Alex O'Connor

speaker

2,073 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 25 May

Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · Atheist vs Christian vs Spiritual Thinker: The Paperclip Problem That Exposes Religion! · 29 Sep 2025 podcast

It's not going to be something that, you know, there's that old, was it Lin Chi, the sort of the Buddhist koan that says, if you meet the Buddha,

Kill him.

The idea being that if you think that the kind of enlightenment which is necessary to spiritual fulfillment can be found through some kind of guru, you're missing the mark.

It's something that you need to do for yourself.

I think individuals can, but humanity can't.

This is essentially a version of Ernest Becker's denial of death hypothesis, which famously suggests that the motivation for a great deal of human behavior is at least human behavior outside of immediate sensory concerns like eating and stuff like that.

Anything that humans engage in on a societal level, on an abstract level, is ultimately motivated by an apprehension of death.

I think that's probably too simple, but it's

Definitely a contributing factor.

I think that, for example, put it this way, right?

Here's an example that comes from, I think his name's Scheffler, and he has this interesting thought experiment.

Suppose, I don't know, maybe you're engaged in writing a book.

Suppose you discovered, and this probably won't be the case for you because you believe in an afterlife, but suppose that you're an atheist for a moment.

Suppose it were the case that you discovered that after you die, a meteor is going to come and wipe out all life on Earth.

Everybody's going to die almost instantly after you do.

But you'll be dead.

So you will live your entire life as it was anyway.

And suppose the rest of the world doesn't even know this is going to happen.

But you're told this is going to be the case.

Would that motivate you to write your book more or less?

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