A Wall And Its Message
I’ve been listening to podcasts for about 2 years now and it started with one of The Joe Rogan episodes featuring Elon Musk in 2020. Then I listened to other episodes featuring famous people I knew — Neil Degrasse Tyson, Miley Cyrus, and Bob Lazar. And then I started listening to his conversations with other guests that I have never heard of. Nowadays, most of the time I still tune in to Joe, but also another podcaster called Lex Fridman.
These 2 guys have a set of big questions that they tend to ask their guests. “What’s your advice to young people?” “What is love?” “How do you want to be remembered after your death?” “What’s the meaning of life?”
What’s the meaning of life?
The question was raised once again in one of Lex Fridman’s episode featuring a former CIA covert intelligence officer, Andrew Bustamante. Andrew told a story :
“There’s a covert training base in Alabama where elite, tier 1 operators go to learn human intelligence stuff. There’s a bar inside this base and on a wall there are scribbles of opinions. The question in the middle of the wall is ‘What’s the meaning of life?’. These elite operators, over the last 25 or 30 years, they get drunk and scribble their answers, and they circle it with a sharpie.
‘Love’, ‘Family’, ‘America’, ‘Freedom’.
The rule is, that when they write something on that wall, they have to connect it with something else on the wall. When you look at that wall, the word ‘Self-respect’ is on the wall, it’s got a circle around it, and you can’t see any other word because of all the things that connect to ‘self-respect’.
From my point of view, I have never seen a better answer. It’s all self-respect. If you don’t have self-respect, how can you do anything else ? How can you love someone else if you don’t have self respect? How can you build a business you’re proud of if you don’t have self-respect? How can you raise kids, make a difference or pioneer anything? How can you just wake up and have a good day if you don’t have self-respect?”
Although I personally think that there’s no meaning to life in general (yes we tend to impose a meaning to our own life. but we all know the world doesn’t care about our personal narrative), this specific conversation lingered on my mind for quite long. If only we can put a full stop on issues like low self-esteem, a lot of problems could be solved and more people could reach their full potential. Self-respect is truly an underrated trait.
