You’re Screwed No Matter What You Do | Jordan Peterson
“The other thing that’s so interesting about being alive is that you’re all-in. No matter what you do, you’re all-in. This is gonna kill you.”
➤➤Transcript (Partial):
You know, I have done my best with every single thing I’ve talked to you guys about—I have done my best to do what Dostoyevsky does in his novels, which is, I make a proposition, and then I spend months or years trying to figure out if I can take the bloody thing apart—if there’s something wrong with it because I want to find out. I want to hit it with a hammer and see if it breaks. And what I’ve been trying to do is to tell you all the things that I’ve gathered, let’s say, or—or laid out or articulated or discovered over the last thirty years that I have not been able to break with the biggest hammer that I could take to them. And I guess that’s the fundamental one, is that I—I believe that the—the idea that lurks in these images, derived from very different cultures… It’s the same idea: Life is suffering. Right. Indisputable. What do you do about that? You voluntarily accept it, and then strive to overcome the suffering that’s a consequence of that. And you do that for you, and you do that in a way that makes it better for other people, and then that works. And one question might be well, how well does it work? And the answer is: The only way that you can find out is by trying it. That’s it. That’s the existential element of it. The proof is to be derived by the incarnation of the attitude in your own life. No one can tell you how it will work for you. It’s the thing that your destiny is to discover that. And you have to make the decisions to begin with, because you can’t do this without commitment. You have to commit to it first. That’s the act of faith that—that Kierkegaard was so insistent upon. You have to say: I’m going to act as if being is good. I’m going to act as if truth is the pathway to enlightenment. I’m going to act as if I should pursue the deepest meaning possible in my life. And there’s reasons to do none of those. They’re real reasons. So it’s really a decision. But you can’t find out what the consequence of the decision is unless you make the decision. I think the same thing happens when you get married, by the way. If you think you might leave, you’re not married. And then you think: well, the marriage didn’t succeed. It’s like, well, maybe you were never married, because the rule is: you don’t get to leave. And there’s a reason for that rule. Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t situations where there should be exceptions made for that, that’s not the point. The point is that there’s some games you don’t get to play unless you’re all-in. And the other thing that’s so interesting about being alive is that you’re all-in. No matter what you do you’re all-in. This is going to kill you. So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while you’re waiting, because, do you have anything better to do? Really? Why not pick the best thing possible that you could do? Why not do that? Maybe you could justify your wretched existence to yourself that way. I think you could. That’s what it looks like. You know, people find such meaning in the responsibilities they adopt. It stops making them ask questions about what life is for. If you have a newborn child, for example—like, unless you’re really in a bad way, psychotically depressed, or maybe your personality really needs some retooling, you stop thinking about anything but ensuring that that baby is doing well. And if someone comes along and asks you an existential question about your commitment to that, the right response is: why are you asking me such stupid questions when this is manifesting…
