Dr. K

So I think the audience can guess too.

Right?

So it's like it's okay if you don't want to do that because –

I'm guessing that there are certain things in your intellect that tell you.

So do you have a subjective instinct?

Yeah, so I think that your answer right now is the reason why you think some of these questions are unanswerable.

So I think if you adopt that frame, you'll never know.

Okay, let me just finish.

Okay, so…

My first experience of this, right, is that first of all, there is a subjective barometer, like how do we know whether we have purpose?

Maybe we listen to other people, but there is some sort of internal sense of this.

And this is where the science becomes really important because if you look at people who have like a history of trauma or something, what you tend to find is that there are certain like neurobiological things that can happen to you that will literally affect the parts of your brain that are able to detect purpose.

So this is sort of like a subjective experience and I think the way that – and I love your emphasis on mechanism and I think this is what, in my opinion, science and spirituality can really add is they add the how, right?

They add like why is it that one person has purpose and another person doesn't have purpose.

So first thing is that in my experience and the way that I operate, I'm not saying it's correct.

It's just – it's effective in terms of helping people move the needle on reducing suicidality, improving resilience, giving them a reason to wake up in the morning.

Like it tends to work and it's not just me.

It's that there's a bunch of methodologies that we have in psychotherapy and stuff like that that accomplish these kinds of things, that there's some internal sense of purpose.

Now, what I think surprises a lot of people is that there are two ways that you increase that sense of purpose.

The first is a bucket of things that are kind of counterintuitive.