[Jordan B. Peterson] Making happiness the key pursuit in life is just hopeless. It’s just not a pursuit that’s going to fulfil itself. Life is already complex enough to make us anxious, painful, disappointed and hurt: that’s not a pessimistic viewpoint; it’s the truth.
My experience has been that it takes very little time to talk to someone, so that if you really listen to them, and get below the surface, you’ll find out how many truly difficult things they’re dealing with on a day-to-day-basis.
You do see people in rare periods of life where they’re comparatively carefree- but that’s not common, as far as I’m concerned.
The idea that impulsive gratification and ‘happiness’ are going to rectify life’s problems just strikes me as naïve beyond tenability, and so it’s no surprise that life is just a constant disappointment for people.
There are studies about the use of Facebook that show that the more people use Facebook, the more depressed they seem to get – and at least one of the hypotheses behind this is that everyone curates the best of their lives on Facebook, and you can understand why. It looks like one big happy advertisement for an indefinite number of perfect lives- but that’s an illusion, a polite illusion. You don’t want to see a picture on Facebook of one of your friends and their partner having a violent or even verbally violent argument. It’s just not what we share on there. We choose to keep that stuff private; but it does have the negative consequence of making Facebook reality seem much more positive than it really is.
The consequence of making money and celebrity of our idols
If you don’t place any emphasis on the development of character, or any belief that character is a reality; If you don’t believe in the utility of courage and truth as the means of making your way through life; then you’re left with – well – celebrity.
People are status conscious, and believe that wealth can provide not just security, but the sorts of experiences, I suppose, that would be commensurate with ‘happiness.’ Economic privation is of no pleasure to anyone, but the evidence suggests, unfortunately, that once you roughly earn a lower middle-class standard of living, additional money you earn beyond that has almost no effect on your quality of life.
Money allows you to do things, to embark on projects, but there isn’t any evidence that excess money past a certain level has any positive effects on ‘happiness’ or general wellbeing. Once you have a middle-class existence, you have almost all the primary luxuries.
Money can’t solve many of the problems that truly plague people. It can’t solve the problems in a relationship between a husband and wife, beyond the narrow economic front. It can’t straighten out the relationships you have with your children—in fact, it can make them wors
[Interviewer] How can we feel that we matter as individuals, that I matter?
[Jordan B. Peterson] The first thing we can notice is how much trouble we could cause if we act like we don’t matter and cease to take care of ourselves, and the people around us. That causes the irresponsible lifestyle that is predicated on the delusion that nothing matters. That leads to a tremendous amount of misery.
You need to attend to the sound of your own conscience and you’ll discover—quite rapidly—that there are problems in the world that are personally relevant to you and which bother you. You can find your destiny, in some sense, in those problems. They bother you for a reason.