From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Without what Becker called 'cultural world views' we would be overwhelmed by existential terror. Beliefs about reality that we share foster psychological equanimity by giving us a sense of meaning and value.
Only the educated are free.
As far as we know, space goes on for infinity, and yet is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. What is out there? We only understand about 5% of the universe, the rest is made-up of dark energy, dark matter and things we've yet to fully understand. Space triggers that innate curiosity in us about what's out there, where we came from, and the possibilities those answers could bring.
The question to be asked is why doesn't everybody fly?
For thousands of years of human history—let alone pre-history—there was never this sense, so common to us now, of a future likely to be radically different from the present. There was really a sense that humanity had already reached its peak, and so the question wasn't what comes next that's better, but rather how to prevent decline and loss.
The only reason we are the master of anything today is because of our intelligence. We're not the strongest species on the planet. We're not the biggest, we're not the most resilient. We're quite fragile and in all honesty, without our intelligence, we're quite irrelevant. The reality is, when they are smarter than we are, it is wishful thinking that they will continue to be connected to us.
From cell to civilisation took about 4 billion years, which is a long time—a third of the age of the universe. If it takes billions of years to produce complex living things at our level, maybe there aren't many places that could sustain an unbroken chain of life for that long.
We've lost our relationship with ourselves; and that is all-encompassing because without a relationship with ourselves, we can't then have a relationship with nature, with each other and the planet.
I do not talk about life and death – I talk about birth and death, they are opposites, and life is simply a continuum of both, and you cannot have one without the other.
Anti-goals are all about what you refuse to give up while chasing those goals. The trap a lot of people fall into is getting so laser-focused on the target that everything else just fades away. You put on blinders.
Excellence means you do the absolute best you can in every situation that you face. It's an aesthetic concept, a performance concept, and helps you create the most perfect balance for success.
Music is woven into the fabric of the universe. As far back as Pythagoras and Kepler, scientists were writing about the fact that music was intrinsic in the planets… part of the harmonic series in sound. We also have a whole branch of knowledge called zoomusicology, which shows that an appreciation of music and sound is a part of nature, not just unique to humans.