Discussion on Purpose and Society

You know, you don't always live in an era where

there's an important one,

you know, in your town that you can join.

In general, that's not what people do with life.

And what I think has happened, uh, is...

Well, frankly, I, I'm gonna connect it to the sexual

revolution, right?

The sexual revolution creates the opportunity to

get one of the most, um,

profound rewards, in fact, the most profound reward that the

universe has ever produced as far as we know, without

having to invest very much work at all,

right? So by making sex common, it

totally altered the way people viewed the number

of years they had to live,

right? They could afford to put off

child-rearing,

right? It could be distant in the future, which left all of these young people with

all of this energy

who m- might well not have been

involved in movements if they were struggling to, you know, raise

a family. But because the family part has been put

off so long,

right, it is considered abnormal to marry early.

It is considered normal not to.

What people do is they take the energy, you know, the

seriousness of purpose that would ordinarily be directed into,

uh, managing a marriage and,

uh, uh, the role of being a parent, and they put it into

something. And Heather has pointed out that this is

especially, um, powerful with

young women who seem to take on causes,

you know, and they defend them like a mother

defending her child.

That's a very powerful force. And the point is, if the idea is, well,

climate change is a, you know, is a threat, and

your role here on Earth is to make sure that that threat is

addressed, and you put the mama bear energy into

your climate change work, well, you know,

that's pretty frightening, especially if climate change isn't the threat

that it's

been made out to be, right?

Right.

You have a whole, a large number of mama bears doing

this ferocious work, uh, and there's a question about

what it even is, whether, whether there's...

whether that's even in the top 10 list of concerns we ought to have.

So

anyway, the, the connection I wanted to draw is

that the,

the projection that you're telling me Elon has made about

high income for everybody is a little bit like another version of

that,

right? It's like, okay, well,

sex became relatively easy to access

as a result of reliable birth control plus abortion.

And then now wealth, the ability to purchasing power, is gonna

become,

uh, trivial as a result of AI. I don't know if that's

likely, but let's say that Elon is right about that.

Well, okay, then what exactly is supposed to structure

your orientation to the universe?

What is supposed to give you

purpose? If it's not producing kids and protecting

them from the horrors of the world and making them strong so that

they can go out into it and accomplish important things of their

own,

and it's not creating wealth so that you will be

rewarded and that your spouse will

smile on you, whatever it is, then what is human

purpose? I think this is a, a terrifying prospect that

everything might be taken caref- care of for

us and leave human beings, um,

listless.

Sure.