Jordan Peterson EXPLAINS Why People Need A Family To Be Happy

Most young women are taught badly that the most important thing that they'll do in their life is their career and that's simply not true. It's not true for most people and certainly not true for most women. I certainly wasn't taught that myself. I feel like I'm doing quite well in my career but I still have pressures. People who are saying, you know, when are you actually going to succeed properly? By having a baby. I kind of find that slightly offensive. I'm 38. I feel like I've got through my early 30s without, almost luckily, when I look at what my friends have to deal with with their children. I almost feel a little bit blessed. What do you say to that? Well, I would say that it starts to get pretty lonesome in life after 45 if you don't have a family, you know, and so it's easy to consider the utility of an intense career and like you have a very high quality career too, you know, that's something that marks you out from maybe from, let's say, more typical people and maybe perhaps that's worth more of a sacrifice but, you know, you're going to be, you're going to live till you're 90 in all likelihood and it's not easy to consider your life across its entire span and there's something to be said for developing a very close-knit, intimate community around you if you can manage it. You have children and you have grandchildren and that to me, what I've experienced in my life, although I've had a very productive career, a very interesting career, it's definitely been the case for me that my family has been more and more important to me as I've got older and I don't think that that's a uncommon experience. This is another example of how our culture has just lost its moorings. It's like, well, what's life? Well, you have a job or a career and hopefully you're productive and you contribute something to the community and you provide yourself and your family with the necessities of life, that's a quarter of your life or a third of it, something like that. You have an intimate relationship, you have a family, that's life and if you don't have one of those, that's one-third of your life you don't have. Now, some people, maybe they're doing so well on the other two fronts that they can cope with not having that or maybe they're doing so well on one front they can cope with not having two of them. Compensates. Yeah, maybe. It's pretty hard because if you want to have a great career, it's hard to do that if you're alone and without a family, right? I mean, the people that I've seen who've been best situated in their life, all things considered, even in relationship to their career, have a pretty solid monogamous relationship that stabilizes them and then they have a family that also stabilizes them and broadens out their life and, you know, exceptional people do exceptional things and good for them but they're, by definition, given that they're exceptional, they're a tiny minority. This is always the argument between conservatives and liberals, right? Because the liberal types, they're more tilted sometimes towards, what would you call it, compassion or appreciation for the exceptional and fair enough, the exceptional is necessary but on average, what everyone does on average is the thing to do and so you just look, you see, well, what do people do? Well, they have a job or career, they have an intimate relationship and they have a family and if you don't have any one of those things, well, then you're treading water harder, doesn't mean you can't do it and it doesn't even mean possibly that you shouldn't try but as a default presumption, it's just utterly foolish. What else are you going to do with your life? Well, maybe you're wildly creative, fair enough, you know, that's extraordinarily rare as well, subject to the power law problem in any case, which is even if you're hyper creative, the probability that you're going to be successful at that economically is extremely, extremely tiny to the point where it's almost non-existent. It's so difficult. Now, it does happen and you can have spectacular success if you become successful but... Wasn't it, did you say last night, of the 100,000 most recently printed books, only a thousand have sold more than a million? Yeah, something like that. Power law is all the way down. Everywhere. Power law, that's, you know, a tiny minority of people do all the work, a tiny minority of people get all the benefit, a tiny minority of athletes score all the goals, a tiny minority of men get all the women, etc, a tiny minority of stars have all the mass, a tiny minority of rivers have all the water, a tiny minority of cities have all the people, etc, etc, etc. Everywhere, always, you know, and we're so clueless in our culture that we blame that on capitalism. It's like, how does that account for the mass of stars, people? So, or the, you know, the volume of rivers or the population density of cities.