What we need instead of happiness is meaning.

In this occasional series, Jordan Peterson writes from his international speaking tour for his book, 12 Rules for Life. This article was first published in The Australian.

HAPPINESS ... IS A SIDE-EFFECT, AN UNEXPECTED BENEFIT. — PETERSON

Ihave been touring in Australia and New Zealand, speaking in most of the major cities in both countries, to audiences ranging in size from 1,500 to 5,500. This tour, based on my most recent book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is part of a lecture schedule that has now encompassed 126 cities in more than a dozen countries. More are planned for Southern and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. The book, by the way, has sold about three million copies, and is slated for translation into 50 languages.

In total, now, I have spoken live to about 300,000 people. With each lecture, concentrating nominally on one or more of the aforementioned 12 Rules, I also try to formulate a problem, so that I can articulate it clearly, address it in a manner that brings the audience along for the journey, and further my thinking about the topic. In Christchurch, most recently, the topic was “Toxic Masculinity,” a phrase I particularly despise, onesided and sexist as it clearly is. I talked about a friend of mine, a man who bought hook line and sinker the idea that human action upon the face of this troubled globe was destined to do nothing but increase the rate at which society disintegrated, individuals collapsed psychologically, and nature suffered under the adverse burden placed upon it by the essential evils of humanity in general, and men in particular. He had a very rough time of it, governed by that belief system, from the time he was a teenager until he committed suicide, due in large part to his ideologically-inspired self-loathing, at the age of 40.

Each of my lectures is devoted, at least insofar as I can manage it, to a topic of equal seriousness and gravity. Despite the darkness of the context and the topics, audiences worldwide have been reduced in the main to absolute silence for the two hours or so of serious conversation that takes place between us, as we jointly work to determine what continues to go wrong in this vale of tears that we inhabit, and how we might endeavour jointly to improve ourselves, society and nature itself, or at least diligently attempt to reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering, malevolence and, sometimes, outright hell that we are all individually capable of producing.

It is no simple matter to determine why any of this has been successful, or necessary, as it apparently is. My radical leftist critics insist that I am appealing purposefully, effectively, greedily and politically to disaffected and angr y young white men, but this is an explanation that is simultaneously self-serving and false: first, because there has not been a single event of any violent or even vaguely aggressive nature at any of the venues I have spoken at, despite the 300,000 hypothetically angr y people in attendance; second, because my audience is not particularly young ( averaging, I would say, 30- 35); third, because at least a third of the people who attend are women, and that is continually increasing (as men make up 80 per cent of the audience of YouTube, the platform that first brought me to public attention, but women buy the bulk of books); fourth, because all the people who attend are by no means young or white, much to the dismay of my critics; fifth, because people are not compelled by any means to buy the books or attend the lectures and greed therefore has nothing to do with it; and sixth, because people are not attending for political reasons — just as I am not speaking for political purposes.

Here is what is actually happening. YouTube and podcasts are revolutionary technologies. They bring long- form complex philosophical and psychological discussion to the very large audiences who have the time and inclination to watch and listen but who may not do the same with books, which always have been and remain a minority taste, unfortunate as that may be. Perhaps five to 10 times as many people can and will lis- ten and watch as would read. People can use found time ( exercising, commuting, working around the home) to listen, and that means they have time that once wasn’t usable in that manner to illuminate and enlighten themselves. And there seems to be a vast, untapped market for precisely that desire. And both these new media forms ( YouTube and podcasts) appear to produce very loyal audiences, who are also, as it seems, likely to want to see the people they have been watching and listening to in person. And what happens in these personal lectures?

I talk directly to the audience. No notes. No scaffolding. I tell them, as individuals, what problem we are here to address. It’s generally something of deep existential significance: the tyranny of society, the terror of nature, the ignorance and malevolence that too often characterizes the individual and the family. We talk about the darkness of life, and of suffering, and of betrayal and nihilism and hopelessness and the desire for revenge that all of that can produce. And then we extract some light out of the abysmal depths. There is no discussion of happiness as the goal of life. Happiness, welcome as it is, is a sideeffect, an unexpected benefit, a bit of the grace of God. If it comes your way, open your arms to it, embrace it, and enjoy it. But it won’t last. What we all need instead of happiness is meaning — the kind of meaning that will sustain each of us through the suffering that life entails, so that we can endure the self-betrayal and the dissolution of our intimate relationships through death and distance and the illness and aging and disappointment and death that await all of us, just and unjust alike. And I tell my audiences something they all know, but have not been able to fully understand or articulate: the sustaining meaning in life is to be found in the responsibility of life, the load we voluntarily decide to bear (and the heavier the better). We must take care of ourselves, as individuals, in a manner that makes us better for our fam- ilies, in a manner that sets the community right, such that the ship of state does not list too far right or left and sails forth for the destination that is true and proper. We must take stock of our multitudinous sins, attempt to atone for them, accept the adventure of our life, and try to encourage nature to shine her beneficial face upon us, keep the tyranny of our social organizations at bay, improve our characters as individuals and, most importantly, face the unknown with truth and courage so that we can discover what is new and necessary and eternally redemptive. It is in this manner that we co-operate in the creation of what has always been envisioned as the City of God, stumbling uphill towards it as we can.