Channel: John Fish

Category: People & Blogs

Tags: john fish vlogfighting nihilismfighting demotivationjohn fishfighting depressionfighting unmotivationmotivationmotivate mehow to become motivatedutilitarianismstudent motivationdoes what i do matterharvard vlogharvard collegenihilismdoes anything matterjohn fish harvardwhy do anythingharvard

Description: How I've been fighting nihilism + being unmotivated by holding myself accountable to doing good with my life. Important links + thoughts below... Growth Books (my daily planner which changed the way I, and thousands of others, organize our lives): bit.ly/growth_book Instagram (where you can reach me most easily): instagram.com/thejohnfish Some further thoughts on this video: For some time, I was thinking about saying that this philosophy of accountability leads you to "only" make decisions in this way. But this is wrong and inherently fragile since exclusionary thought patterns like this seem to me to cause far more harm when they are inevitably violated (we all fail when it comes to living up to our ideal values). So it's better to resist this temptation and view this as I try to frame it in the video: accountability as only one tool of many. I think that viewing accountability in this way also respects the order of the world (which is injust, though rapidly improving). In a broad sense, it seems that for progress to occur we have to hold humanity to a higher standard than simple neutrality--"don't hurt anyone and you're just fine". And yet this can't be a legal standard because it's highly exploitable at minimum through Mill's "tyranny of the majority". With no legal standard possible, we can set a moral standard--and this is exactly what organized religion tends to do, holding its adherents accountable to doing good with the promise of Heaven (or the threat of Hell) or the accounting of Karma. Hopefully I was able to express to you in this video the fact that even without extrinsic and supernatural motivation like this, we can still justify and in fact compel ourselves into doing good.