Arthur Brooks

Obviously there's a cause and effect problem and a glitch in our logic.

Yeah, and you know, there's nothing wrong with these big why questions.

The problem is having these big why questions and believing that if you watch enough internet videos and take enough supplements that you'll be able to answer these things.

And this is one of the, this is a big generational difference that we actually find.

There, every philosophical school of note and of merit has something of the ancient Greeks called aporia, which is to sit in a state of puzzlement over questions that can't be answered.

So Zen Buddhism is based on koans.

Koans are riddles.

You know, what is the sound of one hand clapping?

And a strange, unanswerable question.

You're supposed to ponder that.

And in the pondering, you gain a certain kind of complex knowledge, which we know is, you know, the dominantly processed in the right hemisphere of the brain, right?

A big generational difference is that what's missing for a lot of people's lives today is that at night with their friends, they're not having these BS philosophical conversations about big questions that can't be answered.

That was what you did.

At 1130, after you came home from a party with your friends in college in 1985, is it like, I don't know, dude, do you think God exists?

Right?

It's like, wow, dude.

And now it's like, so we've stopped doing that one thing.

There's nothing wrong with big why questions.

The problem is that we only either ask questions that can be addressed by Google or ChatGPT, or we believe that if we have enough scientific knowledge that these questions can be answered.

Both of those are a big, big wrong turn.