It's not just that "times are tough"*. It's WAY worse than that! In the end, we all die!
And all our loved ones die. Often with great pain and suffering. Before that, you will have to deal with a remarkable amount of pain and suffering yourself. The promise that "everything will made all better" disappears when we become adults and realize that the condition "all better" doesn't really exist and nobody is going to make it right.
So, life sucks and then you die is the default human condition. Peterson: So what are you going to do about that?
* Times are always tough. By almost any measure, our current time is arguably the least-tough time humanity has ever experienced. Life expectancy, the end of total war, the end of scarcity.
The richest person on earth, 200 years ago -- and every King in every Kingdom in history -- would have given it ALL up, in return for the miracle of modern dentistry.
But even in these marvelous times, we find ourselves nihilistic, jaded, desperately unhappy. It is a crisis of meaning.
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