Jordan Peterson - We are Built for Struggle

Question: ''I don't want to calculate high-resolution utopia for myself only to have it squandered by fortune. How do I ensure the meaning I experience is self determined? '' Jordan: Well, you can't. Because there's an arbitrary element to existence, so it is going to be squandered to some degree by fortune. But that's - that's not the point. What are you gonna do? Just sit back on your laurels and wait for things to roll over you? So what you do- Look. The hero myth basically says: go out there, confront the dragon, get the gold, and share it with the community. And, and live properly, or it says- the alternative is; face the tyrant enter the desert as a consequence because everything falls apart, recast structure, find the promised land. Those are the two elements to the hero myth. And you might - and that's divine. It's the closest thing to divine that we know. You might say ''Well, what happens if you follow the divine path and the answer might be well everything turns out perfectly because God is on your side! '' It's like: No. That isn't what happens, because things don't turn out perfectly. It's your best bet, it's your best strategy right? And that's the thing and you know dragons wouldn't be dragons if they couldn't eat you and So, but that's okay, and this is something I found so useful about the biblical stories, especially about the Abrahamic stories, which I didn't know that well till I lectured about them last year. You know God calls people to the adventure of their lives. And so you could say in part God is that force within you which calls you to the adventure of your life and says; Get away from your family, blind and unconscious comfort and get the hell out there in the world! '' Well, God calls Abraham out from his father's, where he stayed far too long, and from his kin where it's secure, and like, the first thing he encounters is a famine. And then he encounters a tyranny inhabited by people who want to steal his wife. It's like, you think, well okay, Abraham should have just stayed in bed and ignored God, obviously! Well that isn't how it is. It's like, we're built for struggle, us human beings. You know, you're not after The bubbles of bliss that Dostoyevsky described in- in notes from underground. We're built to contend with the world reality. You want a challenge, and the best way that you can take on a challenge- because the challenge fortifies you, so you don't want to be secure, you want to be strong. And you get strong by taking on optimal challenges. And so you lay out your destiny in the world and you take the slings and arrows of fate and you make yourself stronger while you're doing so, and you might fail, and fortune might do you in. But it's your best bet, and you know people have also people that have extracted unbelievable successes out of catastrophic failures, and so - and I'm not saying that in a naive way - I know perfectly well what happens to people, you know, you're doing fine in life, and then you get cancer. And then six months later you're dead. And all the heroism in the world isn't going to save you at that point, but that's not the point! Life is bounded by mortality. But that doesn't mean that you don't get out there and contend. And you develop by contending, and you minimize the net amount of suffering in the world. And that's something, man, that's something to do. So it's- it's it beats laying in your basement and getting bitter and then doing the terrible things that bitter people do. So... You can't ensure that the meaning you experience is self determined, but you can play your role to the best of your ability, and that will be good enough, enough. That meaning- the meaning that you'll find in then- in that I believe is sufficient to be sustaining, and perhaps even sustaining through the flood. So it isn't that you can avoid catastrophe. It's that you can prepare yourself to deal with it honorably when it arrives. That's what you've got.