Hello and today we're tackling a very immodest question we're talking about one of the most profound philosophical questions and that is what gives life meaning and my thinking about this is that it's around Christmas

time coming up to Christmas right and sometimes people can be a little bit miserable

particularly if they're not able to see their family or they don't have a family to see.

And so I wanted to do something that will lift your spirits and talk about all of the ways in which life can be meaningful.

But you don't have to be miserable because it's always useful to

know this no one you know is is completely perfect on this matter myself

included so you know this is just my best guess I'm not here to say this is the meaning of your life.

I'm just going to talk about how I approach the question as well as all of the differing perspectives on it and my view is that as long as you can perceive

some sort of meaning as long as you're getting some meaning from something, there's probably

aspects of it that are good, undeniably good.

I'm not here to question that.

It's not to say, oh, you're wrong to get meaning from this unless you're,

you know, you're like a serial killer killer in which case you are wrong but that's more

sort of ethical concerns but we're not going to be talking about the ethics side

of stuff because it's not really going to come in I think it's kind of a given that people don't want to derive meaning from doing unethical things.

And so that's one of the presumptions I'm going to approach this with.

And I'm also going to be talking about sort of things aspects and attitudes towards mortality and death,

because I think if you want to create meaning if you want to

understand the light you have to understand the dark but it's not necessarily going

to be depressing because I think I have quite an optimistic view on it and this is a rare occasion where I'm actually going to be optimistic.

So you know, mark it down in the calendar, pinch yourself because it's happening, I'm saying something positive,

which is a lot of cetus first really but I'm very pleased to be joined by

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