Escaping the Cult of Happiness: the Product of How You Spend Your Time is YOU.

an immediate sequel to my earlier video
of just a few minutes ago talking ultimately about self-discipline the enjoyment of life and what it means to lead a meaningful life and then I guess separately but silently the way in which intelligence infests every aspect of your life and makes many simple pleasures untenable for those of us who choose to be intellectuals for those of us who choose to live intelligently so one of the guys who asked one of these questions inspiring my earlier video wrote back right away and in his reply this is about in the middle of his reply he says imagine dividing your time into three buckets one things that fulfill your vision of who you are two mundane practical realities like washing dishes and then three leisure activities and then he goes on to argue that some things belong into each category okay no no my dude I don't admit of three separate categories I don't even admit of the distinction between work and leisure I don't even think there's an ethical or meaningful distinction here between things you do for money and things you do when nobody's paying you to do them okay there's only one category we're talking about here okay and the category is you the product is you the decisions you're making are about what kind of person you want to be everything else is just excuse making and some of the excuse making is deeply deeply culturally inculcated into us you know including that a lot of people ethically think oh well these are things that only did on the job so they don't come that's not who I really am like I go to work eight hours a day but that's not who I really am this over here this one do mister that's who I really am they're guys who you know divide their own mind like oh when I'm cheating on my wife that's not who I really am when I'm at home with my family that's my true self or something no there is only one you there is only one outcome we're measuring here alright so what I'm explaining in this series of videos it's not difficult to understand it's difficult to accept because you're challenging both values you've received from your parents grandparents great-grandparents going back 2,000 years and also values that may be part of your enjoyment and experience of life on a day to day basis right here and right now so same guy writing me on discord raised the example of chess playing chess and again skiing he says well you're very comfortable condemning cocaine and you're very comfortable condemning video games but it seems to me you're not really comfortable condemning chess and skiing guess again guess again oh boy I live in Canada I'm Canadian most most Canadians think I'm insane because of my condemnation of skiing they can't relate to it at all they think of skiing as the apogee of refined bourgeois self-indulgence all right and I condemn it in precisely the same terms as cocaine there's an overlap between these two things - skiing is very much linked to a whole lot of drug habits in Canada nope my condemnation of skiing is absolute okay playing chess great example great Civ why do you think playing chess is mentally morally ethically in any way better than playing a video game how is playing chess better than playing Virtua Fighter on the Sega Saturn how is playing chess better than playing any of the military strategy games there was one called military madness when I was a kid that are very often based on chess you're moving pieces around a board and you know there are tanks and airplanes instead of rooks and knights right why why do you imagine it's more intellectual or more mentally productive to play chess than history and look in a recent video I took on one of the greatest cultural sacred cows of all and I said hey why do you think it's better to sit alone in your bedroom and practice repetitive finger motions playing a keyboard or playing a violin as opposed to playing a video game okay it's all it's all the accumulation of excuses all right in some cases there are excuses you made up yourself in some cases they're excuses you accept it from your parents in some cases there are excuses that accumulated over lifetimes and lifetimes going back centuries or going back a thousand years handed down within families okay there are some really serious ways in which video games are worse than cocaine I'm gonna tell you one of them right now all right my parents bought me video games they gave me video games the child they sat me down and said oh good you play video games well we go and do this other thing whatever it was they wanted to do right my parents encouraged me to play video games all right my parents didn't encourage me to use cocaine right I'm hope I hope this is true for many of you in the audience also right these these habits and probably this you're telling me right now it's probably because your parents or other people in your culture may be school teachers they told you that playing chess is something tremendously refined and sophisticated that intelligent people do the playing chess is something that will make you smarter right make you a better person maybe they told you that about skiing also okay it's all all right all of it and if you're being honest with yourself you'd question how is it even possible for someone who's leading a meaningful life to enjoy waste time playing chess how is it possible for someone who's leading a meaningful life to enjoy practicing the violin for hours and hours cuz I know at an ex-girlfriend I rarely mentioned here and she complained to me about you know getting getting playing violin accurately every week you had to do a certain number of hours of drills to really play a violin at a high level you need to maintain this accuracy with your your hand motions how can you possibly enjoy doing that don't you have something better to do and I don't even need to appeal here anything external I don't have to appeal the idea of making the world a better place of any kind of ethical charitable mission any kind of political ambition no I can just keep it all in one bucket I can keep it all in one category you why don't you have something better to do in terms of who you want to be into who and what it is you're fashioning yourself into right stuff is easy to understand but it's it's very very hard to live with okay have you ever been to a church you ever been to a sincere question I've known a lot of people on the internet who say that they're Buddhists or even that they're devout like scholars and experts but they've never once been to a Buddhist temple there's 21st century I think there are people who talk about Christianity the internet don't really have experience being in Christian temple you know what the most pathetic thing of all is the people who are made happy by the song and dance the song and dance itself isn't that pathetic someone plays the organ someone prays someone says the benediction right but there were people who are really smiling there are people who really experience joy there are simple minded people who are taken advantage of by religion and if you go if you really start spending time at church if you if you put on a costume as I said before if you disguise yourself as a true believer on stand there if you're a person of real intelligence of real brilliance of real intellect of real self discipline if you're a person who feels your own potential to be something more meaningful in the world with those few hours a day you spend in church you will witness the tragedy of the people who are too stupid who are too dumb to know any better who are really sincerely elated but having someone in a robe tell them some vague about how their a wonderful person how they're gonna go to heaven after they die biggest nonsense imaginable people who are smiling and clapping and full of joy over the performance of these rituals right a lot of us as atheists we may feel a strong motivation to go to church or if you're Muslim go to attend a Muslim ceremony to make your parents happy to make your grandparents happy to make your aunts and uncle have to make some friend or relative of yours happy right but when you're there you feel this same tragedy more acutely and more deeply right because you can't enjoy that ceremony you can't enjoy the ritual you can't enjoy the illusions and delusions of religion the way stupid people can you can't turn your mind off and join in the fun and on the contrary what you see and feel is the tragedy of people who are trapped in the opposite mindset who can't escape from their own stupid you can't escape from their own lack of self-discipline who can't think their way out of this trap people who are so pathetic as to find this happy and on a tiny scale each and every one of us now carries a church in our pockets and we sit down to pray every time we waste a hour on our cell phones you can ride the subway and see people they are playing match three tiles puzzle games line up the blinking gemstones wiling away their hours and among them the most pathetic the most pitiable of all are those who are truly happy when you examine your own happiness when you examine what it is that makes you happy and why whether it's playing chess or snorting cocaine you are gonna come to some very dark conclusions about who you really are and then either you're gonna get motivated to change that and think seriously about who and what it is you want to be or you're going to retreat into making excuses in the name of this thing you call happiness