Paul Conti

And there's sadness and distress and all in that book, but there's a beauty of life and living and experience.

And I think to compare that beauty, like that's life, even if something's difficult and scary and sad, like there's something beautiful around the corner and here's a kind person and a new discovery, you know, more what was in him as a child.

And I think that we can get

As you and I were just talking about a few minutes ago, we can accentuate the negative and foster the negative and come to a place where we're looking for some in-depth philosophical answer, you know, some thick book, you know, that's going to explain all that to us instead of the simplicity that we've been talking about.

I think humility, gratitude helps us have just simple answers.

Positive experiences, feelings of contentment, feelings of connection with another person, learning, discovery.

And I think the answer to Camus' question is yes, and I think it lies in his writing about when he was a child, which I think he saw as less important than his later writings and the intellectual heaviness when I think maybe he had lost his way a little bit from the things he understood when he was younger.

Yeah.

You're bringing different sort of perspectives and trying to tease apart, like, well, wait, what are the differences in those perspectives, right?

And I think what it points out is that, okay, we tend to conflate things as human beings, right?

And to take two different things and try and make them into one.

But we also, I think, on the other end of the spectrum, get very overly reductionist.

And I think that when we get too overly reductionist, we lose the ability to learn from anything or to generate meaning.

The thing about Sartre, who the thought of existentialism is so consistent with him, who on the one hand wrote about...

very clear terms, like this is what it is and this is what it isn't, and here's how you're going to make your meaning in a very academically proscribed way.

But he also wrote short stories like The Wall, where something totally absurd happens as part of the story.

So I think...

What ends up happening is people either reduce themselves or get associated with something that, by being overly reductionist, takes us away from meaning, right?

The idea that, look, we don't know if there is an overarching religious meaning or what we call a religious meaning or purpose.

We don't know that, right?