Doctor Mike

The ancient school, which says that essence precedes existence.

The meaning of Mike's life existed before Mike was born, and your job is to find it and live up to it.

And that's most philosophies, too.

I mean, certainly Aristotle and Socrates and Plato believe that.

And all, you know, most of, even most contemporary philosophers would believe that.

Then there's this sort of the existentialist school, which says that existence precedes essence.

So Sartre said that you exist and

And you have to invent your essence and live according to it.

Invent your meaning.

You're self-inventing in this way.

That's very, very powerful too.

There's a third option, which is that life has no essence.

That it's just existence.

And being free of that is like just to laugh at it all.

just laugh at it all.

And that gives a tremendous sense of power because it has a descriptive quality to it.

And when they get back to the neurobiology of this, when young men in particular are being forced to live exclusively in the left hemisphere of their brains.

When they don't even know all this right hemispheric activity that their grandparents just routinely felt through their boredom and through their heartbreak and through their suffering and through the complete lack of a technologized existence.

They don't know that.

They've never experienced meaning.