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Aug. 2, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:38
How to Become a Legend - There Is No Second Chance!
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If you do want to change the world, if you do want to live a life bigger than your lifespan, bigger than your square inches of wetware and the prison of your soon-to-be-dust skull, if you wish to leap forward, you will be tripped up by those who wish you immobile, who don't want your movement, your rise, your ascent to make them feel like they're sinking into quicksand.
Life is quicksand. We sink, we sink, we sink, we sink.
We sink into the invisible.
We sink into the grave.
We sink into history. We sink into nothingness.
We sink into the star shit that we were born from.
Some star exploded.
Here I am! Soon we will vaporize and we will go scooting through at 500,000 kilometers a second or whatever the hell it is, go scooting through the universe and then eventually we'll make some nine-legged silicon beast who himself will have this brief glimmer, this brief opportunity to do something that means something.
There's no meaning anywhere in the universe, no meaning in a rock, no meaning in a tree.
No meaning in a lizard, no meaning in a cloud.
We get this. Pow!
Thunderclap. We can have meaning.
The whole point of the universe.
There's no point to anything in the universe except what we can will, what we can choose in this incredibly brief flash fire of possibility where matter gets up, says important stuff, walks around, does something, and then dies.
This star sneeze that we are composed of has come together With this unbelievable opportunity.
Would you want to be any other kind of matter in the world than a human being?
Of course not! I mean, 100 billion stars just in our galaxy, billions of galaxies around the universe, 14.8 billion years old.
And billions of years of life, we get this incredible opportunity out of all the matter in the universe that we know of.
This little wetware, this little ball of fiery possibility, we get this.
We get this shocking capacity to have meaning to do something, to defy the inevitability of mere physics, to choose, to will, to create, to grow.
And what are we tripped up by?
What are we stopped by?
Cynicism, a rolled eye.
Oh, here we go again.
The whole potentiality of philosophical matter, the greatest paradox and potential the universe has to offer, dies because of a side-of-the-tongue raspberry.
And we simply slide and fall away.
Into nothingness.
We erupt with unbelievable potential, unbelievable possibility, and I think this is true for just about everyone.
By God, what we can achieve, what we can do, what we can make, what we can build, who we can convince, the joy and excitement and possibility and fear to the wrongdoers that we can jet and lightning through the fuzzy clouds of bullshit history known as the human condition.
And we have this incredible eruption.
Matter. Star sneeze springs to life.
And we tread the very atoms of possibility and we become self-generating star tissue.
Self-creating star tissue.
And we can do anything relative to mere matter.
And we, instead of being Like lava that erupts from the center of the world and forms a phoenix that flies.
We instead just become a ball that's thrown in the air.
The physics of culture, the physics of momentum, the physics of merely personal history take over.
People roll their eyes. People don't like us.
People have problems with us.
People lie about us. People say negative things about us.
And we go...
And we fall into the swamp.
And into the swamp we vanish.
And all the people out there who view all the flickering lights of human lava eruption potential as something to be turned back into mere, lifeless, dead fucking rock.
Those people send up the ragged black cheers of the dark-hearted that another human flame turned to nothing.
Turned to mush.
Turned to wet sand that swallowed up the star stuff that should make legends of everyone.
And that's what I think commitment can bring to you.
It's when you look back over the, you know, we're like a, like a meteor.
Literally. We hit the air.
Squirted out of a mother's vajayjay, we hit the air.
And most people...
Most people, it's like their mom is giving birth, squatting over a fucking grave.
Dead! You fall off the umbilical and you fall into a tombstone.
That's as much choice and as much willpower as people are willing to expend in this life.
The personalities are so empty.
The personalities are so rigid.
The personalities are so reactive.
The personalities are so fixed, mazed, castrating of potential.
Oh, you shouldn't do that.
That's too difficult. That's going to be tough.
That's boring. Oh, who does that anymore?
Oh, you don't care about people.
You only care about thoughts and ideas and philosophy.
Taking a slow pee on the endless fire of human potential and the pee wins forever, it seems.
But we're like meteors. We can...
If you've ever seen a meteor, when I used to work up north after high school, I spent a long time gold panning and prospecting with the most incredible northern lights and sky and stars.
I've always loved astronomy.
And you see, as I did sometimes up there lying out in the woods at night in the cold, and you would see these blazes of light flash across the sky.
That In the eyes even just of human history, let alone geology, let alone the universe, let alone biology, in human history, we are here gone.
Here gone. Hit the atmosphere, burned up.
And now we are just star ash falling into the ground.
Food for worms, that's it.
And I... I never wanted to look backwards and see nothing.
I wanted to see fire in my wake.
I wanted to see a light that lights up a Siberian forest.
That's what I want to look back on.
I wanted to say I got the greatest gift any piece of starshit could possibly get.
The gift of consciousness.
The gift of virile imagination.
The gift of thought.
Nothing thinks but us.
Nothing in the whole universe that we know of thinks but us.
What an unbelievable gift to get out of nothingness.
Out of a sweaty fuck, a sperm and an egg grows a Vesuvius of thought.
Apply it.
Look backward. Do not let the fiery star stuff Of your effects on human history be pounded and turned out and pissed on and extinguished.
Because you will not get a second chance.
I will not get a second chance.
We go back to being inert starshit forever and ever and ever.
Amen. And that's the zoom out.
That's the perspective.
That anyone who wants to improve the world, anyone who wants to improve the human condition in a fundamental way, that is as bright as you have to burn.
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