Why Life Feels So Dull All The Time (and how to fix it) - Robert Greene - #1162

Chris Williamson (0:00)

People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that, me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left, and you can get yours now at chriswilliamson.live. This is a custom-built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over a year working on it. So, if you're a fan of everything Modern Wisdom, come and see me on stage this October around the UK and Ireland, chriswilliamson.live. This has taken you 20 years to do, this book.

Robert Greene (0:28)

Wow. That would be a long time. I would be beat Robert Carrow.

No, seven years.

Chris Williamson (0:34)

Seven.

Robert Greene (0:35)

So, back in like 2000, I read a book on the sublime and I got really excited. I thought this is really interesting, but I knew there was no market for it. It was kind of a weird book. I intended after the war book, this was going to be my next book with sublime. I was going to shock my readers with something totally unexpected. I hired a researcher, started doing it and then 50 Cent trotted along and said, let's do a book together. So I pushed sublime aside. I made the 10th chapter of the 50 Cent book about the sublime, about how he nearly died from the gunshot wounds and his near-death experience. Then from 50 Cent book, there was a chapter about mastery, so I turned that into the book Mastery.

Then, I don't know, human nature was anyway, I just got totally sidelined.

Then I had my quote unquote near-death experience, and suddenly God was telling me, this is the time you need to write a book on the sublime, no more putting it off, because it was a sublime experience to come that close to dying.

Chris Williamson (1:43)

A lot of your work is focused on power, seduction, manipulation, human nature. Why get interested in writing about the sublime at all?

Robert Greene (1:54)

Well, a lot of what happens with humans and what goes wrong with them, is on a deep psychological level and level of consciousness. The first three books are the social game, the surface game that we all play, because we're a social animal and nobody really instructs us. Even though we're a social animal, nobody even teaches us how to be social, and we make all these mistakes and we suffer.

That book came out of my experiences in Hollywood and all the suffering I had in all the 50 different jobs with the psychotic bosses that I had and all that.

But there's something deeper going on with human, something more than just the social game. It's how we experience life itself and how we relate to the world around us.

I'm just noticing a kind of deadness in people's experience, a kind of flatness. Like everything has been flattened out by social media in a way. And people aren't experiencing anything on a deep level. There's nothing surprising anymore.

I look at my Instagram feed and it's interesting. And I see cat videos and they're great. And the first time I see it, it's wow, that cat's doing incredible things. And the second, the third time, it's all the same. It really, there's differences. Don't get me wrong. But in the end, it's all programs, it's all algorithms. It's all the same. And I think people are suffering, suffering deeply from it. I was taking a bike ride the other day in Griffith Park.

I just had this epiphany that I'm living in a madhouse. Everyone's going insane. And I'm going insane as well. And why is that? Why do people feel so cramped and so restless and turning to all these different things and our politics and technology, everything's just going haywire? I feel like there's something deep, deep, having deep in our consciousness and a kind of disconnect from what it means to be alive. You know, when you come close to dying, you know what it really means to be alive. And so I don't know if I'm being too grandiose, but I'm really wanting to help people in their suffering and give them a roadmap for how you could possibly experience life on a deeper level. It has nothing to do with manipulation. It has nothing to do with power or seducing. It's on a deeper psychological level that I'm trying to reach you.

Chris Williamson (4:22)

It feels like you're talking about life having the color stripped away from it in some ways. That the amplitude of the waveform is just being compressed down and everything's little wobbles. Nothing's that great and nothing's that deeply felt.

Robert Greene (4:41)

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I mean, the way I look at it is, we all went through childhood, right? And we all had, it's a universal experience, seeing the world for the first time. Everybody went through that. Everybody had to go through learning language and discovering that you had an eye, that you were different from other people, that you had discovered who your parents were.