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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I just wanted to reframe.
You should be curious.
I think, yeah.
I mean, I think people need tasks.
I think that purpose is intimately tied up with the idea of task to fulfill.
It's why people tend to find meaning in projects which are not completed yet.
In fact, Pascal writes quite compellingly about this when he writes about boredom.
And he imagines a...
A gambler, someone who enjoys gambling, and says, well, why is this person gambling?
Because they're doing this thing with the chance of winning some money.
Okay, so why don't you just give them the money?
Just take the gambler and give him all the money that he could possibly receive without playing the game.
And he won't be very fulfilled, even though he's getting ostensibly what he was trying to get.
No, no, that wouldn't be fulfilling because he enjoys the gambling.
Okay, says Pascal, then let him play the game.
But make it such that he'll never actually win the money.
But he gets to keep playing the game.
And he's not going to be very fulfilled by that either.
That's also going to be completely pointless.
And so Pascal noticed that what you kind of need to avoid boredom, and I suppose to imbue your life with purpose, at least in this analogy, is some kind of task to fulfill that
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