Lecture: 2017 Maps of Meaning 01: Context and Background

Contrary to popular belief, the highest chance of success, and largest entrepreneurial successes, come from founders who are 47 years old when they start their companies. You are still 10 years away from the statistical "peak" to start your startup. Yes you will recover. This experience may be exactly what you need to become great. It's your choice to either hide from it and whither away in regret or face it head on and extract all the value it has to offer. Growth comes from painful reflection on our mistakes. Studying Stoicism and this lecture series really helped me get through the failure of my startup (Which I spent 7 years building and then had to sell for $1). ▶ this video Note the lecturer is controversial politically now... but this series genuinely helped me put myself back together after my ego was shattered - I am way better off now (and more resilient) and years later building another company which is doing great so far.

Watch Jordan Peterson's Maps of meaning course : ▶ this video , it won't solve everything but it will enable you to understand how to make sense out of life, and how your belief system works, so you can make it work for you.

I highly recommend you listen to these lecture series. I cannot overstate the profound effect they had on my life, by giving me the tools I needed to turn my depression around and give me a sense of balance and control in my life. link ▶ this video

I know you're not looking for advice, so I'm not going to preach too hard at you, except to say that I recognize the somber lucidity of your tone, and I've been there. Depression's heaviest weapon is that it feels like the heaviest truth. It's a bit like being in a room within a room. If nothing outside can be perceived from within the walls, does it matter that it exists? I was surprised when I got out – I was sure it couldn't happen to me either. I didn't even realize it was happening to me until months in. Lots of things that I thought were concrete facts about myself and the world turned out to be configurable in ways I was ill equipped to predict until they happened. There was no secret or epiphany or "one weird trick". I mostly did this by pretending as if being were worthwhile. I wasn't interested in anything that happy, normal people were interested in, like meeting new people or wearing clean clothes. But my crude mental model of those people had enough fidelity to imitate them, at least somewhat. So I did, in earnest. Eventually the mask became the face. We are what we repeatedly do. I lost about 6 years before I started doing that, and it took about another 6 to 9 months before I noticed that anything had changed. I have to give a lot of credit to a lecture series I was recommended on HN as well: Maps of Meaning, from Jordan Peterson: ▶ this video It's weird stuff. Took some getting through. I don't remember what the first guy said that made me stick with it, but I'm gl

I like these ones (and even having attended Catholic high school, it was the first piece of media that made me actually realize how much human wisdom could be embedded in religious texts), but found his 2017 Maps of Meaning lectures more impactful, personally. He uses his archetypal lens on Pinocchio instead of Genesis for the first few lectures. There's a lot of content overlap but if you liked the Biblical series, definitely check out Maps of Meaning. ▶ this video

Because the world, for the most part, is (and always has been) a dangerous place and hate has proven to be a very useful (highly conserved through evolutionary time) adaptation to help keep small and delicate bands of our ancestors safe for one more day. You can see this bias towards negativity easily in the structure of basic emotions. There is one positive affect (happiness) and waaaaay more negative affects (fear, anger, disgust, sadness) and only one neutral (surprise). And those negative emotions are all very distinct. If you want more detail I can recommend over 120 hours of learning in the following (which I've watched and digested). They'll walk you through the details from the bottom to the top. - Watch Robert Sapolsky's lectures: link Watch Jordan Peterson's Personality lectures: link and his Maps of Meaning Lectures: (or read the book or listen to the audio book) ▶ this video

For those interested in his non-gender identity content: His series on the Bible: link is generally regarded (by those I know, at least) as Jordan at his best. He goes through the first few stories in the Bible and tries to bring meaning to them, not from the fundamental Christian lens of "this is absolute truth," but more like: "Here are some archetypal patterns about the world and how to act in it that our ancestors have discovered over thousands of years and distilled into stories. Maybe they hold truth that isn't the 'word of God' truth, but observations about the world that have utility to us even as a modern, rational, scientific civilization. I'll back this up by tying it to studies on psychology, neuroscience, evolution, and animal behavior, and show that variations of the same archetypal stories appear in non-Judeo-Christian societies all over the world." You can be a hardline atheist and still get tons of value out of these lectures. I also found his 2017 Maps of Meaning lectures particularly interesting, and personally more relevant: ▶ this video He does a similar thing with the story of Pinocchio instead of the Bible for the first few lectures, which might be more palatable for some. There's a lot of overlap with the Bible series as well.

news.ycombinator.com though I wish it had a way to collapse uninteresting conversations. Stephen Colbert: link and lately I've been binge watching the Jordan Peterson lectures: ▶ this video ribbonfarm: though I usually only read the articles by Venkatesh Rao: link also bingewatching lessons on 2x from link . It used to be link but their servers are sluggish most of the time.