Joe Rogan and Derren Brown: Death Should Give Life Meaning

Yeah, I think the narratives that we get from fiction are very confusing to people, you know, particularly people that are very romantic. They have these ideas that their life is going to be like one of their favorite films. And that's what they're looking for. They're holding out, you know, they're holding out for when the music plays and the close-up is there. And those stories stop going back to this guy, Lando Bontoni, who read a lovely book on this, those, the trouble with those films and those stories, they stop when the people fall in love and get together. That's when it starts. That's when the tough stuff starts that we can do with some good, strong, fictional frameworks to sort of, you know, absorb. That's when the tough stuff, it's like, it's like death. It's the same thing, isn't it? We have no, we've kind of lost touch with the cultural narratives around death that gave it some meaning. So now when it happens, it's just this absurd, scary thing that we don't know what to do with. The only narrative we have that we have absorbed, I guess, is that of the brave battle that someone's fighting, which is so unhelpful for the person that's in that situation. It makes everyone else maybe feel better, but just adds like eventual failure and letting everyone else down to this person's burdens. What they should, what they should, what we should feel in that at that time is, you know, that this is, this is when we can bring our, if we have the opportunity to bring our stories to some kind of ending. You know, if you watch a, if you watch a film or read a book, that final scene makes sense of everything that's happened before. This doesn't happen in life. It just kind of ends. So we, we should be like author of our stories more than at any point before death. And if we have the opportunity, what happens is the opposite. We become like cameos in this story. You know, the main characters are our loved ones or the doctors or people making all these decisions. And we kind of get sidelined. So yeah, these fictional or mythical stories, just these things that just give us a sense of where our experience fits into a wider sense of meaning. We've, you know, we've, we've kind of lost touch with that the last couple of hundred years. And there's a lot of good stuff that's come with that because we've embraced, you know, science and knowledge at the expense of superstition, of course, but I, you know, we've kind of lost touch of something. So we've lost a little bit of touch with nature and the natural laws of things living and dying. And I think we as human beings today are probably more alienated from particularly the death of farm animals and things along those lines, like where, where food comes from, like actually seeing death, even if your dog is sick, you bring them to the vet, the vet puts them down, you know, all these things that people probably experienced firsthand for hundreds and hundreds of years, particularly like raising animals. And that is just completely removed from the equation for most folks.