Morality without Ambition is Meaningless. ADVICE NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR [Ep. 008]

ladies and gentlemen Ted car tip number
one when it comes to life your weaknesses don't matter don't focus on what you're weak at and if you suck at something don't worry about it delegate it get someone else to do it second math and use a calculator or pay a mathematician if you're sucking drawing paint artist if you if you suck at cleaning your house pay a cleaning lady if you suck at looking after your kids pay a babysitter like focus on your strengths guys like us to who could this possibly be useful information for Ted only people who are born rich on permanent vacation and have absolutely zero ambition in life I assume that's that's people like you tend to short and there are way too many people who are really good at what you suck at would love to do it you suck at see wonders well get them to do a really really good job at it while you go do a really really good job what you're really great at I don't believe in focusing on your weaknesses and make them greater I just believe on doing like already good and just focusing on those focus on those focus on those focus on just focus on your strengths Ted cars entire web presence so far as I can see is an elaborate justification for the fact that he has wasted his own life potential he seems to be a man with zero ambition zero interest in the outside world zero human curiosity zero capacity for self-improvement zero mental focus zero ability to speak in paragraphs or even form sentences although he fancies himself a writer and claims that he spent several hours a day writing I shudder to think if the quality of his writing is as bad as his ability to speak English language I searched high and low on the internet for anything like a professional resume a CV for this guy the only thing I could find his own brief account of his decision to drop out of university at age 19 and how this is the best decision he ever made for his life and and this philosophy he's what he's advocating is not even having any ambition is not even having the courage to try and to fail drop out now don't try pardon fail later don't have any ambition to accomplish anything in the world and all of this is is pinned against the wall it hangs on the rusty [ __ ] nail the justification that what you really ought to do with your life is be happy what you really ought to be concerned with is just your own joy your own enjoyment of life and I disagree with that so so fundamentally you know III didn't know it started being this video I didn't really know what direction was going to take with this I did not think I would feel so shocked so horrified by the philosophy of dead car for me to simplify slightly I've got to tell you morality is ambition that's a catchphrase that's a slogan that's a simplification but what do I mean morality without ambition would not be morality okay if I didn't have the ambition to actually improve the situation in Cambodia I wouldn't have ever made the effort the long hours of incredibly hard work to study the Cambodian language very hard work utterly thankless work work that had no positive outcome etc etc right is there a sense in which you can just sit in a library in Canada and study the Cambodian language or Cambodian history Cambodian politics and be a moral person I don't know maybe I want to tell you for me morality without ambition is not morality okay and a life without ambition ultimately is a life with no morals because a life without ambition is going to be either a life of self-indulgence or if you're trapped in poverty it's going to just be a struggle to survive which is for plenty of people it's not for this car and I don't I don't hate Ted Carr for being born red I have to assume from the limited information he's provided me about his life the Ted Carr is born rich and he is spending money to somebody else earn that's fine you know we have that in common with Descartes Bruce Wayne you know what the difference is between you and Bruce Wayne ambition so many videos so many you know that justify your decision to not get an education to not have a career to not have any ambition to make the world a better place none you know the one I just watch from you is titled understanding your life purpose in 60 seconds great title unfortunately the video is 4 minutes and 33 seconds long the first two minutes that video were the longest two minutes of my life Ted I mean you know Ted cars manifesto for the unexamined life of short-term pleasures and self look and Ted I you know what it is partly that to me he looks like an old man I thought he was 40 just just based on appearance I thought Ted Carr was 40 but you know what also Ted the philosophy you're spouting is such an old man's philosophy it's the kind of garbage I heard from men in Thailand who unlike myself another men who were just waiting to die men who had no ambition to make a positive difference in the world you know it is sad it's sad that in Western culture ambition is so much linked to just earning money my ambitions had nothing to do with earning money during that time my life but I mean when I lived in Thailand when I lived in Cambodia I had to say to people again and again look because other people would invite me to go do things that I consider waste time things for just for enjoyment for the doors long I've said look I'm sorry I'm not on vacation you know maybe you are or maybe this is how you live your life is an expat I mean I'm out here I have real goals there things I'm trying to accomplish study the language study the history what I was trying to do in terms of humanitarian work and a lot of those things are failures you know I mean ten cars message is just live your life for your own self indulgence for your own enjoyment don't even try don't even fail you know I would I would feel very hesitant to recommend anyone have ambition go out and fail there's a lot of suffering involved there's a lot of misery you know if you have those ambitions you want to make the world a better place and you know you try so hard and one venture after another fails I think the kind of sorrow that comes from that is much much worse than the sorrow that comes from a failed business venture when something's just about money so just about money I think it's pretty straightforward psychologically an emotion so well I tried to start that pizza restaurant didn't work out it turns out the market for vegan pizza is only a few thousand people whatever you know you you fill out your tax forms and you move on and for me there are all kinds of little small ambitions I had within the big ambitions where the fact that I couldn't carry them out you know haunts me there was one woman I knew in Laos obviously an elderly woman from the story I'm about to tell she directly witnessed you know atrocities of war horrible things beyond comprehension she had a story that'll stay with me forever bunch of stories I mean this woman had to run away from her home as a child during what's called the American War over there she actually do escape from Laos up into the mountains that are on the border between Laos and Vietnam she the only education she got at that age was literally in a cave um you know a chalkboard in a cave and you know she got to see some bizarre and amazing things but you know including airplanes and helicopters shooting people to death in that in that war and I do mean shooting not bombing by the way people to death and you know talking to her she knew me for about two years before she opened up and told me that stuff you know she knew me for like two years and she told me stuff and at that time I was working really hard to learn the language and I said to her look I'm going away now to do humanitarian work in the field I was doing a job that's the only Java pad which is humanitarian in that strictest sense was a job that involved and included sacks of rice being handed to starving people so humanitarian work in a narrow sense a lot of other work I did was humanitarian in a broader perhaps direct sense I said look and one of the field through this humanitarian work when I come back I'm going to understand the Lao language even better going to be way better and my ability uses language and what I really want to do is record your story write it down and publish it as a short book you know just interview you about what happened during this time line so that people know this history and they know it from that human perspective okay now I never got to do that because when I was out doing the humanitarian work members the government threatened to kill me take me out of the country it's a story I've told part of on this channel I didn't tell the part that comes after the death threats but you know my humanitarian work ended with a bang ended with me being exiled with nothing but my backpack and my bicycle and having to find a whole new life and the years of hard work I put into Lao language now suddenly seem like they were for nothing because I could never I was told I could never go back into the country that if I went back in the country my life would be in danger you know that I could be killed or what have you if you've just spent two and a half years studying the Lao language and Lao history and Lao politics you've got a body of knowledge that's useful absolutely nowhere aside from Laos so if the government of Laos is take you up says you can't come back all your humanitarian oceans are at nan and so on um but every minute I spent during those years was animated by ambition and not ambition to make money and not a you know ambition of some kind you know and I believe me I'm extremely self-critical I think many of my ambitions were stupid and jejune and led to my own self-destruction they were bad for me and now now that I have a daughter I didn't back then I was single you know in a very real sense they're bad for my family they're bad for my economic situation I was not born rich I do not have the luxury of just pursuing that kind of thing and then saying oh well and moving on to the next venture really disasters for me in terms of my financial situation the kind of jobs had to take after that I was mean again unlike so again unlike other people in the museum industry unlike other people in the charity industry for me this was not a hobby this is my only income and I desperately needed the income I got doing that kind of humanitarian work and one of those jobs paid me like us $300 per month these are truly humanitarian wages so if you're if you're born rich you can do that in the payment is symbolic if you're not born rich and you actually need to live on that it's a little different game but look I mean there's a kind of morality even to what I was doing during the long hours I spent in archives with books studying history and languages but the morality doesn't come from the act itself I mean sitting at that desk and studying so seriously so ferociously there's a sense in which it's no different from sitting in the same library and wasting time playing video games your computer or kind of dragging your ass and doing the bare minimum to research an assignment for university for course that doesn't interest you there's a sense in which what you do in the library is no is no different the difference comes from the ambition you know the ambition to make a difference in addition to make to change the world in some way you know and I mean I got to tell you I mean I guess that's the sense in which I find Ted Carr's philosophy so disturbing in some ways more disturbing than durianrider I really have to tell you I guess I find it so disturbed because even though I keep saying like my my expectations are low of my fellow vegans yes when I look at my fellow vegans I expect them to have that ambition to change the world in terms of ecology in terms of animal rights it's deeply disturbing to me to see veganism tied to what I used to call the permanent vacation lifestyle permanent vacation philosophy and in this case feel like I even need a new a new term for it a life totally defined in terms of self-indulgence morality is ambition that's a catchphrase that's a slogan that's a simplification but what do I mean morality without ambition would not be more