Happiness Is Fleeting

I listen to weird music, that’s a necessary admission before sharing the content of this article. One of the artists in my rotation is Akira the Don, who takes the speeches of prominent thinkers and puts them to music. My favorite in this rotation is a condensed speech by Jordan Peterson called “Happiness is Fleeting.” Normally I wouldn’t share something so secular (and will not make a habit of doing so in this medium), but these words have obvious parallels to scriptural principles, namely resilience in suffering and modeling Christ to the world. It’s so well-worded that — at least in my view — it warrants sharing. 

“That place where the meaning and the fact are conjoined, that’s the proper place to lecture from. What you want to do as an academic is tell your students about something that you’ve encountered that you’ve fallen in love with, and to communicate the love that you have for that. Not to say, ‘Well, you should read this book.’ But to say, ‘Here’s this book, and here’s what it can open up for you, and this is how it does it. This is what you will gain from it.’ 

“There’s something in it that’s of unbelievable utility, and you have to believe that in order to communicate it, to communicate that commitment you have to beauty and to truth and to literature. It isn’t enough to say what they are and to transmit them. It’s to manifest yourself as a living part of that tradition, and to show yourself thereby as a model for living out what that tradition represents, and to show that that’s so much better than a short-term-pleasure-seeking-nihilism. They’re not even in the same conceptual universe. 

“And people are far more open to that, they know already. People know, especially when they’re hurt, they know that happiness is fleeting and that suffering requires a sustaining meaning. … And so to say, well here’s a balm for the suffering, and it’s profound and deep, and here’s what it’s meant to me, and here’s how you can incorporate it into your life — people are absolutely starving for that, or dying of thirst for that.”