John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom | Lex Fridman Podcast #317

The universe doesn't care about your personal narrative. You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life. It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness, and you step into the street and a truck hits you, and you die. That's mortality. Mortality isn't just some far-flung event. It's that every moment, we are subject to fate in that way. So you can think of, uh, lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them.

The following is a conversation with John Vervaeke, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at University of Toronto. I highly recommend his lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which covers the history and future of humanity's search for meaning. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's John Vervaeke. You have an excellent 50-part lecture series online on the meaning crisis, and I think you describe in the modern times an increase in depression, loneliness, cynicism, and wait for it, bullshit.

(laughs)

The term used technically by Harry Frankfurt and adopted by you. So let me ask, what is meaning? What are we looking for when we, uh, engage in the search for meaning?

So when I'm talking about meaning, I'm talking about what's called meaning in life, not the meaning of life. That's some sort of metaphysical claim. Meaning in life are those factors that make people rate their lives as more meaningful, worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure. And when you study that, what you see is it's a sense of connectedness. Uh, connectedness to yourself, to other people, to the world, and a particular kind of connectedness. You want to be connected to things that have a value and an existence independent of your egocentric sort of preferences and concerns. This is why, for example, having a child is considered very meaningful, because you're connecting to something that's gonna have a life and a value independent of you. Now, the question that comes up for me... Well, there's two questions. One is, why is that at risk right now? And then secondly, and I think you have to answer the second question first, which is, well, yeah, but why is meaning so important? Why is this sense of connectedness so important to human beings? Why, when it is lacking, do they typically fall into depression, potentially mental illness, addiction, self-destructive behavior? And so the first answer I give you is, well, it's that sense of connectedness. And people often express it metaphorically. They want to be connected to something larger than themselves. They want to matter. They don't mean it literally. I mean, if I chained you to a mountain, you wouldn't th- thereby say, "Oh, now my life is so fulfilling." Right? So what they're trying to convey, they're using this metaphor to try and say they want to be connected, they want to be connected to something real, they want to m- make a difference and matter to it. And one way of asking them, well, you know, what's meaningful is, "Tell me what you would like to continue to exist even if you weren't around anymore, and how are you connected to it and how do you matter to it?"