What is the point of it all?

Be the stones in the river

The following is the transcript of today’s podcast in which I try to answer a reader’s question: “With things the way they are, what is the point of all of this?” Link to the pod below.

This is Jason Herbert, and this is a Reckoning. Everybody happy Sunday. I hope you're having a good weekend, a better weekend than I did a couple nights ago. My beloved Kentucky Wildcats lost. We perished in the round of 16 in the NCAA tournament. And that happens, right? I'm still happy for the guys. It's still a good year coming back. And if you want to try to win, sometimes you're going to risk losing and that's part of it, right? The idea of loss just makes the victories all that much sweeter.

But I decided that I was going to have a little fun with all of this. I kind of messaged on Blue Sky, I was like, you know what? We lost. I've got this bottle of wine and I'm going to sit on the couch and pout. And I invited everyone to send me questions on this app called NGL Not Gonna Lie. It's an anonymous app where you can ask questions anonymously, things like that. So it's kind of fun. I've done it a few times before. And frankly, I think I like the attention more than anything else. I kind of chuckle some of the questions I get. And oftentimes it's history or movies, as you can probably imagine. Sometimes it's Star Wars. Sometimes people ask me who I'm dating or dating life. I don't know why you guys are interested in that, but whatever. So I posted. And of course, I got lots of questions about history and movies and different things, some cool questions and stuff like that.

But I got a couple questions which led me to today that kind of stuck in my head. And I've been thinking about them ever since I got them Friday night. And I thought about them all day Saturday when I'm recording this recording this late Saturday night. They've been in my head so much. And I wanted to share them with you because really the questions and there were a couple here that really kind of got to me.

One was, “What do you think the point of life is?” And similarly, another question was, “With this world right now, what's the point of it all?”

These are deeper dives than what my favorite MST 3K episode is or what my hottest history take is, right? And frankly, I get it, right? If you're the one that sent me the message, it sounds…well, it's tough right now, guys. I've talked about this in line with my own work. The fact that I'm 2000 miles removed from my kids, Florida, everything like that. Like it's, it's tough right now and it's scary. And I think a lot of us are depressed or on the verge of being depressed or falling into a depression and trying to find our way out and things like that. And I get it, right. It's what we're seeing out there is it's a world full of hate and hostility and vitriol and meanness and I don't think it's the world that any of us wants to create and it's sad and it's disappointing and frustrating. I think a lot of us myself included are trying to wrestle with how we deal with our family members right now or our friends who we feel betrayed by and like what's going on in this world around us.

So what's what's the point of it all? Why do we fight so hard only to get beat down over and over and over again? Why does it seem like the bad guys win so many times? You know, what's the point of all this? And I, it's this stuck in my head and I wanted to give you some ideas here about what the point of all of this was. And, know, when I first got this message I wanted to share a thought I've been having for a while, especially as I've been working now out here with tribes.

What I've come to internalize is that the point of life is it's about selflessness. It's about being there for other people. It's about giving of oneself to something else, something other than the self. I think so. I think that's the point of all this. think that's the point of being human, right? I think so.

But what's the point of going on, I think is maybe the other question that was asked here. Like, why? If all we do all this work and we try to spread all this good will and we still keep getting our asses kicked and our heads kicked in and the bad guys keep getting put in positions of power and then they continue the cycle of hurting people.

Why keep going on? And I get it. I get it.

I've questioned this myself so many times. What's the point of moving on? What's the point of moving forward? What's the point of fighting on if life is full of hardship and struggle and pain? Where's the benefit to me? Where's my payoff? What am I doing here? Why do I keep moving forward? And I really struggled to internalize what all of this meant until last year.

And I was reading this book by Ryan Holiday. If you're familiar with him, he writes a lot on stoicism and other things. And the most recent of which is a book called Right Thing Right Now: Good Values, Good Character, and Good Deeds. And I was listening to the book. I listened to it, then I had to go out and buy it because of what I found here. I wanted to share with you the experiences of a man in 1920s. I'm going to read some of this book for you so I kind of get to a larger point I'm trying to make here. So if you'll allow me:

“On a frigid night in Chicago in 1927, the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller decided to end it. He was a failure. He'd been kicked out of Harvard. He had buried a child. His drinking problem was a secret shame. It was time, he thought to swim out as far as he could into Lake Michigan and drown. Yet as he prepared to die, he heard a voice, a voice that said in effect, how dare you? Who do you think you are to abandon the responsibilities of life to your children, to the world?

You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, the voice said. You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to the highest advantage of others. You and all men are here for the sake of other men.”

And, you know, Fuller survives. He moves on with his life. Those thoughts continue to stay with him the rest of his life. He lives a very fulfilling life. And that thought, the idea that my life does not belong to me, that your life does not belong to you has stayed in my head for the longest time. Ever since I heard this story, I've come to really believe it to be true. This idea that my life is not about me. And in fact, as Fuller's experience is to say, his own revelation, says that your own work, the things that you're doing here, the struggle that you are going through, may in fact never even be revealed to you why you are doing the things that you do, but you have to do them anyway. And that my friends, I think, is why we have to keep fighting. That's why we have to keep keeping on.

I'm not a religious guy. I think a lot of you know that I've talked about my experiences with religion as a child and things like that. And if you are a religious person, I don't negate that. think that religion has a role for many people in their lives. And if you find fulfillment in faith, I think that that's good for you. Now I never found that. Until maybe I get out here into Colorado and I started to work with folks out here and maybe there's something in the mountains speaking to me. I'm trying to be open to something else out there.

I know that a lot of us are scared. The person who asked me like in the, with the world right now, what's the point of it all? Right? What's what's, what are we doing here? Right. And since Historians At The Movies started as a movie podcast and has steadily moved in other spaces, I wanted to share with you a couple of quotes from film actually that I've been thinking about today.

The first comes from a film, Evan Almighty. If you saw it was the sequel to Bruce Almighty and star Steve Carell, and he gets God's powers and all these things. And God of course is played by Morgan Freeman, who is probably how I like to envision what a God looks like. One of the things that Freeman says as God, is that if someone prayed for courage, does God give that person courage? Or does he give them the opportunities to be courageous?

In this time, when we are so filled with fear, is this not our moment to push forward anyway? know, courage is not the absence of fear. It's being filled with fear and doing the right thing anyway. And in this regard, I think a lot about the late great John Lewis, who I've really come to idolize in the last few years. I think about his ideas of Good Trouble and doing the right thing anyway. Mr. Lewis faced death so many different times and kept pushing forward. And right now so many of just go, and I don't mean to belittle what you are going through in your life. So many of us are worried about our jobs, our passion, maybe our students, our loved ones, our friends, right? Worried about the things that we're saying, worried about someone might be listening in or anything like that.

I'm finding these as opportunities to be courageous. And I won't lie. I'm still worried. I sometimes pull punches on here because I too have to weigh my day to day existence versus these things. But I think a lot about the opportunity and where we are right now and the opportunity to be courageous, the opportunity to speak truth to power. Maybe that's why we are here.

I keep coming back to this idea. You know, I grew up in Western Kentucky. I grew up on the Tennessee River. And I keep thinking about not knowing why we are here, but knowing that we have a role to be here anyway. And the metaphor that continues to pop in my mind guys is the idea that we are but stones in a river.

If you've ever seen a river flow, you'll know that it flows over stones and logs and all the other things that are on the bottom of it. But it is these stones, it is these things, these small pieces of matter. that combined with one another can change the course of a river. No matter how powerful or wide or deep or fast that river is, all of these stones together can move the river one way or another, sending it in different directions. Do the stones know what they're there for? Probably not, but they're still moving the river, right?

The things that we do may outlast us. I've had several astrophysicists on the pod, including my friend Kelsey Johnson a few others who have come on. One of the things that has become apparent to me is that we are quite literally made of stardust. we are made of this extra galactic material and i know it sounds cliche but the reality is that the human experience lasts far longer than a human life. The things that we do matter far longer than our own lives. We get eight good decades if we're lucky on this planet. But the things that we do don't get to be measured in years or decades, but millennia perhaps, eons, who knows? That's why.

That's why we have to continue to fight. That's why, because the things that we do matter beyond ourselves and they matter to people beyond ourselves.

I want to come back to one other film.

The Empire Strikes Back.

Those of you who know this film know probably where I'm going with this is Yoda is directing the young headstrong Luke Skywalker and Luke's doing all of these things. Yoda looks at him and he says, luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. We are luminous beings, my friends.

The things that we do, do matter.

It's just not always revealed to us in our own time. And I know that's frustrating. think a lot of us have questions about why we struggle. Where's the payoff? And the reality is sometimes that's just not always revealed to us, but we do them anyway. We do them for the greater good because we choose to believe that our actions will be vindicated over time. So those are the thoughts I've had tonight, which are, what's the point of it all? It's not about us. It's about everything but us. And we have to do it anyway. Whether or not we receive the benefit or not, we have to keep up the fight. We have to keep going. We have to keep believing in a greater good and the goodness in one another. And we have to do that, not for ourselves, but for everything else around us and everything beyond us. So my friends, we are stones in the river and we can change the course of that river over time right next to one another.

So I hope that wherever you are, you are safe, that you are loved, that you know that you are welcome. I am glad that you're here and you're listening to this pod. I'm glad that you've got friends and I hope you know that I'm here for you as well. So let's keep going. Let's keep up the fight. This is the way of things.

So I'll see you guys down by the river.

Jason

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