I love this idea, or what you just said, that it doesn't even so much matter the direction as much as the commitment. A colleague of mine at Stanford who I respect tremendously, Anna Lembke, who wrote the book Dopamine Nation, she's the head of our Dual Diagnosis Addiction Center. She was the one who really, truly deserves credit for bringing dopamine into the public discussion over the last few years.

She initiated that, talking about how big inflections in dopamine that are very fast, that aren't preceded by effort, aka drugs of abuse, behavioral addictions, et cetera, leave us below baseline with our dopamine. And then people will engage in more of the behavior, and it drives us further and further and further.

That's kind of the principle of it. I was talking to her about how people get sober, and the conversation turned to how do young people find their purpose. It was very interesting. She said, "Let's talk about finding purpose. Everyone nowadays wants to know what their purpose is." She said, "The way you find your purpose is by going out onto your front lawn and seeing if the leaves need to be raked." Sounds familiar, right?

You find purpose by figuring out how you can be of use at progressively larger and larger spheres away from yourself. And in doing that- And the present. And in doing that, you start to hear the calling, and you find your purpose. And as you said, you don't- Or it reveals itself to you.

It reveals- And it's the same thing. Right. Yeah. So I think you two would enjoy a conversation at some point. Thank you very much. Well, this is an important thing to return to, because people are often curious about what to do practically. It's like, okay, first, this is what Jacob does.

Jacob, in the Old Testament stories, he eventually becomes Israel, right? And so that's his name, and Israel means we who wrestle with God. Now Jacob is a bad guy when the story starts, and he leaves his home, and the perverse influence of his mother, and his criminal, betraying past behind.

And he decides that he's going to aim up. And that night he makes an altar, and he makes a sacrifice, and that night he has a dream of a staircase that reaches up to heaven, which is now what he's walking up, right? And so he finds his purpose, he finds his adventure, as a consequence of his decision to be better.

Okay, so now you want to find your purpose, okay. First thing you have to do, you have to review how wretched and miserable you actually are, and you have to face that. And then you have to think, I'd rather not have that, and it has to be true. And then you have to aim up.

Now you don't know what that means, because you're pretty scattered and dissolute, but at least you got the damn intent in mind. And then you have to be willing to make the sacrifices, right, along the way. Okay, then what happens? Well then, the pathway will reveal itself to you in increments.

Calling? Is there something around here that I could fix, that I would fix? That's a great question. Is there something at hand that I could fix, that I would fix? It might be something low, because especially when you first get going, you're not good for anything. So you might have to start with something pretty trivial, but it doesn't matter, because you start getting better.

Is there something that bothers me? That's conscience, that I could set right in some small way. Well, that's there for everyone, right? In the midst of the most catastrophic mess, that pathway, you might even say, look, the more mess around you, the more unstructured possibility you have at hand.

And it's true. It's like, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about this. I know how difficult that is, but it is the case that the more mess at hand that you can see, the more opportunity that's there, because if you can see that it's a mess, then you can see the pathway to cleaning it up.

So do it. Do it. See what happens. That's the adventure. What's going to happen? In my class, my Maps of Meaning class, I used to have students do this as a project. And one of the projects was, find something around you, in your neighborhood, wherever, in your family, that isn't set right, and see if you can set it right.

Just write down what happens. Well, one student in particular, he decided his mother had died, and the family kind of fragmented. And so he decided he would try to take on the role of mother, be responsible for the household operating. Well, it grew him up like mad, as you can imagine.

He ran into all sorts of weird resistances, because his family was upset that he was doing what mom used to do, and he just had a tremendously complex adventure as a consequence of his willingness to pursue this. It was obviously necessary, because the alternative was that his family was going to fall apart.

That's there for everyone. You say, well, my circumstances are so difficult. It's like, fair enough. So are everybody else's, by the way. But that means there's a lot of mess. Fix it a bit. And that's ridiculously entertaining and unpredictable. And that in itself is a great deal. You have no idea what's going to happen.

Just like you didn't know what happened when you started the podcast. Why did you start it? For me, I felt a compulsion to share what I knew, but because during the pandemic, everyone was so focused on vaccines and lockdowns that no one was talking about the reality that everyone was facing, including, sorry, Josh Gordon, I know him through time, our director of the National Institutes of Mental Health.

Not a single thing out there about, hey, folks, if you're going to be indoors this much, get some sunlight in your eyes in the morning, or else you're going to have trouble sleeping. Trouble sleeping equates to mental health issues, stress, uncertainty. My lab was working on ways to regulate stress through deliberate breathing, through other mechanisms.

Well, I want people to have tools, zero cost tools to deal with their stress, to help them regulate their circadian biology, because those wick out to countering the negative forces that were on us, which are social order was disrupted. People are at home. So it was a desire to give people tools that I knew existed, that I was knowledgeable about.

And I had a long standing kind of growing compulsion that I wanted to talk about neuroscience because it's so darn cool. Right. Okay. So there was a lot of energy behind the mission, but then there was a calling. The calling was from hearing about people's suffering. It's like, well, of course you're not sleeping well.

I mean, not only are there a million things to worry about right now, people aren't working, et cetera, but you're not getting sunlight in your eyes. You need to get outside. You need to, you know, and then there's the whole socialization thing and whatever people's circumstances, there are things that they could do.

And so I felt that calling and my conscience told me that I have the knowledge. So why would I cloister with it at home? It's like, what good is that? So I just started blabbing on the internet. Right. Right. That's why. Yeah. Well, that's a perfectly, you know, you can think, well, that's a logical extension of your subsidiary calling to be a teacher and a professor.

You're already a researcher. You're already a professor. So you're investigating and transmitting knowledge like, well, looks like you could do that on a broader scale. And the technology is there. Why not explore that? That's a perfectly reasonable, and you can see the interplay of calling and conscience there. That's a lovely way of characterizing the voice of the divine, which is how it's characterized, repeated.

Elijah. Elijah is the prophet who is, appears with Christ when he's transfigured on the mount in the New Testament. It's Elijah and Moses. Elijah is the first person in human history who identifies the divine with conscience. That's his contribution. That's a major psychological revolution. Right. It's an unheralded transformation in understanding.

It's like, it's not the storm, it's not the forest fire, it's not the earthquake, it's not the God of nature. He's the originator of the phrase, the still small voice. Right. It's like, the notion that your conscience is the voice of the divine, my God, there's virtually no discovery.

There's no proposition more revolutionary than that. And so that's why Elijah is a prophet of, you know, primary status. And I just see no reason at all not to take that claim seriously. It's like, you come up with an explanation for your conscience. It tells you things you don't want to hear.

So how is that you? I mean, you have to gerrymander the definition of you for that to be you. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. you