It's the end of the world, who cares about purpose anyway?

Okay, this thing happened in the classroom.

So this was the class where I incorporated an ama, and the questions were coming at me from every different direction. And then I was overjoyed to see that this student, who had not really been engaged and who had come in late a lot of times, raised his hand, and he looked right at me, and he said, do you ever get tired, Professor Welch? Do you ever get tired of teaching people how to build the lives of their dreams and that they should be living? Do you ever get tired of it? Since we're all going to die? In the end.

I realized that there was no option but to answer this student. Every eye in the room was fixed on me. And so I said to him.

Hey, everybody. Hi, it's Susie Welch. Happy New Year again, and welcome to Becoming youg, the podcast for each week, we endeavor to answer the trivial, superficial, inconsequential little question, what should I do with my life? Which has to be the oldest and the newest question on Earth. Don't you think today we're gonna get actually at a bigger question, if there is one, a bigger question than what should I do with my life? Which is, why even bother? I mean, why even search for purpose right now? Things are. Things are so bad. I mean, it's so, so bad. It's just incredibly bad.

You know? Will you just shut up? It is not bad. It's not bad. Times are not bad. And we are going right there. And when you're done with this podcast, you are going to have a mindset shift. If you're in the place where you think it's bad out there right now, you're going to go to the mirror, you're going to kiss yourself from happiness, and then you're going to go out in the street and you're going to kiss every passing stranger. Don't do that. That would be wrong and creepy and also possibly unhealthy. Look, here's this question that this podcast is about, which is, what should I do with my life? I happen to think about that question all the time. What should I do with my life? Because I teach a class called Becoming youg at NYU Stern School of Business, and I am the director of the NYU Stern Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing, where we also think about the question of individual purpose and organizational purpose. And there's this question, what should I do with my life? If I happened to start looking into this question, when did people start asking it? And the answer is, they started asking it in 32,000 BC, which is about the oldest record we have of people putting down what they were thinking about. There's this thing called the Blombos cave in South Africa, and there are cave paintings and there are hand stencils. And archaeologists, who are the kind of people who think about what hand stencils mean, said these were people struggling to figure out what they were doing on earth and what their purpose was 32,000 years ago. Okay, but the question who am I and why am I here and what's the purpose of my life and what's it all about? What was I born to do? This question feels newly urgent. It feels like it's pressing on us today more than ever before. I think that there's sort of a perfect storm that's led us to this epidemic of purposelessness right now. First of all, let's blame our favorite villain, the pandemic. The pandemic raised huge questions about who we are, where we work, why we work, when we work, what we do. It was gigantic. These questions were raised and they weren't answered. They weren't answered conclusively. And then we all went back to work and the questions were hanging there in the air and people are like, wait, wait, wait, I still don't know, do I go back? Do I not go back? What do I do? And then you layer on top of that a lot of stuff that's happening, which is jobs are really changing and companies are having layoffs and AI is coming and oh my God, I don't have any of those skills and I don't even know if I want them. And then there's, on top of that, a lot of really bad crap happening in the world. There's this terrible war in the Middle East. No matter which side you're on, you hate it. And there was a very polarized election that just occurred. No matter whether your side won or lost, you knew it was polarized and you knew their relatives you're not speaking to because of it. And bad things happen to good people in alarming ways every single day on a mass scale. And you put it all together and you go to work and it can feel purposelessness. People feel like they're in a vortex of despair.

And then with the economic dynamics going on, you can be a highly educated 37 year old person who's done everything right, and you can be living with three roommates in like a two bedroom apartment in a crappy part of town and say, this was not what I signed up for and it's never gonna get better than this and it stinks. And the system is rigged against me.

And you can feel like, what is it all about? All of this can come down on your head. And it can just feel like. The question, what should I do with my life? Is not as old as humanity, but it's as new as your ride to work on the subway every morning. And you're looking out the window and you're thinking, I don't wanna be doing what I'm doing. It's not enough. It doesn't feel fulfilling. And then you end up getting this thing that happened to me in the classroom right before break.

Okay, this thing happened in the classroom. So this was the class where I incorporated an ama. And the questions were coming at me from every different direction. And then I was overjoyed to see that this student, who had not really been engaged and who had come in late a lot of times, raised his hand and he looked right at me and he said, do you ever get tired, Professor Welch? Do you ever get tired of teaching people how to build the lives of their dreams and that they should be living? Do you ever get tired of it? Since we're all going to die in the end, and I want to tell you, I was sitting on a chair. Thank God I was sitting in a chair, because I would have fallen over, and the class went dead silent.

I've taught this class a lot of times to hundreds and now probably thousands of students. And I've never had the likes of this kind of extreme, existential, like, why bother if we're just going to die? In the end, I realized that there was no option but to answer this student. Every eye in the room was fixed on me. And so I said to him, that's such a great question. It's a profound question. I'm so glad that you asked it. And I said out loud, yes, I actually wonder about that all the time. I wonder about it constantly. And my wondering always leads me to the same place, which is that this idea that we're all going to die someday, so it has no point, that's nihilism. That's the definition of nihilism. The sort of purposelessness is what nihilism is all about. Not caring about the future, feeling like the future is made up for us. We're all. It's just no point to it. That attitude is a choice. It's not foisted on you. It's a choice, just as hope is a choice. And guess what I said to the student? And I'll say it to you. I choose hope. I choose it because the case for Hope is just better than the case for nihilism. It's better. It's a smarter case, and I'm going to explain it to you. It's. Every single single generation has thought it was the worst of times. There's actually a psychological dynamic named for this fact. It's called present bias. You think that the present time is worse than any other time. And there's historical evidence of this. The ancient Greeks thought it was the worst of times. The Victorians thought that industrialization was the end of humanity. What do you think it felt like to live during the bubonic plague in 1346 when they didn't even know what was causing it? 50 million people died in four years. Or the Holocaust, or Pol Pot's killing fields. Or what if you were in Rwanda in 1994 when a million people died between the months of April and July? Between the months of April and July, okay, When I was growing up, Russia was going to bomb us into obliteration. China was going to come and kill us all with an atom bomb. And it's always been freaking scary out there. It's just. It's always been scary out there. I think that the difference now, and it's a huge difference, a huge and important difference, is that technology. The same technology that has allowed me to buy six incredibly shitty curling irons that don't work at all. That same technology allows you to know every bad thing happening everywhere, all the time, at the same time, all at once. And your phone, your phone is like an actual highway to hell and back. I mean, there's not a shark attack on the planet that you don't know about within 13 seconds. So every bad thing, every truck accident, every boat sinking in a canal, every awful thing, you know about it all instantly. It's too much for our brains to process. It's too much much for one person, you or me, to know about all at the same time. And yet we do. We know about it all at the same time. And so it feels really, really overwhelming. And then it gets worse. It gets worse because with all the bad news coming in, raining down on your head at the same time, in the middle of all that, there's all these shiny, happy people out there telling you to just do it or live your best life and showing you their best life, and you're, like, shining.

Shut up.

Don't you just know how bad it is out there? And then you feel like even isolated in your nihilism, and you think it's the shit is raining down on you and Everyone is winning but you. And it can feel very lonely. And you think, why doesn't everyone know how bad it is? And that's why you end up getting a student saying, don't you get tired of teaching all this stuff when we're all gonna die someday anyway? Why did I bother waking up every morning putting my face on? Cause I don't wake up like this and getting on the subway on the six and making my way down and teaching this stuff day after day to who are sitting there with hungry eyes and hungry hearts saying, why am I here, Professor Welch? What is my purpose? And I say, my purpose is to help you find your purpose. And the answer is, I will never tire of it. I will never tire of it. Because you have to seek your purpose. Not because the usual bs, life goes on, but because it's how life goes on. It's with our hope that life goes on. And hope is a choice, and it's a contagious one, thank God. But more than that, hope is a moral obligation. We can't all give up at one time because then there will be no future. So someone has to have hope. And you know what? It's going to be me and it's going to be you. It has to be. It's the right thing to do. Now, some people may say, yeah, it's better to live with hope. Yeah, you make the case. But it's hard. It's really hard. It takes a lot of strength to live with hope in these times. And I think I kind of disagree. I think it's harder to live without hope because at least with hope, you know, there's a reason to get up in the morning and to go have a delicious meal and see a friend and feel something warm in your heart. But when you're, like, pessimistic or nihilistic, that to me, feels very, very hard. Why do anything? It's a circular destruction machine in your soul. I'm not here to tell you that you need to get purpose. Let's just say that's a given. You need to get it. But. And that's for other blobiators who get up there and tell you you need to find your purpose and then you'll be happy. I'm not in that business at all. I am in the business of how. How you get purpose. What we do at Becoming youg is talk to you about how you get purpose. Because I hope I've made the case that you've got to have purpose. Purpose. Because the only other option is nihilism which sucks. I get sort of personally offended when people tell you to find your purpose and then don't tell you how. I think that I like being part of the how. And I think there's probably other people out there who are saying, look, this is how you figure out your purpose. I like my method, maybe because I invented, but also because I know it works so well. And I think that when you go through the how of becoming you, you get your why. That's what this is all about, getting your why. That's why we have hope, because we have found our why. And it's like that great quote from Man's search for meaning, okay? Which is like, those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how. I want to actually talk to somebody. I want to finish by having a quick conversation with somebody who's so into hope these days. Somebody who's really into hope. Why? Because she almost died. Guess who it is. It's my bestie. It's gonna seem like I'm rude to her.

For the record, the other day, Susie and I were together to celebrate the new Year, and I was telling her what I thought was a fabulous story, and she looked at me and said, okay, I'm getting bored now.

Shut up, bitch. My bestie, Sue Jacobson. The other day, I was visiting with her, her in Florida. She saw us walking down Worth Avenue, which is very swanky, you would say, what are those two women doing walking down Worth Avenue? They don't look like they belong here. But besides that, we were laughing so hard that if they'd come and arrested us, we wouldn't have been surprised. We've been very bestest friends since we were 18 years old. So really long time. Almost 50 years. We were both tennis counselors at a camp named Camp Wingate on Cape Cod. She went on to become a spectacularly successful leader in Philadelphia. President of the Chamber of Commerce and all sorts of other things. She runs a communications business. We had a huge falling out, actually, that lasted for way too long. Eleven years in our life, and we didn't speak to each other. And then we reconciled, and we became ever closer, closer than ever before in our lives. And that was all going along very, very well. Just total besties. Our husbands loved each other when my husband was still living. And I'm close to her children as well. And it was all going along very well until one day, one morning when sue called me and she said to me, have you ever had a situation where your tongue went numb? And that was the beginning of a terrible nightmare where sue got viral encephalitis and almost died. And it was terrible. It was terrible for her, I'll tell you that. But it was terrible for those of us who loved her. And I.

Sat by her bed, and I did pleasant things, like yell at her. Like, I came into her room one time, and she was not looking very good, and there was a nurse in there, and I just threw open the door, and I saw her as I was visiting her at the hospital, and I said, you just knock this off. Knock this off. Knock it off. And the. And the nurse was like, who are you? And I was like, I'm her best friend. Get out of the way. All right, sue, can you please confirm for the becoming you listening audience that we have no way prepared for this conversation.

We have absolutely no way prepared for this conversation. And I'm ready.

Sue, listen up. So the story is that I've been really bummed out lately by a lot of people saying, like, times are really bad. I mean, I had that student, I think I told you about him, who asked me, like, why even bother studying any of this stuff when we're all gonna die? And I was thinking to myself, who do I know who's filled with purpose? Who do I know who's filled with life? And I thought, the answer is you, because you almost lost your life, and you came too close for everyone's comfort, especially mine and Michaels. And then when you came out of this near death experience, and, I mean, you were in the hospital, how many weeks was.

Was over a month.

Yeah, over a month in the hospital. Okay, we're not joking around here. And you came out of it, and you were like, the future has never been bigger and brighter and more exciting to me. I mean, you scoped your world bigger. I thought. After you came out and you said, I know my why. Why did you choose to double down? You started by having a pity party, if you will recall. And then you said, f. The pity party. Correct, Correct.

And I'm kind of honored that you think of me as that person, but you are right. You and I have talked about it many times. I'm really deliberate about it. I don't want to pretend like it's easy. Like, in the beginning, I remember thinking, whoa, this is, like, really bad. And I was like, how the heck am I going to do this? And the one thing I wanted, believe it or not, was to get my dad's optimism back. It comes from him.

Your dad is a huge optimist. It's true. But I Think it's in you. You were doing it every single time you felt yourself saying, it's too hard. You said, I don't want to live like that. And it was a choice, Sue. I saw with my own eyes it being a choice. I did.

The reason it was a difficult choice is because, you know, my voice would squeak. And I also thought, maybe I'll, like, help someone else. I'm not the only one out there. Everybody's got something, right? And so I thought, you know what? Let's. Let's, like, maybe there's someone who's like, oh, my God, you know, look what happened to Sue. Maybe. Maybe I should think that way, because why not? What are we going to do, waste our lives? Or are we going to have fun and try different things? And, okay, I'm not going to be successful at everything. I'm going to lose a client or two. I'm sure of it at some point. Probably not, but maybe. But my point is, not all great stuff is going to happen to me in the future. I get it. But what's the choice? There is no choice. Right?

That's it. And I think that one thing you just said, which I love so much, is that maybe you would be hope to somebody, that maybe you and you're getting past it would give somebody else hope. Hope is contagious. And that's why I say hope is a moral obligation. It's a moral obligation. If we don't do it, who's going to do it?

And I think also, you know, no matter what side of the aisle you're on, no matter what's happening, like you said earlier in the world.

You have to keep going and you have to find a reason. What gives you joy, what makes you optimistic, how. And like, in my case, you're right. It was really about I. First thing was I want to take care of my team. You know, I want to make sure I don't freak out. You know, you, my family, my friends, I. I want to still give back to Philly. I love that. I know you get upset when I say this about you, but you're. You're the leader in that.

I'm getting bored now. Okay. Bye. Bye. Goodbye.

Look, sometimes people ask me this question, how do I know if I found my purpose? And I say it's actually not hard to know when you found it because you feel so different you than you usually feel. You feel exquisitely alive. Okay? You feel utterly alive. This is the beauty of just hope. It is the essence of feeling alive is this feeling of the future. Sue is a perfect example. She felt why she needed to be alive, and she felt totally alive. And there were some rough days and weeks in there, really rough, where, I mean, she actually fell closer to death than life. And her desire to feel alive again became her purpose, meant to pass it on. And she is a story of feeling and being exquisitely alive and an example of. Of why the case for hope is so real. When we come out of terrible times, this question arises. Is the world happening to us or are we happening to the world?

It's all coming down. It's raining down on us. And the opposite of that is feeling like we can happen to the world. Okay. And that we are agents of action and intentionality and delivery. And sometimes, yeah, look, the world does happen to us. Terrible things happen to us. We lose people that we love, we get sick, we find a lump. I mean, the world can happen to us, and we can surrender to that, or then we can turn around and marshal our resources to turn the tables on the world.

That is it for our episode today. Thank you for being here. Hey, I love hearing from you. I don't like it. I love it. So please write to me and connect with me on Instagram or LinkedIn. You know I don't make this podcast by myself alone in a closet with a microphone, don't you?

Becoming you is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes the amazing Garden, Golda, Arthur, Muskan Nagpal, and Kristin Muller, with help from the becoming universe members Elisa Zinn, Hallie Reiner, Maddie Paul, and Tanya. Joji could not do it without these people. Trust me. I'm your host, Susie Welch, and this is becoming you.

Sam.