How to Use Reading and Writing to Find Your Path | EP 236

What I hope to provide you with is a magic code. You know, there was a book published a while back. Tom Hanks was in the movie; he was a Harvard professor who went around solving symbolic mysteries. Do you remember what was it called? The Da Vinci Code. Everyone liked that; it sold a lot. And you know, it was full of little mysteries, and it was full of hints that there was more to the world than you think, which is definitely true. And you know, there was a way of getting access to that knowledge and that it would really be worthwhile. People like that; they like that idea. And the reason for that is because it's actually true. It's true; it's true. Like, fiction is true.

So, okay, let's go back to the guy who's telling you about his morning. Well, he tells you something exciting. Well then, imagine that 10 people tell you something exciting, and then you extract out the pattern of them dealing with this problem from that. And so then you have a—that's what you do if you're an author, right? Because in a book, you don't want the book exactly to be about what ordinary people do in ordinary times in their life. It's like you already know how to be ordinary during ordinary times of your life; that's not useful. You know, you wouldn't watch a videotape of yourself. Imagine you videotaped yourself during a day, and then the next day you watched that. It's like, God, who would want to do that?

So what seems to happen in stories is that they distill; they distill. So they watch people, people watch people, and then they tell stories about what they see, but they leave a lot out of those stories—everything that's boring, hopefully. Then more and more stories about exciting things get sort of aggregated. Then maybe a great writer comes along and writes something really, really interesting, profound character transformations. And then you say, "Well, that's fiction," and then you say, "Well, that's not true because it's fiction." But then maybe that's not right. Maybe it's more than true because who wants the truth? The truth is mundane reality, and you've already got that mastered. What you want is the distillation of interesting experience.

And you might think, "Well, why is it interesting?" Well, that's a really good question because you don't actually know. Believe me, you really don't know because you'll be interested in things that just don't make any sense at all. I'm going to walk you a bit today through Pinocchio, and we'll do that more the next time too, you know. But I want to tell you a little bit about that movie to begin with just so you know how crazy you are. So, you know the plot. How many people have seen the Disney movie Pinocchio? Okay, so lots of people. So that's strange enough in itself, that so many people have seen it. And it's worth thinking about, you know, you tend to show your kids that movie, but you think about the movie. You're doing some pretty weird things when you're sitting there watching that movie, man.

First of all, it's drawings, right? And they're low-resolution drawings. You don't care, and you watch The Simpsons or maybe, or what's that called? The one that's been concentrating on political correctness so much? South Park. God, that animation, man, it's just awful, right? It's just horrible. It couldn't be worse; you don't care. Like, round heads, smile, a little bit of shuffling; that's a person as far as you're concerned. It's just irrelevant. And if it was higher resolution, it wouldn't help. You just need the bare bones, right, to hang your perceptions on.

So you watch this drawing—that's Pinocchio, beautiful drawings animated in a sequence. You're not watching something real; you're watching a pure construction. And then you think about the plot. It's like, it's completely absurd. Everything about it is absurd. It's like, well, one of the characters is a bug, and he turns out to be like the conscience. And so what the hell is with that? And then another character is this puppet, marionette, and you know somehow he gets free of his strings and then goes on this adventure. And then he gets enticed into various nefarious places by a fox and a cat, and then he rescues his father from a whale. And you don't even know how his father got in the whale. It's like, the last time you see his father, he was in a rainstorm, and the next thing that happens is he's in a whale, and you're sitting there thinking, "Hey, no problem; this all makes sense." It's like, what? Really? Why? How does that make sense? Well, the answer is, you don't know. That's the thing that's so cool; you don't know. You don't even know what you're watching, but it doesn't matter. You watch it, and you're interested in it. You want to see what the hell happens to this puppet. You want to see if he ends up becoming a real boy because it seems important.

Well, you say, "Well, is Pinocchio true?" Well, that's a stupid question. It's partly a stupid question because the answer is, it depends on what you mean by true. And it isn't obvious to me what you should mean when you say that something's true. And the reason it's not obvious is because we have this idea in our society, and it's a very profound idea. And that idea is that the ultimate truth is scientific truth, that that tells us about the nature of the world, and it does that in a final way. In some sense, there's no brooking any arguments about it, and the physicists have got it right, and that's why they can make hydrogen bombs. That's a pretty good demonstration of their being right, but you don't act as if that's true. And you don't, and you watch things and pay attention to things and are captivated by things that aren't predicated on those assumptions.

It seems to me that there is a problem of what the world is made out of, but there's a bigger problem, and that's the problem of how you should conduct yourself in the world. And that's really what you want to know; people want to know that more than anything because you need to know. It's like, here you guys are in university. It's like you don't know what you're doing. I mean, some of you know more than others, but you're at the beginning of your life, and life is very complex and chaotic, and it isn't exactly obvious, you know, how what kind of relationship you should form or what sort of character you should develop or what you're going to do for a job or how—what's the meaning of life? That's a good one. What's the meaning of life? Well, and you know, people come to university, at least many of them, and that's kind of what they want to find out.

Now Paglia, her notion is that you could think about it this way: articulated knowledge is embedded in inarticulate knowledge, and inarticulate knowledge is the domain of literature and art and high culture, let's say. And we sort of know what it means, but we don't exactly know what it means. It means more than we know. And then outside of that is what we don't know at all. And that's an idea that Jung developed as well, and maybe Paglia picked it up from Jung because Jung believed that, you know, there was this domain that we had mastered in every domain, and then there was a domain outside of that which you could think of as unexplored territory. And what we met unexplored territory with was our creative imagination, and that what we're trying to do with our creative imagination is to figure out how to deal with that unexplored territory.

We're producing dramas that we could act out that would help us deal with what we still hadn't mastered. And then outside of that, there's just what we don't know at all. And Paglia's idea—and this was Jung's idea—was that without understanding that surround, you're too atomized. You're not part of your historical tradition; you haven't incorporated the spirit of your ancestors who built all this. You're just here now, and you don't know what to do either. And you don't know how to maintain your culture, and you don't know how to serve it.

And you might say, "Well, why should you serve your culture?" And well, I have a hypothesis about that. You know, you can think about this—I don't know if it's true—but people ask what the meaning of life is, and it seems to me that meaning is proportionate to the adoption of responsibility. You know, like let's say you have a little sister who's like three. You're going to take care of her. Like questioning whether that's a good idea just seems stupid, you know what I mean? It just doesn't seem like the right kind of question. It's like, well obviously, self-evidently, let's say that's what you do, and you find it meaningful. It's like, probably, you know, interacting with a little kid. When we had little kids, you know, when they were like two or under, we took them out to see their relatives, and they were older people, and you know, they watched that two-year-old like it was a fire. You know, every second that that little kid was in the room, every single adult was focused on him or her. That's something that people attend to, and that's a source of meaning.

And what else is meaningful? Well, your family relationships are meaningful to you, and maybe the responsibility that you adopt as a friend, that seems meaningful. Maybe your decision to pursue a particular career and be of some utility in society. You know, part of that's governed by your desire to establish some security and get ahead. It's fine, but you're also playing an integral role in the maintenance of the structure that supports you. And my observation has been that, in my clinical practices, that people just have a hell of a time if they don't slot in somewhere. You know, you think, "I've got to go to work at nine in the morning," and you know, "I've got this rigid schedule." It's like it's probably a good idea to be grateful for that because what I've noticed is that if people pull out from those externally scaffolded systems, they drift. They get depressed; they get anxious. They don't know what to do with themselves. You know, they're kind of like sled dogs with no sled. And we're kind of like sled dogs, as far as I can tell. Beasts of burden; like, we need a load, man. We need a load. And the question is, what sort of load do you need?

And here's why I think we need that. You know, I've been thinking about how to figure out what's real for a long time, and because I'm an existentialist, I'm operating under the presupposition that you can tell what people believe by watching how they act. I don't care what they say. I don't care what their statements are about their view of reality because the correlation—the relationship between that and their actual actions is certainly not perfect and sometimes doesn't even exist. One thing I've noticed is that people, no one argues with their own pain. Everyone who hurts acts as if they believe that pain is real, so we could say the ultimate reality is pain. That's how people act. It's in keeping with the claims of many religious traditions. You know, the Jews are always recollecting past pain. I mean, the Christian God is a crucified person. I mean, there's a fair bit of pain there. For the Buddhists, the fundamental maxim is that life is suffering, and it seems to me that there's a metaphysical claim there. The metaphysical claim is that pain is real. Now, of course, it depends on what you mean by real, but people act as if their pain is real. So that's a good place to start.

Now that poses a problem: life is pain; life is suffering, let's say. And why is that? Well, it's because you can be broken, hurt, and destroyed, and so that seems pretty self-evident. And worse, you know it. And that makes people unique. Like, that's our self-consciousness, right? That's really what separates us, in some sense, from other creatures. I mean, other creatures have some self-consciousness. Like, a chimp can learn to recognize itself in a mirror and so can a dolphin. But, you know, that's pretty bare-bones self-consciousness. You know, real self-consciousness is the knowledge of your borders and not only in space but in time. And as far as I can tell, human beings are the only creatures that have discovered the future. And that's really good because we can plan for the future, but it's really bad because, you know, the future is finite, and that's like—that's a big shock to the old system. And it's the existential burden that everyone bears, and it's associated integrally with suffering. And so then you think, "Well, life is suffering, and it's finite." And that's part of the suffering; that's part of what makes you question the value of existing and maybe the value of existence itself.

So then what do you have to use as a weapon against that? Well, you know, we talked a little bit about responsibility; that seems to work. You know, the amount of responsibility that you adopt with really in relationship to things seems to increase your meaningful engagement. And you might say, "Well, what's the most meaningfully engaged activity?" And you might say, "Well, how about a little reduction in the old suffering?" You know, so you live your life so that you're not causing undue pain, especially pointless pain. That would be good. And maybe you could even be more useful than that and you could figure out some ways that some suffering—yours, other people's—both. If you're really, you know, hitting a home run, maybe you can figure out some way that some of that could be rectified. And that seems to be meaningful in and of itself.

I mean, if it's pain that makes you doubt the meaning of life, which is perfectly reasonable, then this cessation of pain—the cessation of suffering, the minimization of suffering as a logical corollary—should be the proper medication. And so I would say that means that there's some mode that you can conduct yourself in that makes you a good person. And part of being a good person is to alleviate suffering, and I don't think you get to question that, actually. If the suffering itself is what's making you question the validity of your life, then you can't also say that the cessation of that is not useful. I mean, you can, but it's completely incoherent. You can claim incoherent things if you want.

So then I would say these distilled stories that I'm talking about—the stories that are written, say, by great authors. I'm particularly fond of Dostoevsky, whose works are head and shoulders above anyone I've ever read in terms of writers of fiction. He deals with the hardest questions that human beings face, and he has characters on both sides of the argument, and they really lay out the arguments. It's not like Dostoevsky, you know, he's got a belief, and so he has a character and that character has his beliefs, and that character always wins the arguments. That doesn't happen in the Dostoevsky novel at all. He sets up a character, and then he sets up three or four antagonists, and those antagonists, they're not straw men; they're like iron giants. They just stomp his protagonist, you know, and the whole thing is a war between these different conceptions of being, and it's amazing to see; it's amazing to read.

So you distill these stories—great authors distill stories, great storytellers distill stories. And we have stories that are very, very, very, very old. Those are usually religious stories of one form or another. But they can be fairy tales, because fairy tales—some people have traced fairy tales back, you know, more than ten thousand years, and so they're part of an oral tradition. And oral traditions can last for tens of thousands of years. And you know, a story that's been told for ten thousand years is a funny kind of story. It's like people have remembered it, and obviously modified it. It's like the game of telephone, you know, where I tell you something and you whisper it to the person next to you, and so on. It's like a game of telephone that's gone on for, you know, a thousand generations, and all that's left is what people remember. And maybe they remember what's important because you tend to remember what's important. And it isn't necessarily the case that you know what the hell it means. You don't know what music means.

But you know it doesn't stop you from listening to it. You don't know, generally speaking, what a movie that you see or a book that you read means—not if it's profound. It means more than you can understand because otherwise, why read it? Well, so the idea is this: that we're necessarily nested inside moral systems. The moral systems are predicated on narratives, narrative dramas of sorts, and the moral systems are what orient us in life. And the reason to understand them to the degree that you can is because you need to know how to live.

Nietzsche said that if you had a "Y," you could bear any "how." And that's good. Learn to write. I'm dead serious. Like, I'm dead serious about that because writing is formalized thinking, and so the way you write is, first of all, you need a problem. Because why write if you don't have a problem? So this is good advice if you're just writing an essay, by the way, for your classes. It's like, pick a bloody problem that you want to write about, because otherwise, it's false right from the start. It's up to you to engage with the material until you find something that grips you, that you desire to investigate.

Okay, so you need a problem. Well, the next thing you need to do is we need to have something to say about the problem. Also, reading is really good for that. Read as much as you can get your hands on that addresses the problem. Okay, so now you know a bunch of things or at least provisionally know them. You at least have access to them. Well, now you start sorting through. It's like, okay, well, maybe I need to summarize what I've learned, and then I need to iron out the contradictions between what I've learned, and I need to elegantly formulate that, and I need to get my word choice right and my phrase choice right and my sentence choice right. And I need to organize the sentences into proper paragraphs and the paragraphs into proper sequence so that I have a coherent argument. And at the same time, what you're doing is you're integrating your own personality at the highest and most abstract level of organization, and you're sharpening your tools and you're putting yourself straight because you're learning to think.

You learn to do that by writing. And so I would say, pick some hard problems and learn to write very, very carefully. And when I say, "pay attention to the word," I mean that. Pick the right words. Organize them into the right phrases. Get your sentences straight. Like when I wrote my first book, Maps of Meaning, I believe I wrote every sentence in that book fifty times—fifty variants of every sentence. I'd read it once; I'd read it again; I'd read it again; I'd write it again. And I have a little competition: which sentence is better? Which sentence is better? I'd pick that sentence. Do the same with the paragraphs. Over many, many years, you hone your words. They're the most powerful thing about you, bar none. If you're an effective writer and speaker and communicator, you have all the authority and competence that there is. And so, you're at university; maybe you're taking a humanities degree. Well, what's the humanities degree for? It's to teach you how to think. You learn to think by writing.

Now, there's more to read and speak and all of that, but the best thing you can do is read and write every day—a couple of hours every day. Write about things you find important and see if you can discover what you believe to be true, and that'll build you a foundation. And it's unbelievably practical. Like, if you look at people who are phenomenally successful across life, there's various reasons, but one of them is that they're unbelievably good at articulating what they're aiming at and strategizing and negotiating and enticing people with a vision forward. It's like, get your words together, man. That makes you unstoppable. And that's really—that's the core of the humanities, that idea. Get your words together; make yourself an articulate creature, and then you're deadly in the best possible way.

So, take that seriously. And I'll end with something too. You students, you might think in your more cynical moments that you have to offer your professors what they want and gerrymander the content of your language to suit their predilections or what you consider to be their predilections. First of all, it's a very small minority of professors who are corrupt enough to punish you for producing a high-quality essay that they don't agree with. And though that's reprehensible, it doesn't happen very often. But more importantly, it's the highest academic sin to do that because what you're here to do is learn to find your true voice. Every time you deviate from that for expedient reasons, you corrupt yourself—and not in a trivial way—because when you formulate your arguments, that becomes a permanent part of your character. You carry that with you. It becomes part of the structure through which you view the world, and it guides your actions. And so you hold your words pristine, and you work in a dedicated way to become as articulate and clear as you can possibly become. And there's nothing more practical and noble than that. At the same time, that's why the humanities are so valuable. You know, you think, "Well, what good is a humanities degree?" It's like, well, you come out of here able to speak and think and write. No matter where you go, you're headed for the pinnacle, and hopefully in a way that's positive for everyone.

So that's what I would recommend. I'm a great admirer of the humanities and of the universities. I mean, the humanities—you learn to be a citizen through the humanities. The humanities are at the core of Western culture. If they go, we're in trouble. So the problem is that what's manifesting itself as the humanities in the universities is no longer the humanities. It's something almost virtually the opposite of that. And so, when I tell people not to go to humanities courses in the universities, it's with a very heavy heart, believe me. You know, now the question is where do you go instead? Well, that's a good question. You can always read. You know, one of the things that's really cool about Amazon is all the great books are free. They're literally free. You can go download them on your Kindle for nothing. The copyright has expired, and people have been putting electronic versions online, so the great books of the Western world and even many of the great books of the twentieth century are now available completely for free.

Well, so you can read them. There's lots of information to be garnered now on YouTube, and that's really going to explode over the next ten years. I mean, one of the things I want to work on probably over the next ten years is to set up a humanities university online. And I'm starting to work—I already have some programs online; they're called self-authoring programs, and they help people write. And partly we designed them to help people learn to write as well as to help them write about themselves. So the self-authoring programs help people write an autobiography and analyze their personality faults and virtues and lay out a future for themselves. And when we've had students do that—do the future authoring program—it's so cool what happened was that the probability that they would stay in school went up by about 30 percent. But something even cooler happened: it worked best for the worst-performing students.

So we did a lot of it in Holland at a business school called Erasmus. There's a school of management—Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University—and we ran several— I think it's about 10,000 people through the future authoring program now. And what happened, if you looked at the academic performance of the students, the Dutch women, the native Dutch women were at the pinnacle, and then it was the Dutch men below them. Now, the women were in a minority, and they were probably a little more highly selected, right? So maybe that accounted for the performance gap. And then underneath that, there was female non-western ethnic minority immigrants, and then below that were male non-western ethnic minority immigrants. And there was a massive gap between the Dutch women and the male non-western ethnic minority immigrants—like a performance gap of about 80 percent. A massive gap.

Within two years after writing the future authoring program, the male non-ethnic western minority students passed the Dutch students, yeah. And some of them didn't even remember that they had done the future authoring exercise. And we replicated that at Mohawk College just a while back; same thing. The young men who went to Mohawk College, they did this exercise in the summer just before they went to college. It only took about an hour to write out their future. It's not that long to think about your whole future and what happened was that the young men who had the worst grades in school, who were in non-career-oriented trajectories, had a retention improvement of about 40 percent. So yeah, so that was just like—we're just thrilled about that.

So the reason I'm telling you all of this story, apart from the fact that it's vaguely interesting, is that we are experimenting with technologies to teach people how to write. Now, normally, the way you're taught how to write is by having someone edit your writing, but that's prohibitively expensive. I don't think it can be transformed into something that's available on a mass basis, and so what we're trying to do is break down the process of writing into its requisite steps. That's kind of what behavioral psychologists do. We've done that already a bit with this essay-writing format. And then to sort of teach people what the mechanics of writing actually are, and then maybe to try to figure out how to crowdsource editing so that many, many people can participate in the process. But we'd like to set up an online humanities university over the next ten years. And since the universities have abandoned their intellectual property, there's no reason not to just move in and take it, as far as I can tell.

You know, my colleagues and I developed this program online to help people do that—to write through their life. So the past authoring program helps people write an autobiography: "Who the hell am I anyways?" And you think you know, but you don't because you're complicated. And then the present authoring program helps you identify your faults and your virtues by your own definition. It's not imposed on you; it's a guided process of exploration. And then the future authoring program helps you figure out, "Well, if you could have what you wanted, well, hypothetically, what would that actually be?" And yes, it's very much worth asking yourself that question because you're always searching for that anyways—even negatively—because your conscience will torment you for the things you're not doing.

Okay, while not doing, in relationship to what? Well, in relationship to the implicit ideal of your conscience. Well, what is that? And the answer is, well, you don't know. And so if you're just allowing yourself to be tortured into submission, then you're at the mercy of some ideal that you don't know. You don't, and maybe you wouldn't want to pursue if you actually knew. You know, that's why Jung—Carl Jung said everyone lives out a myth, but virtually no one knows which myth they're living. And maybe it's a tragedy; maybe you don't want it to be a tragedy. And then the question: what do you want? That's a really deep question. You know, I mean, that's a serious question. What is it that you should value? And people say, "Well, being happy." They don't even mean that, by the way. If you decompose what people mean when they say they want to be happy, what it turns out they actually mean is they don't want to be miserable. They're way more concerned with avoiding suffering than they are with pursuing, you know, enthusiastic positive emotion.

So even the statement, "I want to be happy," is actually not an accurate reflection of what it is that you want. Does that not show just how little of our own motivations we get to see? We're so good at deception that we deceive ourselves before we deceive anybody else. We get to see this tiny, tiny little sliver of why we are here, why we do the things we do, why we think the things we think. I saw this quote today from Robert Wright that said, "Emotions are the executioner of our genes or the executor of our genes." All that they're there is to just enact what our biological imperative wants. And then we get to glimpse them as they run past on the way to doing a thing, and we believe that somehow we're peering into the source code of our own mind. That's not the case.

Well, we're definitely not transparent to ourselves by any stretch of the imagination. We wouldn't have to spend decades studying psychology if we were transparent. Like, we're tremendously mysterious to ourselves. One of the things we do do in the self-authoring program, in the future authoring program, is say, "Well, if you deteriorated according to your own vices, and that went—that got out of hand, what would that look like five years down the road?" You know, everyone knows some people. Some people flirt with alcoholism or drug abuse or sex addiction.

Yes, yes, yes, that's right. Fractured relationships, even candy, whatever. And then, you know, you have a sense in your mind of what you'd be like if you let yourself go. "Oh, I'd be sick, man. I'd be under a bridge or something. I'd probably be behind like a—I don't know—living behind a Tim Hortons or something," you know, some type of place. I'm trying to make it local to you. But like some—yeah, I'd be living, you know, I'd just be doing drugs or just probably listening to Aerosmith. I'd be outdoors; I bet no real home. I'd have no fear.

So for you, it's a vision of homelessness and substance abuse. Yeah, yeah. Well, you've got to ask yourself, like, okay, think about that. Is that what you want? And I don't—I mean, think about it. Imagine that, right? That's what awaits you. Well, then you have a better thing to be afraid of. It's like, afraid as I am of gripping my own destiny, here's the alternative, right? Now you've created a reality of what that looks like, so now you have something to battle against, right? Yes, exactly right. You need part of being motivated is to be afraid of the proper things, you know? Afraid as you might be of success, and fair enough; it's possible that you should be more afraid of stagnation and failure. But you have to make those things real for you before they have any power.

Yeah, as you're talking, I'm even realizing that if I don't make the lowest—if I don't make the reality of what could happen if I don't take care of myself and if I were to like devolve and disintegrate into my worst place, if I don't make that a reality, it almost lets me stay in the fog even more because now even—the end hasn't even been created. I've left it all just so vague that I can just kind of meander around. It's like it reminds me a little bit—I didn't want to quit smoking for a while because if I quit smoking, then I would have to actually then do something else good for myself or I would have to then be a non-smoker. And a non-smoker might then go for a run or he might, like, you know, then achieve a different goal. So one of the reasons I realized for a while that I didn't quit smoking was because if I was real honest with myself, I wanted to always have an excuse of why I couldn't do other stuff.

People are going to wonder how it was that we came to have a conversation. Yes. And so maybe you could shed some light on that, and it's because I'm curious; I'm curious about it as well. I got turned on to you from a friend of mine about four years ago, I think three years ago, and I started listening to a lot of what you were saying. And many of the things you said I had been thinking about, but I heard you putting them into words in context. I was like, "What? That's—that's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm trying to get to." I found a lot of it goes back to—talk about self-determination, which we've talked about a lot, about your self-authoring. And then you hear a lot of those threads through my book, maybe in a different way, in a more folksy way.

But a lot of what you've said gave me confidence to go, "I'm going to put my story on paper." So I thank you for that, and that's why I thank you in the back of the book. You know, I reached out to you, I guess, a year and a half ago or so, and you and I chatted, and I've stayed in contact with your daughter. You know, your definition—one of the great simple things I said earlier—sometimes just to re-understand a word differently. I've always had trouble in a bad, tough relationship—an awkward relationship—with many words. But my two that I've had the longest trouble with are vulnerability and humility.

Yeah, these are tough ones. They're tough ones. So humility, I—you know, okay, be humble. Well, for a few decades, be humble. I lost confidence when I was humble. I feigned false modesty, which I felt, which I knew at the time—that's arrogant. What are you doing? Right? Absolutely. It's very difficult to be—to have humility without being arrogant about it. Weirdly enough, you said—you correct me if I misquote you—"Humility is known when you have more to learn. You're either in love with what you know, or you're in love with what you don't know, and there's a lot more of what you don't know, so pick your love carefully."

Oh, well, that—I went, "Oh, I purchased; I'm in on that." But for the first time, when I see that, I'm not shrinking; I'm actually standing taller. My heart's higher, my chin's higher, my shoulders are further back, right? I have more courage going forward because, oh, one hundred percent, I can rely on that until I'm gone, and maybe even further than that. Yes, I have more to learn. I purchase, but now I can go forward with the confidence of watching what I do know, what I have built. I can add more courage. I can forgive easier. I can take responsibility with more courage. I can take care of the things I've built and attend those gardens better with that understanding of humility.

So for that, I thank you. I appreciate that. It's a humility—it's a form of average. The best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write. And I made this little thing that I put online—it steps people through the process of writing. Because what's happened now, it's very hard to teach people to write because it's unbelievably time intensive. And like writing, marking a good essay—that's really easy. Check A: you did everything right. Right? Marking a bad essay? Oh my god, the words are wrong, the phrases are wrong, the sentences are wrong. They're not ordered right in the paragraphs. The paragraphs aren't coherent, and the whole thing makes no sense. So trying to tell the person what they did wrong, it's like, well you did everything wrong. Everything about this essay is wrong. Well, that's not helpful either. You have to find the few little things they did half right, and you have to teach them what they did wrong. It's really expensive.

And so what I did with this rubric was try to address that from the production side instead of the grading side. But the best thing you can do is teach people to write because there's no difference between that and thinking. One of the things that just blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something. It's like, "Well, you have to do this assignment." Well, why are you writing? Well, you need the grade. It's like, no, you need to learn to think because thinking makes you act effectively in the world. Thinking makes you win the battles you undertake. And those could be battles for good things. If you can think and speak and write, you are absolutely deadly. Nothing can get in your way.

So that's why you learn to write. It's like—and I can't believe that people aren't just told that. It's like it's the most powerful weapon you can possibly provide someone with. And I mean, I know lots of people who've been staggeringly successful and watched them throughout my life. I mean, those people—you don't want to have an argument with them. They'll just slash you into pieces—and not in a malevolent way. It's like, if you're going to make your point, and they're going to make their point, you better have your points organized because otherwise, you're going to look like and be an absolute idiot. You are not going to get anywhere. And if you can formulate your arguments coherently and make a presentation, if you can speak to people, if you can lay out a proposal, God, people give you money. They give you opportunities. You have influence.

That's what you're at university for. And so that's what you do. You're in—you’re in English, right? You're in—yeah, new languages. Anyway, it's like, yeah, teach people to be articulate because that's the most dangerous thing you can possibly be. So—and that's motivating if people know that. It's like, well, why are you learning to write? Because you're—here's your sword; here's your M16, right? Here's your bulletproof vest. Like, you learn how to use them. But ah, it's just—it's an endless mystery to me why that isn't made self-evident.

So that's the sort of thing that can drive you mad, trying to sort out. It's like, people are—there's a conspiracy to bring people into the education system to make them weaker. So I guess that keeps the competition down. Maybe that's one way of thinking about it. If your students are stupid, they're not going to challenge you. When you think of stories and you use stories and you tell stories very effectively—when you talk about, say, Pinocchio—you use biblical stories; you're a very engaging sort of interpreter and transmitter of stories. When you're working on, say, Beyond Order, this new book, how do you think of composing your stories or your messages so that they are not lost, so that they have some durability or transmissibility?

Well, I'm always—mostly when I'm writing, I'm trying to figure something out. Although, as I've written for—as the period of time over which I've been writing has lengthened, I'm spending more time communicating the ideas and less time figuring them out. When I wrote my first book, which was Maps of Meaning, pretty much all I was doing was trying to figure something out. It was just an exercise in sustained thought. And I worked on it from 1985 to 1999—about three hours a day. And I thought about it, especially when I was in my twenties, all the time. I was thinking about it like 13 hours a day, and the ideas were just running through my mind at a rate far higher than I'm capable of now.

I was trying to figure something out. I was trying to figure out—I was trying to understand malevolence, I suppose, among other things. But when I wrote the last two books, I was trying to communicate some of what I thought I had learned. And so, but it's still—a lot of it's still trying to solve, to answer a question. When I lecture, for example, and I usually do that without notes, I have a question in mind. It's like, okay, well, in the biblical lectures, for example, the first one is—I think it's about two hours long—on the first sentence of Genesis. The question is, well, what does this sentence mean? And so the lecture is an exploration of what it means, and I'm trying to think it through. And at the same time, I'm communicating that process of thinking it through.

And that's what I'm doing with my books. And the books are written to me, you know, which is why I think I've gotten away with giving advice. The books aren't really advice, or if they are, I'm included in the population of idiots who needs the advice. So, you know, these are things I haven't—there's a—the last chapter is "Be Grateful in Spite of Your Suffering." You know, I’ve had real struggles with that. So, although I know perfectly well that resentment, regardless of the cause, is not productive, it's certainly understandable.

You know, grabbing what you just said and maybe going to a somewhat meta level, I am going to shoehorn in Victor Frankl because I don't want to leave that loose end for listeners. I Frankl talks about the desire to finish his book as one of the sources of meaning that got him through the concentration camps. Did your book—and I don't know the timeline for having worked on it—serve a similar purpose over the last 18 to 24 months? Absolutely, absolutely! It was a life raft. I was devastated when I finished it, which is common experience, you know, people—and it speaks to the nature of human motivation.

We often think, well, once I get to point B, that's where you're headed; everything will be okay. It's like, no, that’s not the case at all. Now you need a new point B. So, and that was really, you know, because I don't work at the university anymore, and I don't have my clinical practice anymore, and so those are losses too, of structure for me. And I have the book to anchor myself while I was so ill, and it was invaluable and still is for that matter.

I want to ask you about the title Beyond Order, but before I get to that, I'm just planting the seed. I'd love to ask you—this is a question that a friend of mine, several friends of mine wanted me to ask some version of—and I would like to hear your answer. And that is, how would you recommend someone think about meaning or constructing or finding meaning if they have reached the pinnacle of competence or a high level of competence in a certain area? I have a friend—I won't name him because I don't know if he would want this public—but I asked him some version of this, and he said, "Well, at some point you have to either find God or have kids, and having kids is easier."

Well, that speaks to what we discussed earlier. It's like there's many domains in which to obtain competence. You can find a new domain, but kids for sure—that's like, look, life is quite straightforward in some ways. Find a partner and stick with them. You know, that's hard. Try to make yourself into better people if you can. It's a challenge. Have kids; have grandkids. Thank God I have grandkids; thank God I have kids. You know they are of unquestionable virtue. And so then, if you're lucky, you have other projects, and you're healthy enough to undertake them.

With regards to how people should search for meaning, well, the first thing I do, like I said with my clients, is do a scan of their life. You mentioned it at the beginning when you introduced me. I have a program, a self-authoring at selfauthoring.com, that helps people with this. It helps you write an autobiography, sort of figures out who you are. It helps you assess your personality traits—positive and negative—and then it helps you make a plan for the future. And people have found that useful. So one way of conceptualizing yourself is not as order and as not as chaos, but as the thing that traverses between the two domains.

And that, I would say, is the mythological hero. So I'm going to start talking to you about Pinocchio a little bit, weirdly enough. I hope you enjoy this. And the reason I want to do it is because I want to bring what I told you abstractly down to earth and then you can start thinking, well, do the conceptions that I've introduced to you, are they good for anything? Do they help? That's the order, descent into chaos, re-establishment of order. That's paradise lost; profane history, paradise regained. It's the classic comedy, and that's the story of life. And so the question is, how do you manage it? And so that's a question you really want to know the answer to.

So you'll go, you'll pay money—weirdly, you'll line up and pay money to see a story about that, even if you don't even know that that's what the story is about. And the reason for that is that, actually, part of you does know what the story is about. You know, your cognition has multiple layers. You understand things that you don't know; you understand in ways that you don't understand. And you can tell that because, you know, we talked about Pinocchio a little bit, how absurd it is, and that it doesn't matter.

So the movie opens with the opening credits, which are carved wooden signs, which is like a hint, you know, because Geppetto's a carver. And it starts with this song, which was actually quite a popular song, and it's a bit of a—what would you call it? I don't think the poetry is particularly profound, but it was a song that people liked and people still listen to. And it sets the tone for the movie, which is what music does. One of the things that's really interesting about movies—that's really mysterious is that, you know, if you go to a movie, there's almost always a soundtrack, right? If you go to a movie and there isn't a soundtrack, it kind of feels empty. It feels like there's something missing.

And you know, it's as if the music, you know, when you go to a movie, there's lots of things you can't see. The characters are only partial, and you don't know anything about their background. So it's like a low-resolution thing. What seems to happen with the music is that it provides the emotional background, the complex context, let's say. It's like a substitute for the context, and it guides you in your perceptions of the movie. It gives you hints about what's going to happen, and the funny thing about that is that we just—we just don't have any problem with that. You know, it's like, yeah, of course, movie has a soundtrack. And of course, when there's a dramatic scene, the music gets dramatic. But that doesn't happen in real life, so you'd wonder why we would accept it in a movie.

And I think it's partly because we're willing to accept the amplification of reality that constitutes a movie, and in fact, we find that compelling. And music is one of the things that does that amplification, the dramatization, and that's acceptable to us. This song, I find quite interesting, so I'm going to take it apart quite a bit. In some sense, I feel foolish doing it because it's, you know, it's a childish song in some ways, but that's okay.

"When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are." Well, okay, there's some mysteries there. People wish upon stars. That's like a little ritual, right? Why do they do that? Well, and what exactly is a star? That's another question because there are stars that shine in the heavens and there are people who are stars. And so why are people stars? Well, they're usually famous people, right? They're people that attract a lot of attention, and maybe there are people who have a lot of talent. That's another possibility. Maybe they're models. I don't mean, you know, clothing models—although sometimes they are—but they're models for emulation. That's what being a star means.

That's why People Magazine is full of stars. It's like they're like heroes brought to earth. And of course, you know nothing about them. All you know is their public persona, and of course, they're usually very attractive, and so that allows you to project upon them all the things that would go along with ideal humanity. And so they're stars. But still, why stars? Well, stars beckon in the darkness, right? And they're otherworldly—that's the thing that's cool. They're not of this earth, and I mean that technically because obviously, they're not of this earth, but I also mean it phenomenologically. I mean it has an element of human experience.

So most of you are urban, and so you've not had the experience, perhaps, of the full night sky. You know, and that's really too bad, because the full night sky is one of those experiences that actually induces awe naturally, you know? And no wonder you look up there, and there's just stars everywhere, right? You're looking at the edge of the galaxy. That's actually—that's the Milky Way, right? It's the edge of the galaxy. It's like, wow, there's the edge of the galaxy. And there's just so many of them, and it's such an expense. You're looking into infinity; you're looking into the unknown; you're looking beyond yourself, that's for sure. And you know that produces a sense of awe in people—like looking at the Grand Canyon or something like that. And it's—you’re looking at something that transcends yourself.

But that feeling of awe, that seems to be something—that's a natural part of our response. You know, you might feel awe when you meet someone that you regard as particularly admirable as well because you feel that there's something transcendent about them. So here's an interesting thing to think about: there are people you admire, and there are people that you don't admire, and that's a clue, right? That's a clue as to your value system. And it might be not really something you can even put your finger on. It's like you find this person captivating; you find this person admirable, and it's as if there’s something inside of you that's looking for what's admirable, you know? Assuming that you are, and that person who's admirable has a faculty, some faculty, that you would like to have for yourself.

And so they're a model for emulation, and that's part of how people develop. You know, like little kids often develop little hero crushes on older kids, you know? Not that much older, but sort of the person that's sort of just within their grasp, and then they follow them around and imitate them. And you know, so they're imitating what they find admirable. Well, the fact that you find something admirable is a hint as to the structure of your unconscious value system. And so you could think, even as an exercise, you could think, "Well, what qualities of a human being do I find admirable?" You have to ask yourself that. In a sense—you can't really think about it. There is a difference between asking yourself a question and thinking about it, you know, because it's more like when you're asking yourself a question, it's contemplative. It's like, well, what do I find admirable?

It's a question you don't know, and if you're fortunate—and this happens quite regularly—an answer will float up from wherever the hell answers float up, and oh yeah, that's one. And you can write that down, and you get some idea of what your ideal is, you know, and you have one likely and what your counter-ideal is.

Star, well, to wish upon a star is to raise your eyes above the horizon and to focus on something transcendent that's beyond you—to focus on the absolute, we could say, to focus on the light that shines in the darkness. Now, as stars, people wear diamonds because they're like stars or they're like the sun. And they're pure and perfect, and they glitter. And so there's something about the light too. There's something about a source of light; it's a source of illumination and enlightenment. And then—and the light that shines in the darkness is a deep metaphor, right? It's what you want. You want a light to shine in the darkness.

And so the star has all that. And so people wish upon a star because they have some intuition that aiming above the mundane has the potential to transform themselves; they make a wish. Well, if you're gonna make a wish, you should aim at something high. And even just aiming at that is more likely to make the wish come true. And this is not metaphor. You know, I have this program, which you guys are going to do called the future authoring program. It's one of two assignments. One is that you write an autobiography; that's the past authoring. The other is that you write a plan for the future; that's the future authoring. I would recommend that you get started on those right now—like, not right now, but like really soon—because they're harder than you think, and some of you are going to write like 15,000 words. You're going to get sucked right in; this happens all the time. You're going to get sucked right into it.

And so you write an autobiography because you need to know where you are and who you are right now. Because how the hell are you going to plot a pathway to the future unless you know where you are? And then you need to write about the future because you aren't going to hit something unless you aim at it. That's for sure. And lots of times, people won't aim at what they want because they're afraid. The reason they're afraid is because if you specify what you want, you've specified your conditions of failure—you know when you fail. And it's better just to keep it foggy. It's like, well, I don't know if I'm succeeding or failing, but you know I can't really tell.

Well great, except you can't hit anything you don't aim at. And so the future authoring problem program is like a—it's an attempt to have you articulate your character. And so is the past authoring program. Who are you? And you know the past authoring program, and it asks you to break your life into epochs and then to write about the emotional, you know, the things that you regard as important—important events that have shaped who you are. And you know, you may find that some of those—some of that writing makes you emotional. And I would say if you have a memory that's more than 18 months old, roughly speaking, and when you bring it to mind, it has an emotional impact, especially a negative emotional impact, it's like part of your soul is stuck back there.

And I know that's a metaphorical way of thinking about it, but what I mean is that the reason that you still experience the emotion is because you have not solved the problem that that situation faced you with. It might be a real problem: like maybe you got tangled up with someone who is really bad. And that's rough, man, because you've got to come up with a theory of malevolence to deal with something like that, and that's no joke. But if it still produces emotion, it means you haven't solved the problem, and your brain is still tagging it as threat. It's—it's a part of your territory that you did not master. Threat, threat, threat, threat—and until you take it apart—and articulation really helps that. Writing really helps that.

Then you're not going to free yourself from its grip. And that might not be that pleasant. I mean, this is one of those situations where doing it tends to produce a decrement in people's mood in the short term, but quite radical improvements three to six months down the road. You know, it's often the case that you, unfortunately, have to do something you don't want to do in order to progress. It's very, very common.

So, and the future authoring program asks you about different dimensions of your life. Like, because you're—you can think of yourself as a personality inside your head, but you're nested in systems that transcend you, and they're just as real as whatever's in your head. It's like, well, what do you need for life? Well, that's pretty easy, actually. Some friends—that's a good thing. Intimate relationships—that's a good thing. Family, you know, either the one you're going to produce or the one that you come from, where people to some degree love and care for one another—that's a good thing to work on.

You need—you need some plan for your career. You've got to fit in somewhere that people regard as important, and that they'll trade with you so that you can live. You need something worthwhile to do with the time that you're not at work. And you need to pay attention to your mental and physical health, and you need to regulate your use of substances, which is a strange one. But alcohol does lots of people in, so it's worth thinking about; that's why we put it in there.

So then it's like, okay, what the hell do you want? What do you want from your friends? What do you want from your family? What do you want from your career? If you could have what you wanted—that's what the program asks you—three to five years down the road, you get to have what you want. Now, I'm assuming that you're going to approach this like, you know, reasonable adults and not like 13-year-old dreamers who think, "I want the most expensive yacht in the world." It's like, fine. But, you know, that isn't really what it's supposed to be; more concentrating on your character.

And so then it asks you to write for 15 minutes without thinking too much about grammar or sentence structure or any of that about what your life could be like three to five years down the road if you were treating yourself like someone you cared for, and you were helping them figure out what they wanted. And then it asks you to do the same thing in reverse, which is to think about the ways that you're radically insufficient and your faults. And everyone knows this, I think. You know, maybe not, but everyone has a sense of, if they were going to degenerate, how they would do it. You know, some people would be an alcoholic; some people would be a street person.

It's like there's some doom thing out there that's got your name on it if you're particularly uncautious and you know don't—and let things fall apart. So I want you to write about that: what do you not want to have happen in three to five years? And there's psychological reasons for this. Say one is if you have something to aim for, that's a source of positive emotion because your positive emotion is mostly generated by evidence that you're moving towards something that you value. It's not generated so much by accomplishing something because when you accomplish something, you're just left with the problem of whatever you're going to do next. So you graduate from university. It's like, you know, hooray! One day you're at the peak of your undergraduate university career; the next day you're unemployed and looking for a bad job at Starbucks.

So, you see what I mean? One problem that you solve is replaced by another problem. And so the idea that you're going to be happy when you solve all your problems is like: good luck with that theory. But, you know, if you're aiming at something worthwhile and you really believe it's worthwhile and you've thought it through, you know, so that you're not weak; you're not weak; you've got your damn arguments mustered—then when you make progress, even a little bit, you think, "Hey, that's all right," and you get a little kick, a little dopamine kick. And that's what you want because that's where your positive emotion comes from.

You can use cocaine if you want, but, but you know that tends to have relatively detrimental medium to long-term consequences, but it activates the same system. So you have to be aiming at something, and you should be aiming at something that's realistic, that you want, that you could get. You know, like, not easily because if it's easy, in some sense you've already got it. It's got to push you, and that's part of the pleasure, actually, because there are two things that you want to do when you're pursuing something that's important, and one of them is to get the thing that's important, but the other is to make yourself better at pursuing things, right?

So, you can get both of those at the same time. You're aiming at something and you're increasing your competence. It's like, that's a good deal; that's a good deal, and there’s a lot of intrinsic meaning to be felt in that. And then the second half of the program, you write out a plan for how you're going to do it and how you're going to keep yourself on track. And you’re going to write about why it would be good for you if you did this and why it would be good for your family and what possible benefits it would have to the community. You know, because you want to nail this thing down.

And then you want to figure out what kind of obstacles are going to come up and how you might overcome them and how you might keep yourself on track and all of that. And we know because we've actually done a lot of research on this particular program that if university students do this—and this is more true if they're not too well oriented to begin with—if university students do this, they're about 25 percent less likely to drop out, which is a lot, and about their grade point average increases about 20 percent. So hooray for that, you know, because you never know when you develop an intervention if it's going to work.

There's also evidence, but not from my lab, that doing such things improves your physical health. And I think the reason for that is that, you know, when you go over your autobiography and you scour out those negative places that you're sort of dragging along with you, it lowers your overall stress load because your brain is kind of, I think, calculating how dangerous the world is by attending to the ratio of successes to failures that you've had in your life, something like that. And so, you know, if there are holes in your map that you could still fall through, then your brain regards the territory still as a bit on the dangerous side, and then you’re more prepared for emergency action—and that's hard on you. So you want to go back there and fix up those experiences to the degree that you can.