Why Most People Cannot Change Their Mind
On the phenomenon of losing all meaning
Hi, I’m Max Murphy! A failed creative turned existential imbecile. These days, I write The Murphy Memos where we explore the absurdity of existence with crappy jokes.
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The past few weeks, we’ve been talking about the Sisyphean struggle of figuring out what the actual fuck is going on here (hint: we aren’t making any progress).
Start here if you’re new to this terrible way of thinking.
Today, we’re gunna talk about something seemingly unrelated: why most people are dense motherfuckers.
The Journey for Meaning
Death anxiety is our default mode of existence. Sitting around and stressing out about how fucked we really are.
To Becker, it’s necessary to create hero mythologies that give life meaning, and deny the inevitability of death.
There’s an interesting overlap between Becker’s hero myth and John Vervaeke’s idea of a worldview, "A worldview is two things simultaneously: (1) a model of the world and (2) a model for acting in that world. It turns the individual into an agent who acts, and it turns the world into an arena in which those actions make sense."
A hero myth/worldview doesn’t just deny your death, it transforms you from a nothing into a something. And for most of history, just about everyone shared a worldview with those around them.
Back in the day, if you were vibing in Medieval Europe, you were probably all in on Christianity. Your daily dose of beliefs was served up hot and fresh by your local community, the church, and even the government.
Christianity wasn’t just your worldview; it was the worldview of everyone around you.
Did anyone bat an eye?
Hell no.
Christianity gave every little thing you did profound meaning. Your entire existence was a spiritual smackdown against sin and Satan.
But we’re living after the death of god.
Once a worldview has been stripped away, what are you left with?
Suddenly, you're not a valiant child of God on a holy crusade. You're just John, the guy who can't even fight off the temptation to eat meat on Fridays.
As silly and flawed as the Medieval worldview may have been, it was better than nothing.
Bad Sex is Better Than No Sex
A worldview is actually kinda like sex. They’re both perfectly natural, and make you feel like you're on top of the world.
Without them, life feels like a never-ending Monday morning without coffee.
Picture this. You’re a lonely guy. Divorced. The last few tinder dates were dumpster fires. You just need to get it. So, you drive to the bad part of town, and find the woman you’ll be making love to on a dimly lit street at 2 in the morning: Tracy.
Tracy has gonorrhea and refuses to stop smoking her cigarette the whole time, but it was worth every dollar.
Anything is better than another cold shower.
This was better than nothing.
A worldview is no different.
Having sex a worldview gives life meaning.
When you don’t have a worldview, you lack purpose, meaning, and hope.
You are a random accident and everything you do is a random accident.
You become a nihilistic nothing. The spiritual equivalent of an incel, starved of the one thing in the world you want most.
I can’t go back to cold showers
You don’t need to spend a lot of time in the nihilistic nothingness to see how fucking terrible it is. Instead, people find another prostitute, and cling to her for dear life.
They trade in Tracy for chlamydia Claire, and then marry her so they’ll never be alone again.
Today, we’ve seen the rise of all kinds of goofy new worldviews online. People are so desperate to have a “why” that they turn to Alex Jones.
How fucked up is you?
The thought of returning to the cold shower is unfathomable. So it doesn’t matter if every single building block of this new worldview is a bullshit. Instead, people turn off their brain.
“I will NOT become a nihilistic nothing again!”
And this is why they don’t believe you when you tell them the government isn’t really turning the frogs gay, or that Obama isn’t secretly a lizard from Mars.
The pain of having your worldview shattered into a million pieces is traumatic.
They tried being open-minded before, and when they did, they lost all sense of meaning and purpose.
A human without a worldview is more fucked than any prostitute ever could be.
No one knows that better than them.
ps: watch this video if you want to learn how everything we believe is a lie :)
It seems we engage with a lot of the same thinkers — I love John Verveake’s work.
The idea of a world view as a source of meaning is an interesting one, and what’s interesting to me is that we get to — at least in part — construct that world view. :)