This is the kind of drivel people love to eat right up.
"It's better to have a problem, than no problem at all."
"Being is better than non-being because being is a problem."
"Responsibility gives life meaning"
"Taking 4 days off every three months will help you to get more work done."
"Have a kid to distract you from existential questions."
"Desire the good and you can help solve the world's problems. Then maybe we wouldn't have so many problems to worry about."
Trying to convince people to spend their lives making other people happy instead of themselves.
This guy's full of it. I'm glad they didn't force me to sit through sermons like this when I was trying to study academics.
Not only do I think he's wrong, I think he's setting up a recipe for unhappiness and depression. Telling people there's a deeper meaning, there's a secret to life you can unlock, there's a correct answer to how you ought to live your life, all contributes to making people chronically miserable over their lifetimes.
What it does is make someone who's content, living a good life, enjoying their retirement, or their job they enjoy, or raising their family they love, and forces them to stop being happy and question, "Is this enough? Am I doing this right? Could I be living better?" It instill guilt in people for just enjoying themselves.
And I really take exception to his confidence. Ok, if you want to share your best guess for how to live well, great, let's talk about it. But to act like you've got it all figured out just seems like an incredible lack of humility to me and makes it hard for me to respect the way he comes to conclusions.
His entire view is pretty corporate/worker-bee friendly. People who followed his advice would make great employees, willing to work harder, for less, designing their lives around their economic output rather than their own pleasure. And it's pretty mainstream stuff in popular psychology today; that meaning or purpose is the foundation of happiness. I think that's just pointing people in the complete opposite direction though. Happiness is come to much more easily by understanding there is no meaning and no need for it.
