84. Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life Is Meaningless and Amazing

Humans have built institutions in order to deal with famine and plague and war ... If we stop maintaining these institutions, then war and plague and famine will come back in an even worse form than ever before.

I don't think that the main question in life is the question of meaning; I think that the main question in life is the question of suffering. What is suffering? Where is it coming from? And how can we be liberated from it?

The moment of consciousness—that's the greatest mystery in the universe. The most ordinary moment in your life, you are stuck in traffic in your car, the traffic is not moving, you're annoyed—this is the most amazing thing in the universe. It's, in many ways, more amazing than solar systems and black holes. We don't understand how can anything in the universe be annoyed? How can anything be conscious?

Unfortunately, we are seeing the institutions collapsing and plague and famine and war coming back. It's not too late to save the dam that is holding the river, but we don't have much time. And frankly, I don't see that the leading countries of the world are doing enough to save the global order.

I get to meet a lot of politicians and business leaders, and they often ask me for advice. And one thing I tell them is to take time off to disconnect. One of the worst problems of leaders today, in many fields, is that, previously, they had built into their schedule some time off because of the limitations of communication technology in the old world. Now, there is none. You are always connected. There is immense pressure on you, and it's extremely dangerous.

If one person stops believing in the dollar, nothing happens. But if millions of people stop believing in the dollar, it disappears; it loses all its value. And it didn't happen to the dollar so far, but it did happen to quite a number of other currencies throughout history.

The universe, the laws of physics, they don't work like a story or like a drama. The laws of nature don't care about us. If planet Earth explodes tomorrow morning and all life on it disappears, physics wouldn't care. Planets and stars explode all the time throughout the universe, and the universe just goes along with its business.

Off record, I can let my mind rest. And part of resting is saying stupid things ... The mind of every person is full of garbage. I think this is a basic human right—you have a right to say stupid things in private.

Given the pace of technological and scientific progress today, I think it's very unlikely that there will still be Homo sapiens like you and me in 200 years or 300 years.

One way to understand meditation is the instruction: Just forget about all the stories in your mind, and just observe what is actually happening. You have the mind constantly producing stories, and leave them aside, and try to observe reality.

I invest a lot of time and effort in meditation, which, for me, is training the mind. And then I trust my trained mind to make better choices.

What would the Catholic church say about the souls of Neanderthals? Because the Catholic church, for instance, said that chimpanzees don't have souls. When they die, that's it; they don't go to Heaven or Hell. So, what about Neanderthals?

Money is simply trust. It's not made of matter; it's not gold; it's not paper; it's just an idea in our mind. And not just any idea; it's trust—trust between people. That's money.

When you ask, 'What is the meaning of life?', before you even attempt an answer, I would say the first step is to think, what kind of answer would be acceptable to me? And the answer is a story. We are storytelling animals. We think not in facts, not in statistics, not in equations; we think in stories.

To be able to tell the difference between what is actually happening and what is just a story that I'm creating and imposing on reality—most humans, this skill is underdeveloped.

In the days of COVID, it's good to remember the fact that most infectious diseases started with the Agricultural Revolution because they came from domesticated animals, and they spread in large permanent settlements.

Up until now, what I can say is that COVID has been an amazing scientific triumph coupled with political failure.

The early 21st century has been, until now, the best time to be a human being.

The only famine that still exists is political famine. If a person, anywhere on Earth, still dies from lack of food, it is only because of political reasons. We have the power to prevent it—which we did not have in the Middle Ages or in the ancient world.

From a very early age, I just couldn't accept the Jewish story, because it's completely false from a historical perspective.

People in the Agricultural Revolution, they tried to create paradise for humans. They actually created paradise for germs.