tendency and that kind of throws us back to the beginning of the discussion because becker would identify that need for the central ten centralizing tendency as a manifestation of the denial of death and we've kind of elaborated on that and criticized it and broadened it i would say so it's something more like well the need to you know imagine we have to unite in personality to some degree right i mean so we're ruled by a body of laws and it's interesting that it's a body of laws and the laws are what we act out so as long as we're law abiding that makes us a certain kind of personality and i would say a more conscientious personality probably a more agreeable personality probably a more emotionally stable personality than we would otherwise be alone and so imagine that for us to live in a group we have to partake in a central personality and deviate in our individual ways but that that partake partaking of the central personality without that we get fragmentation and inability to make peace inability to understand each other inability to cooperate right and that is something like the worship of a central spirit at least as it's acted out yeah yeah i think so and also connecting back to you know something that we we talked about the difference between you know more defense versus growth perspectives it's not just the case that um unifying around a belief is somehow you know like becker would argue somehow allowing us to to escape our anxiety it's very inspiring and mobilizing because if you look at a lot of the projects that we engage in that so i know you had marion toupee on um who's a friend um you know a number of weeks back and he talked about the human progress and how that people don't see you know a lot of people don't don't think that we've made progress yeah well they're they're blinded by the variability right right right but if you look at if you look at progress there's a lot of thing and and not just the progress that we're we've benefited from i mean you and i are able to have this conversation separated by many many miles over the internet instantaneously communicating thanks to project thanks to progress and technology right we wouldn't have been able to do this um decades ago but if you look at a lot of projects that are focused on making society or the world a better place they're projects that extend beyond our individual lifetimes so in other words you have to make some commitment to say i'm not just going to be hedonistically looking out for myself and you know trying to have as fun of a life as i can and then it's over you know which some people do of course but you have to say i'm going to give part of myself to something bigger than myself so that's not just a defense in my mind that's and you talked about something that's um adaptive that's something that that's very good for society to say it might take 50 years or 100 years before we make this cure this disease or reach this you know make or build this you know build this project or send something out into space and i might not even see it myself but i believe in it right yeah well that thing that we unite around right that might be not so much a structure of dogmatic belief as a shared ideal some of which is described in dogmatic terms i mean when i look at the abolition of slavery let's say i mean you can certainly come up with any number of reasons why slavery is a good idea from the perspective of the slave owner now the question is how the hell did it ever get to be the case that people decided that that was a bad thing and it looks to me like it's the working of that ideal across millennia really that finally manifested itself in that ethical decision it's like well there was this idea and it's part of the judeo-christian tradition that we're all imbued with a spark of divinity that aligns us with god that we're supposed to act in relationship to that and there was a logical incompatibility between that and the and the forces that the economic forces primarily that that propelled slavery forward and so it's not just that we're united by a dogmatic structure we're united by a a personality that's a night that's the ideal towards which we're trying to struggle something like that and that has more that of that growth-oriented element that you're describing right like i mean i've been struck repeatedly by this idea recently and perhaps it's not particularly original that the figure of christ in the west is at least the consequence of a millennia-long millennial's long discussion about what constitutes the ideal look we haven't agreed exactly because it's too complicated to fully agree on but i do believe that we feel guilt when we fail to live up to whatever that implicit ideal is right yeah yeah no i agree so yeah so i do think that you know what you're talking about of this the central you know this that we all kind of rally around is inspirational right it gives people a reason to be optimistic and i think there are and you know i i suspect you agree with me just based on you know seeing some of your some of your own discussions on on current trends there are reasons i think to be concerned that we have a growing amount of not just people and like hyper individualism of people not you know having shared you know shared culture but also just the the the associated pessimism and cynicism you see this in the antenatalist movement right you you see this and some of the activism that is associated with the social justice movement which is not you know i think most of us would agree that um there's more work to be done in any in any area where you might say there's still an you know unfairness or injustice um but there's this notion among at least a certain component of the a certain portion of these activists that is it's not going to get better right it's it's it's permanent these and that it hasn't it hasn't in fact we just saw at the at the challenge institute where um when you did my introduction where i'm i'm a scholar we actually just ran a survey um that will probably be released by the time this this podcast um airs where we we look we recruited a thousand um us university students um from all over the country and we asked them questions about about progress and we asked them specifically connected to their college experience because what we were interested in is what are people learning you know you hear all these criticisms about colleges and indoctrination but we wanted to ask students what are they actually what do they think they're learning and so we asked them um based on what you've learned in college so far do you think the world has gotten better over the last 50 years and we even gave them specific examples because you could say well it depends on what you mean but it got better right so we we had examples like and things that we knew based on the human progress and other you know other data points that had gotten better like poverty right that you know poverty has been decreasing um and radically and and immensely right and so what was amazing to me and i can i can actually um bring up um so i don't get the numbers wrong um so we asked people based on what you've learned in college so far is the world getting better over the last 50 years and not even 50 of students said yes so half of students don't think that the world has gotten better and we asked the same questions about the us as the u.s gotten better and very similar answers only about a quarter of the students of u.s college students said that they're optimistic about the future of the world based on what they've learned in college so far only 11 of us college students said that their college experience has made them have a more positive view of the us whereas 45 percent said that their college experiences made them have a more negative view of the us the rest said their view hasn't changed and only half of students are optimistic about say they're optimistic about their own future um and their and their ability to make a difference in the world so i could go on with with with all these statistics but essentially we you know we found a number of reasons to think that students well let me back up a little bit so if you think about objectively if you think about american college students using you know using the terms that are often used in this discussion which is the concept of privilege like if you think about the concept of privilege um to be born in america to live in america um you've already kind of won the lottery i'm not saying america is the greatest you know the the greatest place but compared to a lot of places in the world um there's opportunity there's you know there's a lot more opportunity here right so only a small percentage of people have that privilege already right and then on top of that only a minority of people get to attend university i mean the vast majority of the world doesn't have the opportunity to attend um university right so at some level it seems obviously true that if you have the privilege of attending university in america you would think that you should be pretty off you know you should be pretty optimistic about your situation in life and have a lot of gratitude about it um but what we're finding and of course these aren't you know these this is just a poll these aren't experiments or anything we're not and we're not controlling for personality or you know other potential factors but um we're getting a snapshot of college students not being very one many of them not seen that you know there's been progress so what are they learning in college where they're not saying hey wow like maybe things aren't perfect but they've certainly gotten better um they're not seeing that and then on top of that they're not particularly helpful or optimistic about the future and they don't seem to have a a real sense of agency right that they can make a difference in the world that they're and again you would think that if you were you know if you were sufficiently blessed to to live in the united states and go to college that might you know from my perspective that might come with a certain level of responsibility right that's you know you you you're very fortunate and you have a duty to do something um in the world to help others to make a difference to you know to make your community and your society better but it seems like a good portion of students aren't particularly optimistic about that and don't really see that they have a place well i talked to toopey and to bjorn lomberg and to um matt ridley these are all optimistic sorts of characters who've done a lot to document the radical improvement in absolute terms of of human existence over the last especially the last 30 years and all of them know that they have a marketing problem right it's like yeah well why isn't this compelling because it's just it's an it's an uphill battle to to get this information out there and the question is why and it seems to me that it has something to do with it's in some sense too materialistic like not that that's bad exactly because isn't it good to have enough to eat and all of that but there's some impetus some spiritual impetus or something like that that seems to be lacking and then there's another issue i don't know if you thought about this or not but you know in the christian tradition there's an apocalypse there's apocalypse and it's sort of projected in some sense out into the spiritual world so the end of the world is at hand but who knows when right well so it's projected like utopia is projected and so then you might ask yourself well what happens if it isn't projected is there a utopian and an apo apocalyptic tendency in human thinking and if so what happens if it's not contained within a religious structure and so i would wonder to what degree the pessimists in your survey have apocalyptic visions of the future because they're certainly no shortage of uh suggestions that we're facing continually facing something that looks like an apocalyptic nightmare and it isn't obvious to me that that's the case right yeah now you see this with what's become almost a religious environmentalism right of it's very apocalyptic way you know depending on who's talking and on what day it varies from we've only got like a decade left before the planet turns into an uninhabitable hellscape to you know on the more optimistic side you'll see some people say well we can still do something to mitigate it but you do see again under there there are plenty of environmental activists that i think are very practical very solution oriented very entrepreneurial who are thinking about technologies and strategies to to make yeah lomborg is like that right right but then there's there's a but there is an element of these activists that it is almost like an apocalyptic mean you know meaning making religion where because the reason i say that is because it seems to accompany this anti-natalist and right right view of it's almost as if the best so how you might ask well what's that got to do with with meaning well it's almost as if what they're arguing is the most meaningful thing that humans can do is go away right yes well you surrender the planet to the other species because we've screwed it up um well and the thing about the apocalyptic like i mean when i grew up the apocalypse was basically the threat of nuclear war which seemed very real and seems to have at least vanished to some degree in terms of what people fear and maybe that's because the actual risk has declined i would say that's the primary reason i mean it isn't obvious to me that russia is going to attack the united states with nuclear bombs so and china and america well it's not a full-fledged cold war yet so so but you know back in the 60s there were many people who were entirely convinced that everyone was going to be starving and that we were going to run out of resources by the year 2000 i mean the population bomb ehrlich's book the club of rome all these people said oh we're going to overpopulate the planet and we're going to run out of resources and we didn't and we aren't going to by all appearances we're going to peak at about 9 billion and it wouldn't surprise me at all if in a hundred years the fundamental problem is that there aren't enough children i mean i don't know and who who knows because 100 years is a long way away but that apocalypse those apocalypses didn't occur and we have the environmental apocalypse and it'd be interesting to see that that the more pessimistic students that you described do you suppose they would would they be more likely to fall into the search for meaning camp would they be the ones that were more susceptible to alternative quasi-religious beliefs do you do you know any of that yet because it'll be interesting to look at all that relationship to views of the future yeah no that so so there are some data there are some data points that i can bring up not from not from my survey but that i think speak to this issue um and other issues you raised including the materialism issue that you brought up about progress so for one there has been global data looking at meaning across different countries and as it turns out people in poorer countries report higher meaning in life than people in richer countries even when you control for religiosity the effect remains religiosity explains part of it um religious people have more meaning but even when you control for that that that remains so what's the story there well it could be that in poorer countries people are naturally more interdependent um right you you're not as individualistic you you have to help each other and so you can very you can it's much easier to see how your life matters right people depend on well you know i just interviewed a man who was held in guantanamo bay for 14 years and released and he came from mauritania he came from a tribal society like literally a tribal society he's only one gender he's not even one generation removed from that and he went to be educated in germany when he was an older teenager and when he got to germany he was alone in a room for the first time in his life and he said it really upset him and he said we weren't talking about meaning specifically but that the meaning in his life was the interdependence with all of his family members whom he was never isolated from ever and he said specifically he talked about his mother and said that she was an eternal source of meaning from for him and that that dissolved very rapidly when he was isolated and individual and he suffered repeated bouts of depression before he ended up in guantanamo guantanamo bay and so i'd never talked to somebody who had come from a tribal background like that so and and and was struck by that degree of interdependence i mean we don't know it and you know the students that you're describing that are pessimistic about the future many material things have improved but maybe we are more atomized than we were 50 years ago i mean i don't know i think families are more fragmented than they were 50 years ago arguably yeah and some people i think putnam again have argued that social institutions that pull people together have become much less prevalent as well i i think did he write bowling alone was that yeah he did yeah yeah no i think that's true i mean that's one of the things that i've been you know i've been thinking out because i i naturally lean you know kind of libertarian classical liberal and so um i think one of the this is something i'm you know as a psychologist i'm you know i'm always talking to people in in this space because it's if you're very if you're smart and have high self-control trait self-control and are relatively successful then it's it's pretty easy to be libertarian and think well you know i can choose whatever i want to believe in and i don't want to tell anyone to do anything the extreme libertarians like i don't want anyone to tell anyone to do anything ever um but you know one thing i'm always telling you know telling these people is but that's not how most that's not how most people are and one of the challenges that comes with um with the success of the free market which i'm a big advocate for um is affluence right like markets have made you know capitalism has made societies wealthy and but potentially have created this psychological vulnerability that that you're talking about so on the one hand yes we've progressed in many ways along material lines but to what extent has that potentially contributed to or created certain vulnerabilities in our social lives because i don't have to even get along with my neighbors if i have enough money i can just hire people to do things right i can just pay people um for services without actually having to compromise or negotiate and it turns out or develop attachments right or cooperate yeah or inspire or mentor or lead or any of those things right and then also you don't do those things that you pay other people to do which is a form of loss often as well right exactly so i think this is a you know taking us back to the to the unifying religion idea i think this is a a good example where you you might need something in in a free market society you you know having religion is a good counter and people that's not a novel of course that's not a novel observation because a lot of people have talked about i've talked about this in fact one you know i'm in a business school on one of the growing areas popular areas that that people are interested in is ethical leadership and the idea is people have looked at and you know people have looked at like the financial crisis and all this you know the crony capitalism and corruption of big business and these things and people are like oh yeah um markets are great but if you have people that do bad things and make unethical decisions they can take exploit people and they can take advantage of people and um and so there is this kind of ethical leadership movement like if you want if you want the market to work then you need people to follow certain ethical rules not just laws but in certain ethical principles and in a lot of ways that's a secular repackaging of you know what might have been um in the past it's just like well you have to you you have a business world but you also have the separate religious world and that religious world is where you get your morals right your business world might tell you how to how to sell a product um but if that if selling that product makes you sin or makes you violate you know certain certain moral rules then that's a check on you it's like i'm not supposed to do that but if you if you strip away that that moral framework um and say well anything goes it's all about making money or it's all about material gain or it's all about it's all about maximizing quarterly profits which also makes it very short term right so um so these things you know so in a lot of ways these i i think these belief systems balance that and part of the pessimism might be um that you that you do have in in our you know materialistic culture the sense of well i'm just supposed to be well you see this a lot with the privilege talk it's because the emphasis is always on billionaires or rich people or you always you always see this like well your life's you know your life's gonna be horrible because you don't have you know you're not a billionaire which of course nearly no one is right it's a weird fixation because it's like the the modal experience is not that right so well it isn't obvious that that would be an advantageous experience to begin with right i mean along with that comes the same responsibility as running a small country right so that's another thing too is the fixation on uh on privilege in terms of well people are rich or it's it neglects the privilege of having you know having loving parents or you know you know having uh being having access to nature or i mean there's just so many things in life that don't boil down to um to that material wealth and so that might be that might be part of the issue that you know like you raised with with with people like marion toubia you know i've talked to i know marian we've talked about this a lot as well as because he's he this is something that he's grappled with is why why can't people be like wow like i'm just really really thankful to be alive right now because it's it's demonstrably better um than it was you know 50 years ago or 100 years ago certainly 200 or 300 or 400 years ago but yeah maybe there is attention well when when have you have you done anything in your lab like a a qualitative taxonomy of meaning so imagine because one of the things i've sort of thought through is uh you know where do people derive proximal meaning and so on and i kind of thought this through as a clinician you should probably about be about as educated as you are intelligent or there's a lack you need a career or a job especially if you're conscientious you need a vocation if you're creative you need to spend your leisure time in some intelligent and productive and non-self-destructive manner you need an intimate relationship you need a family etc you can list maybe a dozen things that seem to be proximal sources of meaning but i don't really have any idea how those rank order yeah you know i mean what is it that people require to make them feel both secure and exploratory is that like is that a stable network of family and friends like what's on top there do you have any sense of that so we have done studies where we've just asked people to tell us what makes your life meaningful and it is qualitative they just write and then we use human coders and we've also used coding software you know scanning software and not surprisingly i mean the the most common response to that the most you know the the most frequent word uses in these narratives and are about relationships family and friends and so it certainly seems to and that's more than people write that more than they write about religion or anything else we looked at this also among um to make sure there wasn't something dramatically different between believers and non-believers we were we matched a sample and we recruited because as you know in the united states even though a lot of people don't go to church still we're still talking about less than 10 or so of the population that will identify self-identify as as totally atheist right because people are um like you said people are spiritual but not religious um so we recruited we specifically recruited you know a sample of people that said you know they were the real deal like hardcore atheists and we recruited a sample of of believers um largely because we just we thought well that's one dimension that might you know people might write about different things and they didn't um you know basically everyone said the same thing with what gives their life meaning which was family and close relationships and people did talk about it you know so the the coding picked up a few other things like people talk some things about community they talked about um hobbies they talked about couriers but that was um the family was what you know was way up here and those other things were were down here so one thing would be very interesting then would be to see what sort of social networks the pessimists have yeah right i mean if if you have a paucity of social net networks especially perhaps at the familial level but maybe you know friends and family or in some sense somewhat interchangeable i doubt it but perhaps they are maybe that's one of the things that sets you up really badly for optimism about the future yeah yeah no that's a good point and you know one of the you know one of the things that that concerns me of course you know it's possible you could say well young people are you know maybe more pessimistic and they're college students and there's something kind of edgy or you know about being cynical and you know they're going to grow out of this and you know all that's all that's certainly possible but it seems to me like it's just would be way more beneficial for students to be able to say hey this is uh this is a real pro you know again using you know the term privilege this is a real privilege to be here i'm taking a space that probably millions of people around the world would would love to have this opportunity um and that comes with responsibility um but that doesn't seem to be that you know that if you talk to people about responsibility that that gets you almost no well that's funny though you know because when i when i went on my tour for my book i went to about 150 different cities and one of the things that brought the audience the only thing i would say that brought every audience i talked about it with to a complete silence was the idea that meaning could be found in the adoption of responsibility and so it was peculiar because my original attitude would have been much like the one you just expressed which is well you know good luck selling responsibility that's what parents and figures of authority do all the time but the thing is they don't sell it as a source of meaning right right they they sell it as a moral obligation and that's fine because you can you can see the moral obligation element but what they don't explain is that in undertaking that moral obligation you find a sustaining meaning right no i totally agree i mean one thing that you know that i think that is is interesting where people mis i think a lot of people misunderstand meaning is they get that it's social well it's like you can tell people people find meaning in relationships and that makes total sense to people but in our society people often think of relationships in a very um i think about the meaning of relationships in a very superficial level what i mean by that is people just like well you need people to to like you and to support you and you see this in the way we often approach things in academia which is students want to feel supported um and so you see this very caregiving approach to social relationships which i just want you know we need to make sure there's no bullying which you know okay we all agree on that we need to make sure that people are nice to each other and that we have inclusive environments but and that's all great and but to me that's not meaning you need to mat like so here's the here's the way here's again well that might be the meaning of one kind of security that's rather maternal in its orientation but it certainly doesn't exhaust the range of meanings that we might be encouraging university students to pursue right so imagine so here's an example imagine that you were so we'll use work just for you know it'll be something people can understand imagine you were on a work team you a team got put together to work on a project and everyone on that team was very nice to you and very kind to you no one ever said a bad word to you no one hurt your feelings everyone was very supported but when it came time to get the work done um no one was interested in your contributions in fact they were like oh you know you don't need to worry about this jordan we'll take care of it oh that's fine we all love you jordan you know you're um okay so think about that scenario and think about a different scenario in which yeah maybe there's more conflict or you know maybe it's not high fives all the time where people aren't supporting you but your contribution is valued you're making a significant contribution to the team and people and you're needed well that would be more akin to a sports team right so i but oftentimes we i think in our society the first approach is what people think of them maybe like you said it's a more of a maternal thing that it's like well we just need to support people and but the problem with that is that's not a recipe to feel like you matter in fact people don't like over time people figure out that you know people are just pitying them and they don't really need them they don't really like them you know so you know people need to have some skin in the game they need to be making a contribution this actually connects to the argument um that i have against things like universal basic income um you know which we we can or don't have to get into um but the idea is it's great to think about taking care of people that you know that we we like that like it feels good to be like oh yeah well we want to help people but oftentimes just just taking care of people isn't allowing them to have agency it's not allowing them um to make a meaningful contribution it's in fact it could you know one of the predictors of of um the desire to die by suicide is feeling like a burden um to you know and so you can have the opposite effect where people feel like well the most meaningful thing i can do is to opt out because i'm not making a contribution and so i'm very concerned about any kind of movement even as kind-hearted as it seems that's just about well let's just be nice to everyone and make sure everyone feels included and loved and supported and that's all great but that's to me that's not that's not meaning we want to live in a polite society of course um but people need to be able to make contributions and people need to be able to feel that you could even look at that from a big five perspective big five personality perspective i mean that provision of basic care is an agreeable value right so it's a it's a reflection of trade agreeableness and well on one end trait disagreeableness is more associated with competition and conflict right and there's utility in that as well so even by identifying taking care of people as the only value we don't even exhaust the utility of trait agreeableness and then there's the meanings of duty and industriousness and orderliness that are associated with conscientiousness and the meanings of creativity that are associated with openness and you could maybe put security for neuroticism on the same axis as care conceivably but there's also meanings of extroversion and and none of those are addressed with a sole focus on providing security to people let's say i mean i don't know if using the big five framework in that way is a good way of parsing up the universe of meaning but you know we do know those dimensions exist yeah no yeah that makes sense so yeah so i think that the you know when we talk about even social meaning it has to go beyond um just simple connectedness or having you know having a lot of friends i mean this is why if you look at like the loneliness literature this is what people can be surrounded by people who love them and still feel terribly lonely right and still feel totally isolated even though they're in an environment where everyone's being being um kind of where they have a lot of social interaction and so you know that one of my concerns about you know some of the some of the movements that we're seeing that i i again going back to the pessimism thing that seemed to come from this idea of well there's not going to be any jobs for anyone everything is going to be automated and if you do do something it's just based on luck because some people are really smart and so you know they're they they're going to be privileged in the cognitive economy and then there's going to be people that can't really do anything and so if you're if you're a kind-hearted person what you do is you just say well we're going to financially provide for people we're just going to take care of people um but to me that's um pretty insulting but doesn't mean it may not address the core problem which is it may not address the core problem and it but i i think it's it's um it's very arrogant to assume that you have the answers for who can and can't contribute i mean when i worked in when when we were starting with you know my history when i before going to graduate school and i worked in social work and outpatient from clinical mental health one of the things that we we did because it was an outpatient clinic is and we had people we had people with severe schizophrenia some of these people really couldn't hold down jobs um and you know they really they were on disability and you know they had a really hard time but many of them many of them did even though they were severely mentally ill or in some cases in another group that we worked with had severe developmental disabilities they still wanted to be contributing members to society and so what you know but the goal of a lot of the the work we did was was to integrate them this is why it was an outpatient um you know program was they needed some support right they needed a case worker to check on them you know they needed an employer that was um open-minded to you know finding ways for them to contribute but you know i had this one this one client i worked with who um i mean you wouldn't want him in an office place you just you but he was a very talented programmer and so they this employer you know this was way before the the remote work phase um this was decades ago but this employer figured out well this guy can work from home he does good work he's you know he's got a methodical mind um but he's just you know he he can't be around people you know everyone else won't feel it won't create a good opposite environment if he's here because he you know he has auditory hallucinations and he's very paranoid and he um self-medicates with alcohol and that makes things even worse and so he just adds a layer of chaos to the workplace that you know we don't need um but he can do but he actually does good work on his time scale when he can do it and um and so he had you know he was he was working like he was he was doing something and then we you know i had clients in another job i had that um had severe developmental disabilities and but they you know they wanted to go to work they wanted to do something they wanted to have the dignity of feeling like um they had a job to go to and so um those are just a couple examples but but that kind of experience that kind of practical experience stands at it you know at odds with a lot of what i see in a very more academic discussion which isn't based on anyone's real life it seems it's based on these hypotheticals of well jobs aren't that meaningful and um you know some work is boring or or monotonous and so these the best thing we can do for these people is just make sure they have a universal basic income or whatever so they can just do whatever they want um with their time um but that you know like you said that might not that brings its own hazards right right so we we started this discussion talking about ernest becker and a rather unidimensional view of meaning but your walk through your research and this discussion indicates that you've as a consequence of studying this for so long you've developed a much more multi-dimensional sense of meaning that's not reductionistic in the same way that's not merely defensive that can't be reduced to the terror of death or defenses against that and so is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we close no i think we we we covered a lot of a lot of the areas that that i'm interested in i mean one thing i'll just you know i can just add that because you're absolutely right like i've what i've tried to do and this is part of what i like about being a researcher is i've tried to just kind of follow the data like i have i i have ideas of course i have and i have my own biases and um but i've tried like with the nostalgia work i talked to i talked about i try really hard to you know test hypotheses but then look you know kind of see what's going on and then that gives me ideas or make observations in in the real world and that gives me ideas and so you're right i have gone kind of on this journey where i definitely started out in this more kind of defensive approach because that's what i you know i learned in graduate school and have moved more towards this explorative growth oriented kind of creative approach to meaning and i do think they are connected through you know some of the attachment and social and cultural security systems and frameworks we talked about um but now so i'm you know i'm even going further in the direction of looking at like how meaning contributes to things like entrepreneurship because as you noted before there's a certain level even if you look at the developmental literature on attachment like you talked about the studies where the little kids you know when they venture away from mom moms the security um that gives them you know that makes them feel like there's something there that will protect them which makes them a little bit more willing to explore well if you scale that out on a society level and we look at topics like entrepreneurship which involves risk taking and putting yourself out there and fault and oftentimes failing repeatedly um is that can you imagine that same kind of framework where you you know a society that has um existential frameworks whether they be strong social relationships religion other cultural world views that provide the type of security that encourages people to innovate and to take risks and and so that that's kind of the direction i've been going in and more recently which i think very much connects to this overall project that that we've been talking about because we need that right we need risk takers we need um we need people who are optimists who who could look at the same set as data of everyone else and who and everyone else feels pessimistic to be like no i think there's a solution we just haven't figured this out yet and i think those people are often inspired by um by meaning right you need meaning is in my world another way to say this meaning isn't an outcome variable it's a predictor variable right it's because we tend to think of meaning as an indicator of well-being um which it is but in addition to that i would say it's a it it's an it's a cause it um and fitness research they've done some studies showing that when people think about what's important what's meaningful in their life they're more likely to exercise when you feel like your life's meaningful you've got like a reason to get up every day and do something and sometimes that something is take risks to try new things because you want to make the world better you want to make life better for your family and so i think that we just have to be really careful about um about that like that's an important that's an important element of life and if you have too much cynicism and nihilism and pessimism and anti-natalism and you know people don't have any people don't feel like they've got something to strive for in the future then um not only we're going to see psychological and social decline but we'll see economic decline as well and we won't be able to solve the problems that people say they're really concerned about such as climate change if you don't have people that believe in the future is worth saving to begin with those are excellent words to close on i would say thank you very much for talking with me today it was very interesting the time flew by it did thank you so much for having me my pleasure my pleasure good luck with your research and hopefully we can talk again at some point yeah we'd love that thanks a lot you bet bye bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 328,978

Keywords: meaning, meaning of life, Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, dr clay routledge, clay routledge jordan peterson, dr clay routledge meaning, What is the meaning of life

Id: 3yV0b-NhKTY

Length: 133min 20sec (8000 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021