Name: Humanity is Having a Meaning Crisis
Uploaded: 2023-09-13T18:29:54.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Humanity is Having a Meaning Crisis' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Humanity is Having a Meaning Crisis' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-13. Transcript available.

yeah and you teach all i guess i mean a lot of people like i guess that a lot
of things that i
get shared for about yours are like about meaning and looking into meaning yes
and especially at a
time where it feels like people are or for me even i mean it feels like we're
getting into this
cul-de-sac in america where it's like is there a lot of value to my life do i
am i just a cog in
the wheel am i just a consumer is there any you know what is the purpose for me
i think a lot of
people are starting to ask themselves that yeah yeah i call that the meaning
crisis and i think
there's good evidence that it's becoming very prevalent in the west whatever
that means these
days but you know sort of north america europe you know yeah uh japan hawaii
yeah australia you know
things like that um and the symptoms are you can sort of see symptoms of it uh
all through the
culture and um and i've also seen a significant increase um in in the work i'm
doing both academically
and in the public sphere uh especially since covet covet really ramped a lot of
these issues up for
people in a powerful way one of the interesting things that uh covet did is it
threw people back
onto their inner life um and what's interesting is our culture especially north
american culture
um right and i'm not the first to observe it you know it has a hyperponderance
of a tendency towards
narcissism being very like you know uh so people have oriented their lives in a
very self-centered way but
and but they thought that right or they can maybe a better way of putting it
they confuse that with
having deep rich inner resources and when everything sort of stopped and they
couldn't focus the world
on them and they had to focus on themselves in order to find resources and what
you found was a bifurcation
like a division uh some people were like whoa that like that really threw them
um so i i i'll say i'll
say something to you and i i'm of two two minds of it because i'm happy about
it as a scientist because
i made a prediction and i'm sad about it as a human being because it's not a
good prediction um so just
as the pandemic was hitting i said what you're going to get is you're going to
get a rise in a term
that julian evans made famous called conspirituality this mixture of conspiracy
theories and spirituality
and that took off and then i said as we come out of the pandemic we'll get a
mental health spike and
then a little bit later sort of an increase in crime and all of these things
are coming to pass
because what had happened is many people are thrown into the interior life only
to realize for all of the
self-centeredness they've actually not given any wise attention to their inner
life and they were
suddenly without resources other people saw this as a an opportunity and they
framed it that way and so
what's been springing up where all of these online communities where people not
to sound too high
falutin or anything but people started to say you know i really want to
cultivate wisdom i mean there's
tons of information there's a lot of bullshit mixed up with it there's you know
there's all this stuff
and then there's science and that but i want wisdom and so and i get and i've
gotten involved with quite
a few of these communities so that was that was there's there's both you have
both negative and positive
symptoms in the culture uh like you know um the number of close friends people
have is reliably declining
even for all of our social internet connections uh loneliness is becoming
epidemic and loneliness is
like it's very unhealthy we are we are we are naturally social cultural beings
and loneliness is
well it's becoming a hobby too for some people in a way it's becoming almost so
common that it's like um
are not common but it's well i guess common i guess and once you start to
become something you
there's a part of you that will want to find the most organized way to be it
and to engage in it
yes so even in loneliness it's almost becoming a culture you know it is but it's
a culture with great
cost uh i mean we we have weird things happening like the uk has set up a
ministry of loneliness
which sounds like something out of orwell right like the ministry of loneliness
yeah and it's like
whoa how did we get there yeah it sounds like an ozzy osbourne album oh yeah
maybe yeah when it comes
to like searching for like meaning right like as a person you know do we do it
is it something that we do
as individuals like are we do do is there any value in finding meaning as an
individual it feels
like to me sometimes more like the value is finding meaning as like a species
or like a group right like
i guess when i think about meaning i don't think like what is my what is the
meaning for me what
is the purpose of my life i i find my brain often thinks more like what is our
purpose right what is
our meaning um do you feel like if that one is more rewarding than the other or
why do we
what's the real value and i don't know what i'm trying to ask but can you help
me i think i think i
i think i do if you'll allow me to help yeah please i'll try to i'll try to be
a little bit socratic
okay right so um one way of perhaps reframing it is that maybe there's like two
poles to this problem
and they're actually interdependent uh one one half of the meaning uh issue
um is the fact that and we can get into the cog sci of this the cognitive
science if this is what i this
is my cognitive science but i'll just say it the very processes that make you
adaptively intelligent
like able to solve so many problems in so many domains in so many ways those
very pro those very
processes make you perennially prone to self-deception like they're locked
together i see what you're
saying so the same thing that makes you help you to figure something out is the
same thing that keeps
you in a certain space right so let's i won't get into the details of it right
now but like for
example the primary problem your intelligence is trying well there are two in
any problem you're
trying to solve there are two meta problems i'll try not to use meta very often
but okay meta means
what like they're they are about they are above uh all the other problems you
have to solve you have
to sort of solve these problems whenever you're trying to solve any other
problem got it understood
okay so the first is what should you pay attention to and that sounds like a
trivial because what you
can say is well it's obvious and here's something and i can back this up with a
lot of argument and
evidence getting a machine to find things obvious so that it would be a general
problem solver is the
goal of agi right so the fact that you find it obvious doesn't mean you can
explain it in fact the
fact that it is so obvious to you what you should be paying attention to is the
miracle because think
think about it theo think about all the things you could be paying attention to
in this room right
now think of all the memory and information you have in the head all the
different ways you could
combine them all the different actions you could perform you could be lifting
an arm right now right
and somehow out of all of that you ignore most of that information and that
information is
like it's titanically vast like if you just let me give you a small example
playing a game of chess
all the different possible pathways all the different possible combinations
for playing a game of chess the number of those pathways exceeds the number of
atomic particles in
the universe wow that's just for a little game of chess now look in your
environment all you're
working all your long-term memory right and right now my brain is locked in on
it's it's
shut all that other stuff out that's right to stay focused on locked in right
here that is pretty
remarkable you don't think about that you just think oh i'm just locking in on
what i'm thinking or
looking at or whatever but really there's some there's other stuff going on
that's that's stopping
all this other stuff from being like hitting the main inflection point in my
brain that's right and
that's called framing okay right and so what happens is the it's you need this
this is your and the
ability to do this relevance realization i use realization in both sense become
aware of and make real
right this is like core and that's one of the meta abilities uh the other is to
anticipate your your
environment you like you in fact we judge how intelligent a creature is by how
much it can
anticipate the future so for example oh yeah of course oh yeah yeah yeah right
okay good good
okay so you have this anticipation problem now the those two those two problems
are interlocked
because think about the more into the future i have to anticipate the more that
combat that explosion of
possibilities opens up the relevance realization issue how do i what do i pay
attention to so you're
just paying attention in this moment if you also have to like pay attention and
think about what i need
to do an hour from now three hours to tomorrow thursday you know just to see
how it opens up it'd be very
very scary yeah yeah so you are adaptive right and ignoring the thing that's
making us ignore
also sometimes makes us ignore what turns out to be relevant i see and it gets
even more pronounced
as we're dealing with anticipating the future this is why getting people to
save for their retirement
so this is an experiment that was done you go in with you know all the best
evidence you go into
academics we we pretend we're the smartest people we're supposed to be
responsive to evidence and
argument you give them argument and evidence you should start saving for your
retirement right now
here's all the charts here's all the graphs you allow them to make any
challenges they want
they you you can absolutely convince them they all agree you come back in six
months and none of them
are saving now here's what you can do that makes a difference right you come
back and you say
you know what i want you to imagine don't just think i want you to imagine your
future self as a as a
beloved family member that you've always taken care of and you feel a
compassionate concern for and i want
you to imagine that as much as you can you come back in six months and you find
two things when they're
imagining they start to save and the more vividly they imagine the more they
say right because you have to
you can't just deal with the truth you have to deal with the salience how
things catch your attention
ah i see what you're saying so you have to not only have like this idea but if
you can add like weight
and girth and uh make it that idea as vivid as possible this is almost present
that's right like
the future is almost you're able to find a way like a bridge to make it more
present then people are
able to behave um maybe in more positive or effective ways uh in planning for
it that's right so i call
that an ecology of practices all the practices support each other and checked
and balanced and they have
complementary strengths and weaknesses remember each thing each thing that
makes you adaptive has a dark
side and what you do is you try and pair them so that they correct for each
other's dark sides
right right you get an ecology of practices and across cultures and across time
you see people coming
up with these ecologies of practices for overcoming the self-deception and for
increasing that sense of
connectedness and i'll talk about that in a sec if you'd like right and that's
wisdom and so it
so that the individual pole is you need to cultivate wisdom but what's the
collective pull and you put
your finger on it so what is this meaning thing so a lot if you do research on
it there's four
dimensions to it uh and the one that people think it's synonymous with is
having a purpose that's
only one of the dimension it's actually not the most important one of the
dimensions of meaning yeah
meaning in life so we're not talking about like the meaning of a sentence we're
talking about
what makes your life worth living even though it has all the frustrations and
failures and faults
and flaws in it right because i think especially you get to like a middle of
your life kind of or
ballpark you know and you start that really starts to hit home you're like oh
well my youth is disappearing
yeah what is the what is my purpose here and then is it the purpose of just me
or am i part of a group and
we have a purpose those are the questions yeah that i really kind of right see
us getting hit with a lot
so what happens historically in a time where we get to a place like this is
there pat has this happened
before in time yes okay so we don't need to be alarmed at the point like humans
have never been through
this that's right we've been through it before uh now there's a like there
there's two there's two
uh stances on this that are both sort of wrong because they're extreme one is
oh this is human
beings have always said the meanings and probably and it's a dismissive thing
and the other one is no
this is completely absolutely unique and there's truth to both what's unique is
we face a set of problems
that are global in a way there was never global problems that were this like
this you know complex
and and growing like we face an interconnection of the advent of you know agi
we already fest we're already
facing you know growing the growing impact of social media you know people are
looking at issues around the environment uh energy
as you said our political economic system is breaking down is gridlocking and
people are losing faith
in it and i use that word deliberately in in in a deep way and so those are
those are i think unique
things we're facing and they i i think when we're in a meeting crisis it sort
of hamstrings us it really
weakens our ability to turn our best wisdom towards these problems because when
we're in a meaning
crisis right so oh especially you know if we're all isolated and we're isolated
and it's not our best
it's very self-motivated it's not our like group conscience um we're acting out
of fear a lot of
people yeah and we're acting out of like and our ability to cut through the and
to
realize when we're in self-deception is you know being seriously challenged oh
yeah do you think
we used to get so much more out of that just in our system because if it seems
like these things you're
speaking of are things that seem like necessities to our soul you know they are
like nothing seems
more thirsty these days than like our soul like whatever there's like some i
almost can feel this
part of underneath me a lot of times just almost like my soul is trying to
order per like oxy cons or
something it's like dude what am i like what am i even doing here anymore if
these are the practices
we're doing a lot of times it's like you can start to feel it feels bored you
know or it feels like
thirsty what's a better word it doesn't feel bored it feels thirsty well it
yeah thirsty and but it can
vacillate between profound boredom and extreme anxiety like so you get the and
by the way thirst that's
the that's the that's the that the the word that's actually used in the buddhist
scriptures for what's
usually translated as desire it's it's more like thirst and craving it's not
simple desire yeah uh so
yeah and and that that craving um when it's that reciprocal narrowing it's
identifying in a mindless
fact it's all that stuff we talk about we become selves through each other and
so the soul is perhaps i mean
i'm i'm trying to rehabilitate these terms so we can re-inhabit them and there's
a connection between
those two words rehabilitate re-inhabit right i'm trying to rehabilitate the
notion of soul this is how
we right this is our deep connectedness to our embodiment to our groundedness
our self is our deep
connectedness to each other and our spirit is our deep connectedness to the
vertical to what is ultimate and if
we could bring those back so that they can be simultaneously scientifically
understood
remember socrates and spiritually transformatively real for us again then we
can do that nourishment
you're talking about and i think it's going to become it's a necessity i think
it is that's what
i think i don't know if that part of us can die the part of us that is
desperate for um
these just like this understanding or this comfort or this peace not even like
the comfort of a blanket or
of uh but the comfort of just some connection to this greater energy that we're
supposed to be
like working with
Thank you.

Humanity is Having a Meaning Crisis

yeah and you teach all i guess i mean a lot of people like i guess that a lot
of things that i
get shared for about yours are like about meaning and looking into meaning yes
and especially at a
time where it feels like people are or for me even i mean it feels like we're
getting into this
cul-de-sac in america where it's like is there a lot of value to my life do i
am i just a cog in
the wheel am i just a consumer is there any you know what is the purpose for me
i think a lot of
people are starting to ask themselves that yeah yeah i call that the meaning
crisis and i think
there's good evidence that it's becoming very prevalent in the west whatever
that means these
days but you know sort of north america europe you know yeah uh japan hawaii
yeah australia you know
things like that um and the symptoms are you can sort of see symptoms of it uh
all through the
culture and um and i've also seen a significant increase um in in the work i'm
doing both academically
and in the public sphere uh especially since covet covet really ramped a lot of
these issues up for
people in a powerful way one of the interesting things that uh covet did is it
threw people back
onto their inner life um and what's interesting is our culture especially north
american culture
um right and i'm not the first to observe it you know it has a hyperponderance
of a tendency towards
narcissism being very like you know uh so people have oriented their lives in a
very self-centered way but
and but they thought that right or they can maybe a better way of putting it
they confuse that with
having deep rich inner resources and when everything sort of stopped and they
couldn't focus the world
on them and they had to focus on themselves in order to find resources and what
you found was a bifurcation
like a division uh some people were like whoa that like that really threw them
um so i i i'll say i'll
say something to you and i i'm of two two minds of it because i'm happy about
it as a scientist because
i made a prediction and i'm sad about it as a human being because it's not a
good prediction um so just
as the pandemic was hitting i said what you're going to get is you're going to
get a rise in a term
that julian evans made famous called conspirituality this mixture of conspiracy
theories and spirituality
and that took off and then i said as we come out of the pandemic we'll get a
mental health spike and
then a little bit later sort of an increase in crime and all of these things
are coming to pass
because what had happened is many people are thrown into the interior life only
to realize for all of the
self-centeredness they've actually not given any wise attention to their inner
life and they were
suddenly without resources other people saw this as a an opportunity and they
framed it that way and so
what's been springing up where all of these online communities where people not
to sound too high
falutin or anything but people started to say you know i really want to
cultivate wisdom i mean there's
tons of information there's a lot of bullshit mixed up with it there's you know
there's all this stuff
and then there's science and that but i want wisdom and so and i get and i've
gotten involved with quite
a few of these communities so that was that was there's there's both you have
both negative and positive
symptoms in the culture uh like you know um the number of close friends people
have is reliably declining
even for all of our social internet connections uh loneliness is becoming
epidemic and loneliness is
like it's very unhealthy we are we are we are naturally social cultural beings
and loneliness is
well it's becoming a hobby too for some people in a way it's becoming almost so
common that it's like um
are not common but it's well i guess common i guess and once you start to
become something you
there's a part of you that will want to find the most organized way to be it
and to engage in it
yes so even in loneliness it's almost becoming a culture you know it is but it's
a culture with great
cost uh i mean we we have weird things happening like the uk has set up a
ministry of loneliness
which sounds like something out of orwell right like the ministry of loneliness
yeah and it's like
whoa how did we get there yeah it sounds like an ozzy osbourne album oh yeah
maybe yeah when it comes
to like searching for like meaning right like as a person you know do we do it
is it something that we do
as individuals like are we do do is there any value in finding meaning as an
individual it feels
like to me sometimes more like the value is finding meaning as like a species
or like a group right like
i guess when i think about meaning i don't think like what is my what is the
meaning for me what
is the purpose of my life i i find my brain often thinks more like what is our
purpose right what is
our meaning um do you feel like if that one is more rewarding than the other or
why do we
what's the real value and i don't know what i'm trying to ask but can you help
me i think i think i
i think i do if you'll allow me to help yeah please i'll try to i'll try to be
a little bit socratic
okay right so um one way of perhaps reframing it is that maybe there's like two
poles to this problem
and they're actually interdependent uh one one half of the meaning uh issue
um is the fact that and we can get into the cog sci of this the cognitive
science if this is what i this
is my cognitive science but i'll just say it the very processes that make you
adaptively intelligent
like able to solve so many problems in so many domains in so many ways those
very pro those very
processes make you perennially prone to self-deception like they're locked
together i see what you're
saying so the same thing that makes you help you to figure something out is the
same thing that keeps
you in a certain space right so let's i won't get into the details of it right
now but like for
example the primary problem your intelligence is trying well there are two in
any problem you're
trying to solve there are two meta problems i'll try not to use meta very often
but okay meta means
what like they're they are about they are above uh all the other problems you
have to solve you have
to sort of solve these problems whenever you're trying to solve any other
problem got it understood
okay so the first is what should you pay attention to and that sounds like a
trivial because what you
can say is well it's obvious and here's something and i can back this up with a
lot of argument and
evidence getting a machine to find things obvious so that it would be a general
problem solver is the
goal of agi right so the fact that you find it obvious doesn't mean you can
explain it in fact the
fact that it is so obvious to you what you should be paying attention to is the
miracle because think
think about it theo think about all the things you could be paying attention to
in this room right
now think of all the memory and information you have in the head all the
different ways you could
combine them all the different actions you could perform you could be lifting
an arm right now right
and somehow out of all of that you ignore most of that information and that
information is
like it's titanically vast like if you just let me give you a small example
playing a game of chess
all the different possible pathways all the different possible combinations
for playing a game of chess the number of those pathways exceeds the number of
atomic particles in
the universe wow that's just for a little game of chess now look in your
environment all you're
working all your long-term memory right and right now my brain is locked in on
it's it's
shut all that other stuff out that's right to stay focused on locked in right
here that is pretty
remarkable you don't think about that you just think oh i'm just locking in on
what i'm thinking or
looking at or whatever but really there's some there's other stuff going on
that's that's stopping
all this other stuff from being like hitting the main inflection point in my
brain that's right and
that's called framing okay right and so what happens is the it's you need this
this is your and the
ability to do this relevance realization i use realization in both sense become
aware of and make real
right this is like core and that's one of the meta abilities uh the other is to
anticipate your your
environment you like you in fact we judge how intelligent a creature is by how
much it can
anticipate the future so for example oh yeah of course oh yeah yeah yeah right
okay good good
okay so you have this anticipation problem now the those two those two problems
are interlocked
because think about the more into the future i have to anticipate the more that
combat that explosion of
possibilities opens up the relevance realization issue how do i what do i pay
attention to so you're
just paying attention in this moment if you also have to like pay attention and
think about what i need
to do an hour from now three hours to tomorrow thursday you know just to see
how it opens up it'd be very
very scary yeah yeah so you are adaptive right and ignoring the thing that's
making us ignore
also sometimes makes us ignore what turns out to be relevant i see and it gets
even more pronounced
as we're dealing with anticipating the future this is why getting people to
save for their retirement
so this is an experiment that was done you go in with you know all the best
evidence you go into
academics we we pretend we're the smartest people we're supposed to be
responsive to evidence and
argument you give them argument and evidence you should start saving for your
retirement right now
here's all the charts here's all the graphs you allow them to make any
challenges they want
they you you can absolutely convince them they all agree you come back in six
months and none of them
are saving now here's what you can do that makes a difference right you come
back and you say
you know what i want you to imagine don't just think i want you to imagine your
future self as a as a
beloved family member that you've always taken care of and you feel a
compassionate concern for and i want
you to imagine that as much as you can you come back in six months and you find
two things when they're
imagining they start to save and the more vividly they imagine the more they
say right because you have to
you can't just deal with the truth you have to deal with the salience how
things catch your attention
ah i see what you're saying so you have to not only have like this idea but if
you can add like weight
and girth and uh make it that idea as vivid as possible this is almost present
that's right like
the future is almost you're able to find a way like a bridge to make it more
present then people are
able to behave um maybe in more positive or effective ways uh in planning for
it that's right so i call
that an ecology of practices all the practices support each other and checked
and balanced and they have
complementary strengths and weaknesses remember each thing each thing that
makes you adaptive has a dark
side and what you do is you try and pair them so that they correct for each
other's dark sides
right right you get an ecology of practices and across cultures and across time
you see people coming
up with these ecologies of practices for overcoming the self-deception and for
increasing that sense of
connectedness and i'll talk about that in a sec if you'd like right and that's
wisdom and so it
so that the individual pole is you need to cultivate wisdom but what's the
collective pull and you put
your finger on it so what is this meaning thing so a lot if you do research on
it there's four
dimensions to it uh and the one that people think it's synonymous with is
having a purpose that's
only one of the dimension it's actually not the most important one of the
dimensions of meaning yeah
meaning in life so we're not talking about like the meaning of a sentence we're
talking about
what makes your life worth living even though