Ep. 1541 - Every Young Man Who Feels Lost Should Listen To This
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Summary
Jacob Imam is a writer, speaker, founder of the College of St. Joseph the Worker, and a guy who talks about an issue that I focus on a lot as well over the years. And that's why I was interested in sitting down with him to discuss the issue of masculinity in the culture, and specifically why so many young men seem to have lost drive and ambition that used to define being a young man. And how do we get that back?
Transcript
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Joined today by Dr. Jacob Imam, who's a writer, speaker, founder of the College of St. Joseph
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the Worker, and a guy who talks a lot about an issue that I focus on a lot as well over
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the years, which is why I was interested in sitting down with him, and that's the issue
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of masculinity in the culture, and specifically why so many young men seem to have lost drive
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and ambition that used to define being a young man, and how do we get that back?
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You know, when I was a young man, which I don't know if I qualify anymore, but when I was in
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my early 20s, I could think about that time for me being really just being overflowing
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with ambition, I can remember, and still much the same way, but especially at that time,
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and just kind of working obsessively towards my goals, but then you look at, and it's
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not the case, we don't want to generalize too much, but many young men today, and I don't
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know if this is just me being an old fuddy-duddy, but I don't see that as much in many young men.
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There doesn't seem to be that same drive, that same just like, I need to get out there and
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Have you noticed that, and what do you attribute that to?
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I think it's impossible not to notice that today.
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I mean, everybody from the Karens and the bureaucratic white liberals that scream at young men for
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being incompetent and worthless, everybody too, the Jordan Peterson's who are actually
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giving them something positive and a constructive way forward, is noticing that and saying that.
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And obviously there's multi-layered, you know, reasons for why this is, but no doubt a huge
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part of it is that there is no activity of young people today.
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You only have a character in your soul from the actions that you take.
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You know, characters comes from that Greek word that means like an engraving and a mark.
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You know, the way that your soul actually has a particular character about it, a particular
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identity to it, is because you've actually engraved it with your actions.
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We've handed them phones, we've handed them computers, we've told them to sit in their
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rooms functionally through our marketing and our advertisement, just stay there, don't
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And so I think that the, you know, the shape of their bodies is much like the shape of their
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souls, very much blob-like, undefined, not all that interesting, right?
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And so part of the resurrection of masculinity is certainly going to have to come through
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doing real things, transforming the world so that it visibly looks different.
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We just haven't even taught them that that's a good thing to do or how to achieve it.
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I think that there's a problem when you don't have a lodestar, you don't have a compass of
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what you're actually trying to shoot for and achieve.
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And I firmly believe that if holiness is not that lodestar, if that's not your north star,
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then you're going to keep going through these mindless cycles where one generation after
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the next looks up at their dad and say, what on earth were you doing?
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And their children are going to be just as right and justifiably saying, you were wrong.
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This was silly, just as much as they were of their fathers.
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I see this also, you know, in so much in young men today that they are searching to even have
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I think this is something that screams out everything from them trying to dress in a certain
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way or post in a certain way, even their taking on of a certain ideology, whether that be left or
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right or certain brand within, is a way in which they're trying to be a person, have an identifiable
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But you don't get an identity just by claiming one.
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The only way you ever get an identity is by giving of yourself to something real, to
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It's only at that point that you ever start to have a character that's worth having.
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Do you think a man, a young man needs to get married and have kids in order to, do you
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You definitely have to have some vocation that is pulling you out of yourself.
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I mean, when your kid screams at 2 a.m., it's not like, great, I'm so happy that I'm giving
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But you didn't choose the moment of giving yourself.
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You don't plan out, you know, I'm done with work at 5 and there, I'm going to plan out the
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As great as that is, you know, it's when you're in a true relationship with somebody
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that you don't get to determine when you are called to give of yourself or not.
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And that's what kids provide better than anything in the world, I think, at that.
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And that's one of the problems with saying that, as you point out, that, well, you don't
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need to, you know, in order to be in service to others, you don't need to get married and
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So the way that I look at it is that every man is called to fatherhood.
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And for the vast majority of men, that will take on the literal biological, you know,
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But I don't think any man is called to just live entirely for himself.
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Now, of course, the pushback that you hear is on the family piece and the marriage piece
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specifically is, well, it's a rigged game these days, you know, getting married in particular.
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The family court system is stacked against you.
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And let's, who knows, your wife ends up being a terrible person, cheats on you, takes the
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kids, takes all your money, and your life is left in ruins.
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You know, you're a sucker if you take the risk.
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So how do you, how do you justify being a sucker and going off and having kids and getting
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You know, I just think that's the most ridiculous thing that anybody could possibly say.
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This is why there's no sexual, like real sexual attraction today, I think as well.
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Because all, like what you just said, it was like a whole list of calculations.
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I got to do my background check on this woman, like see what she's done, like what's her
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I mean, mainly it's girls doing this to guys, right, too, is saying, you know, how much
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That's not talking about getting swept off your feet.
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I mean, at that point, you're just talking about research, right?
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But if you really want to have the opportunity to love someone, like truly give yourself an
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act, and in that act, become somebody, finally, like become somebody yourself, then that has
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You know, being swept off your feet is before a person that stands out.
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I mean, I think about the line from the Song of Songs, when the woman's singing, that like
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an apple tree amongst the trees of the forest is my lover, right?
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I mean, there's a million different trees out there, but there's only one that stands out
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Not necessarily to everybody, but to that person.
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If you don't want to have anybody know you as standing out amongst the trees of the forest,
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You'll also be a waste on the rest of society as well, by the way, because you've never practiced
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how to be charitable and this perfect opportunity to, so that you'll never be able to take that
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habit and to actually die for something great one day either.
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And you're also, you're embracing a life of misery in order, because you're afraid that
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Well, you know, and isn't that the larger problem that's going on?
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I just, at the root of all tyranny is fear, right?
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And I think this is a big problem of why men do feel humiliated today.
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I think they're also just being, you know, humiliated.
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Talk about those Karens, talk about the Jordan Petersons, but it's not just those people that
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I mean, a guy does not need to be told by somebody else that he's a wimp.
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You know, he knows that about himself though, as well.
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And in part, because there's so much fear, like he has actually been dominated by the world
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And he's not able to show any resilience against them.
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I mean, I think about this, you know, in part because, uh, of what we're trying to, to do
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to like, actually, how do we get a guy out of that situation?
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Like, how do, how do we raise him up out of that state?
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You know, and, and a large part of it is going to have to be, he needs to fight against everything
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I mean, he won't, corporate interest wants the guy to be lazy.
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He wants to be, have the guy not know how to defend, guard, and protect other people.
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Because then that guy needs to spend more money on stuff.
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If you're being set up in the system of corporate interest where people say, you know, it's more
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profitable for you to be skill-less than not, it's not going to be a lot of motivation.
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I mean, everything in that, in society is then going to be oriented to keep him where he is.
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Shouldn't he also, and I want to get your reaction to this, because you talk about the fear, and fear is natural.
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And also, I think you have to be willing to take risks.
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And I think that's, in my opinion, that's one of the major roles that a father can play in the life of his sons in particular, also his daughters, but in particular his sons, is to teach them how and show them how to take good risks.
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Now, there are foolish risks that a person could take, but there's also good risks, and a man has to be willing to take risks.
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So when I hear from young men, well, if I get married, here's the long list of awful things that might happen as a result.
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You know, if I go and get married to this woman and we have kids, how do I know that 15 years from now she's not going to go and run off with some guy she met at the gym and leave me in ruins?
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And the answer, of course, is that, well, there's a whole lot you can do to guard yourself against that.
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When people talk about the divorce rate is whatever, they claim 40%.
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It does not mean that if you get married that your chance of getting divorced is 40%.
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There's a lot you can do to guard yourself against it.
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But how do you know for a fact those terrible things aren't going to happen?
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Anything good you do in your life, it's possible.
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You can't look in a crystal ball and see exactly what's going to happen to you over the next 50 years of your life.
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And when you give yourself to someone who you love and you give your life to them completely, there is a risk.
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But nothing good or worthwhile has ever been achieved by anyone ever in life without taking a risk.
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And so that seems to be the breakdown with a lot of young men.
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But if you're not willing to take any risk with your life at all, you will literally never do anything.
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I think one other question for them to ask, if they're like seriously in this predicament and they're not just lying to themselves and thinking about how to think about risk.
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You have to ask yourself the question, if this fails, was it still a good thing for me to do, right?
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Did I become a better person for just trying it out, right?
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And, you know, of course you have to do your calculation, figure, you know, as much as is warranted about figuring out who this person is that you're marrying or, you know, building your financial model, making sure that the numbers make sense before you take the leap into a new startup or something like that.
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But, you know, ultimately you have to say, would I regret the time?
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You know, would I become a better person even if this flopped?
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And I think that's like the ultimate litmus test.
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But that's how you have to decide whether or not it's a good one.
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One of the great things about having kids is that it's one of those things that once you do it in life, and you have a child, and you love your child, you can never really fully regret.
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There's a lot of things I did in my life prior to having kids that, a lot of mistakes that I made.
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Like, I can't really live in regret about anything because I have my kids, you know.
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And so even to your point, if you go off and you start a family and you have children, even if something goes horribly wrong, and there's other ways.
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But it's one of those things that once you've experienced it, you can never really regret it.
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Because you've been, you're experiencing something that's so objectively good that even if things go off the rails somehow in some unforeseen way, you can't have regret.
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Yeah, no, we would call you a monster if you regretted that, actually.
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Going back just specifically to work for a minute.
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Because the pushback on that that I get all the time when I talk about this, and I'm sure you've heard the same thing, talk about the value of work.
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You know, and if you want to live, you have to work.
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And if you're not going to work, it means, only way to live and not work is to basically live off of someone who is working for you.
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What I hear is, hey, man, you know, you're telling young men to go out and be wage slaves and to be corporate pawns and to live, to just embrace this life of meaningless drudgery.
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If you go back and take a look at the ancient world and what they all thought the creation of the world was like, they all said the same thing.
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I mean, think about the Atrahasis, which is like the Babylonian myth.
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Like if you were a young Christian kid growing up today, your parents probably read to you the beginning of the Bible.
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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
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If you were a good Babylonian boy 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, you were being read this myth, which opens up,
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in the beginning, the gods and not the men bore the load and handled the drudgery.
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They're complaining about work right from the beginning, right?
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And you look around at pretty much any ancient myth, and they all say the exact same thing.
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And then you go and look at the Bible, which is unique in the ancient volumes of creation myths,
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when it says that it was before the fall God gave the gift of work to man,
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and actually does so right next to the gift of marriage.
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Subduing and having dominion over the world is said right next to be fruitful and multiply.
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And you ask the question, okay, well, what's the reason for those two things being connected?
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You start there before even moving to why work is a joy and not a drudgery.
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Well, you think about marriage, and you start with something that is material, like your bodies, right?
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You know, just as you're saying, just something objectively good.
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I mean, the spiritual emerges out of it a new soul, right?
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It's something that cannot just be reduced to pure nature.
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You know, if you want to build a house, you first imagine the house in your mind.
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This is the original glory that is revealed in work, next to marriage, no less, that it
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actually is a way of bridging heaven and earth together.
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And when God commands Adam in Genesis to till and to keep the garden, he's using words that
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are more often used in the Old Testament, abad v'shamar, to speak about the Levitical duties
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of the priests, that they are supposed to be ritually keeping the liturgy, praying around
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Well, namely that what our work is supposed to be is, again, like marriage, a bridge,
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between heaven and earth, a way of transforming the world so that it actually matters, insofar
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as we're welcoming God into a relationship that he's already welcomed us into.
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And this is why I say that if you don't have holiness or this transcendent understanding
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of relation built and nestled in love itself, then it is going to be dissatisfying.
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You're just going to be a corporate pawn, or you're going to feel that way.
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Of course, there are terrible jobs that do bear more drudgery, and that's, of course,
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But if you don't have that fundamental understanding of what work is actually for, you're just going
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I think, you know, when you do find, when Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree, the knowledge
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of good and evil, and God gives them these sets of curses, those aren't curses really at
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I think they're instructing man into a new way of seeing the world.
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I mean, God put them in the garden, gave them all the fruit to eat from.
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Work was something that was inherently disassociated from the necessities of life, or getting the
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I think the temperature was pretty good, you know?
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What they were ultimately doing was seeing work, was taking on work as a way of building
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that relationship between heaven and earth, and also building their own souls, actually
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engraving their souls with a new type of character through their activity.
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That's the original purpose of what work is for.
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Now, after the fall, it becomes that so that we would continue to work, so that we would
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continue to engrave our souls, so as to continue to grow, actually take steps in the pursuit
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So even if you have a bad job, that's what you have to be focusing on.
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I'm just thinking, I think one of the, maybe some of the confusion here is the distinction
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between a job and work, because the way that people talk about it these days is, they talk
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about it like, well, jobs are an invention of the industrial age, and it's kind of the
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office space, just like going to the office and moving numbers around for no reason.
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And if only we didn't have that, if only we didn't have this capitalistic system, then
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we wouldn't have to deal, it's almost like we would live in a world with no work.
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But it's like, well, no, actually, there was arguably, not even arguably, there was a lot
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more work to be done prior to the industrial age.
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So we actually, when people complain these days about, well, I got to go to the nine to five
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job, you see these TikTok videos of people that are often, you know, Gen Z, young people
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in tears because they've just discovered the drudgery of work.
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And they're talking about, oh, I got to go to work for eight hours.
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And it's like, that, do you understand that you're, you stand in very rare company in the
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whole history of humanity that you actually have multiple hours a day by your own telling
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Like that, that's very rare for people even on earth today, but certainly historically,
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you go back prior to the industrial age, that like didn't exist unless you were a pharaoh
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or, you know, the, you know, the emperor of Rome.
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Well, kind of, I mean, I, I'm not going to defend them at all.
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I'm going to, I'm going to hammer on them, but I think a better critique of them needs
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And you actually do find in the middle ages, I mean, we know the number of, number of days
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per year that like Benedictine monks worked, right?
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And, and it's actually about half the year sitting around, sometimes ranging from about
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158 to 172 days a year that they would actually be working.
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So there, there are occasions in history where we find an unbelievable reduction of work because
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Well, I guess I would, this is the distinction of, so what do we, what are we calling work?
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So what I mean is if you're in the middle ages, it would seem to me impossible that in most
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cases that you could go through even two days without doing some kind of work, at least
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how we would define it today, because you got to eat.
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And so today we're in a situation where when you get home from work.
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You can actually just do no work and sit around where I think prior, I think, you know,
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Hence the blob-like character of, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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No, I think the distinction you made between work and a job is, is gold, right?
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I mean, when we think about a job, we think about something that hopefully you don't mind
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And that's really the first thing that you say about it is that, you know, if you have
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a good job, you define it as, I get good pay and I don't mind it too much, right?
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But a work, that's, when you use that word, it feels like it has more of a heavy sense
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My, my godfather was a guy named Walter Hooper, who served as C.S. Lewis's secretary at the
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And when C.S. Lewis died, he was wondering, you know, what do I do now?
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And a dear friend of Lewis's kind of looked him squarely in the eye and said, I, I think
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And that had always stuck with Walter to the, to the last, last of his days, that there was
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And he did it, you know, and that, that I think is when we start to look beyond the
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necessities, right, of after the fall, having to work so that you eat and seeing beyond it
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to, this is fundamentally about the transformation of the world so that I can welcome more people
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into this relationship with God and myself as well.
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And yeah, and I think when, when you're looking at a complaint against, against kind of the
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lethargy that is prolific today, it, it's, I think the complaint arises because they don't
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know what their work is and what they're supposed to do.
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And they're going to hate their job until they've squared themselves with that more fundamental
00:27:24.140
Jeremy's Razors crunched numbers to map out the grim reality of a razorless American revolution.
00:27:31.820
Suddenly, our founders became a bunch of dirty, unshaven hippies whining about the man.
00:27:36.400
The lesson, without a damn good shave, history falls apart.
00:27:39.820
Thankfully, Jeremy's Razors is here to keep jawlines sharp in America's golden age.
00:27:43.120
And to honor President's Day, you get 20% off to do it.
00:27:51.360
Yeah, I guess if you don't have any sense of why you're doing it or what the job is for,
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I think that, like, there's two opposite ends of the spectrum.
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And in my mind, a life where there's just nothing to do at all is torturous.
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On the other hand, a life where there's a lot to do, but you don't know what it's for.
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You know, it's like the cool hand, you ever see Cool Hand Luke, the movie?
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But in that movie, in order to punish Luke, Paul Newman's character, the warden has him
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dig a hole and then fill it back in and then just dig it again.
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And I guess for a lot of people, that's what their jobs kind of feel like because they don't
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have any sense of, and in particular, if you don't have a family, you don't have a wife
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and kids, they don't have this spiritual sense, you don't have a faith, it does feel a bit
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I think there's the other side of it, too, is that their bosses or the guys that founded
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the company might not have an answer to that question as well.
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And therefore, of course, the type of jobs that those guys are then building, designing,
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creating are going to occasion that sense of, you know, hopelessness in them.
00:29:17.320
And so, again, like, you got to give credit, but of course, that's not the only job out
00:29:22.080
There's just an enormous amount of good work to be done where you can be your own keeper.
00:29:27.220
I mean, this is a part, of course, at this point, I'm biased, but this is originally why
00:29:32.580
I chose to help serve the skilled trades is specifically because you can be your own owner.
00:29:41.580
Like, you can actually fulfill the American dream of being in charge of your life and
00:29:48.360
having ownership over the means of production, if they want to keep using that same language
00:30:00.300
I mean, in a real sense where you can't if you're just clocking in and clocking out.
00:30:04.980
I mean, when Jefferson, Madison, they were like thinking about how on earth the republic
00:30:09.420
was going to exist and perpetuate, they were thinking about the Yohan farmer, right?
00:30:16.500
I mean, it's like the small farmer who could defend the republic and he could take good charge
00:30:23.220
of the republic precisely because he could take charge of himself, that he was independent
00:30:33.260
He was able to feed himself and provide himself by his own work.
00:30:38.780
And it gave him a stability in a place to be a rock and a pillar for their communities.
00:30:46.900
Now, that is really quite a remarkable thing because if that is truly the American dream,
00:30:58.240
And of course, we don't have to be farmers today.
00:31:01.320
I mean, I think the equivalent of the Yohan farmer today is the small business owner, right?
00:31:06.240
But the idea is the same, is that he who has independent means can truly have an independent
00:31:15.880
He's somebody that can think for himself, that can penetrate and cut through rhetoric and dissembling
00:31:22.120
from all of the propaganda that is disseminated today, that he's able, because he is secure
00:31:29.560
in his own ability for material provisions, to also be able to be a provision to himself
00:31:38.660
and to others in terms of the spiritual ones as well and to the thoughts that are actually
00:31:45.540
And how does a young man get to that, get there from, he's in a job that he hates and
00:31:56.040
Without cheating and applying to the College of St. Joseph, the worker, right?
00:32:01.300
What's the, I mean, how did, because what I hear is, well, look, look, it sounds great.
00:32:13.480
The jobs that I'm in, there's no opportunity for growth.
00:32:23.680
But I think a part of it is that you have to be open to jobs that maybe your parents
00:32:30.780
You know, I mean, when you talk about the skilled trades, for instance, the opportunities
00:32:36.500
there are immense, but of course we have a great disdain for it.
00:32:42.300
And the world has always had a great disdain for, for, yeah, actually manual labor.
00:32:47.960
I think about here, like the ancient Greeks, like the city-states of Sparta and Thieves
00:32:54.240
that literally had laws on the books forbidding their citizens from engaging in manual labor.
00:32:59.740
However, Athens didn't have one of these laws, but Aristotle wrote in his politics,
00:33:04.840
his treatise on politics, that the life of a tradesman was ignoble and inimical to the
00:33:11.080
You know, Caesar, or Cicero, excuse me, pretty much said the same thing and at different
00:33:15.500
occasions in Roman history, similar laws forbidding citizens from engaging in manual labor hit
00:33:22.940
And I look at this and say, okay, the Greeks hated work.
00:33:27.040
The Romans hated work, and into the Greco-Roman world, the word became flesh and spent most
00:33:34.480
of the years of his life at the carpenter's bench, that Christ's life was political dynamite
00:33:41.840
because it completely overturned who you thought the lowly carpenter to be.
00:33:48.260
I mean, he literally, as St. Paul said, it came in the form of a slave, right?
00:33:52.240
And he's not talking, you know, in any sort of analogical sense.
00:33:57.340
I mean, he actually is, allegorical sense, excuse me, he actually is coming in the form
00:34:03.760
But if Christ truly, and I, you know, this is just true, it's authoritatively true that
00:34:09.940
Christ reveals true humanity to us, then he has revealed something about the dignity of
00:34:18.280
And when you look then at his followers, those who came after him, they didn't take that for
00:34:26.000
And here I'm thinking about the early monasteries, which were the early seats of education as
00:34:33.720
There was a pace of life and a dance of the daily routine that moved around the chapel
00:34:40.820
where the monks prayed, the library where they studied and carried on the most sophisticated
00:34:47.160
and hard-earned parts of wisdom that we have still today, and then to the fields where they
00:34:56.820
And that movement between the chapel, the library, and the fields was the model of their life.
00:35:04.040
But it was also, I have to say, their business model too.
00:35:10.280
And so you fast forward a few years when that monastic model becomes ingrained and instantiated
00:35:22.340
Where you find guys like Hugh of St. Victor and St. Bonaventure talking about the trifold
00:35:30.060
distinction of the arts, which are the liberal arts, you should say something like philosophy,
00:35:36.060
theology, you know, the more speculative and theoretical forms of knowledge.
00:35:42.300
So the practical arts, which are like politics and economics, actually, how do we govern and
00:35:48.280
Down to the mechanical or the manual arts, which is like farming, which is like carpentry,
00:35:55.240
which is like masonry, and they fit together not just because different people are good
00:35:59.960
at different things, but because you can't have the one without the other.
00:36:04.700
What you believe is fundamentally going to change how you build.
00:36:08.460
And having the ability to build is going to enable you to have the freedom to think and
00:36:16.480
to think freely and to think without a tyrant influencing what's actually in your mind.
00:36:22.820
So I think that there is a tremendous dignity to many of the forms of work that the ancient
00:36:32.100
world, and I would say our modern world, has looked down upon, and that we have to put away
00:36:38.360
the ancient pagan disdain for a lot of these jobs and instead embrace something that I think
00:36:44.460
is far more dynamic and far more sophisticated as a view of what they are.
00:36:50.100
I think that the trades are a clear option for this.
00:36:54.000
There's over 500,000 open jobs in the skilled trades, and we're not talking about guys in
00:37:01.180
We're talking about those who actually need to exercise their creative capacity to troubleshoot
00:37:06.400
and figure out problems today that actually engages your mind wholly so that you can also
00:37:15.180
I think that that is a real possibility for pretty much anybody in any city in the United
00:37:25.040
And I would say, you know, to take it a step further, one of the reasons why I'm so dedicated
00:37:30.000
to seeing tradesmen, highly educated tradesmen, truly trained in the liberal arts is because
00:37:36.700
a liberal arts education is almost least wasted on a tradesman because he is the owner of his
00:37:46.440
own means of production, because he is of independent means and therefore has an ability to be of
00:37:52.820
independent mind in a way that not everyone in society is today.
00:37:56.940
So if you're complaining about your job right now, and you don't know what the next step
00:38:01.560
is, then maybe you need to think in a wider horizon and see where true dignity lies.
00:38:07.560
And so, and also if it's true that you don't see any opportunities where you live, there's
00:38:11.460
always the option of moving as well, which is, you know.
00:38:20.300
And that's why I'm always preaching, if you're, especially if you're a young man with no kids
00:38:25.640
and no wife, you are in really this amazing position where you can go anywhere and do anything.
00:38:35.540
And so there's really, like, you can move to Alaska if you needed to, if you wanted to.
00:38:42.840
Um, and, uh, so I don't know that you got these young men that feel somehow tied down
00:38:50.020
or, or like they can't move around when, why not?
00:38:54.840
You know, um, so tell me about the College of St. Joseph's the Worker.
00:39:00.620
So this is an idea that first, now it's reality.
00:39:03.900
It was, it was a hope to find a way of being able to continue to train students in the
00:39:11.940
classical liberal arts, but doing it in such a way as that they could simultaneously be
00:39:17.800
financially stable all the way through college and not graduate up to their eyeballs in debt.
00:39:22.580
And then also to have a means by which to instantiate these ideas into the world and
00:39:33.000
I was, um, in between my master's and my, uh, doctorate when I, um, first started to
00:39:38.940
write the model and I was doing it in part because I thought I was going to go off and
00:39:43.240
be a professor and then be terribly guilt ridden, bringing all these students into the classroom
00:39:48.720
and knowing that they were going to, you know, get $60,000 in debt and go off and make a,
00:39:57.220
And the math just didn't seem justifiable to me.
00:40:00.040
Um, and so we started to pick at a new model, a new idea where, um, students can come and
00:40:06.980
be formed in the Catholic intellectual tradition to earn their BA degrees, regular four year
00:40:12.480
degree, um, while also being trained in the skilled trades to earn their journeyman card
00:40:17.980
to, to actually be able to work as a skilled tradesman on any job site in the U S. And because
00:40:24.200
you get paid to train in the skilled trades, you graduate, uh, net even instead of again,
00:40:34.300
This is the inaugural class that we're, that we're educating this year.
00:40:49.940
You're out and done, commenced in all, just like every other, every other university.
00:41:02.260
We have some operations going in Weirton, West Virginia, just across the Ohio river.
00:41:07.060
Um, it's a marvelous, uh, in historic area that we're in, but totally defeated as, as
00:41:13.900
I would say this is, you know, when people talk about the Rust Belt, man, we are in this
00:41:27.000
Um, I'd say about 80% of the downtown is all boarded up and empty.
00:41:31.580
It's, it's, it's actually a pretty rich opportunity to be part of a revitalization effort
00:41:36.820
in the middle of the downtown, uh, simultaneous with this, uh, launching of the college.
00:41:42.240
If, uh, any young man was listening to this conversation, what, what's the main thing you'd
00:41:48.020
I, I, I think that, um, if you're a young guy that's struggling to find good work, I think
00:41:54.220
you need to spend some time seriously, quietly by yourself, realize asking the question,
00:42:03.140
And if you are struggling to figure that out, then go find the wisest person that, you know,
00:42:13.600
Ask the wisest person that, you know, like, what should I be working for?
00:42:20.120
But I think we need to get back to actually understanding what our, what our principal
00:42:23.280
ends are, like what, what we actually have as a goal and a purpose for our life.
00:42:28.680
Otherwise, you're just going to keep taking steps.
00:42:30.960
It's like getting in a car and driving without knowing the directions of where you're supposed
00:42:37.080
You'll, you'll, you'll hit the, your foot will be on that pedal and you will be going
00:42:40.560
You'll be working for something, but you might not hit that end.
00:42:53.280
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00:44:07.440
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