Why Your Marriage Feels Like A Prison Instead Of An Adventure

What does it mean to wrestle with God—and can anyone avoid it? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson takes up a question that reaches beyond the divide between believer and atheist. Drawing on ancient stories and his experience as a clinical psychologist, he explores faith, doubt, and what our choices reveal about what we believe.

What does a man who spent seventy five years living in his father’s tent have to do with the question you have been avoiding about your own life? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson works through the story of Abraham and arrives at the hardest passage in scripture, the moment a father is told to take his only son up a mountain and offer him as a burnt offering. The atheists call it proof of a monstrous God. Peterson thinks they have the story upside down, and getting to why takes him through a savings account, a sports team, a statue Michelangelo carved at twenty four, and the thing every mother does on the first day of school. Then a police officer asks him for one piece of advice, and the answer takes six minutes and costs Moses the promised land. By the end there is a calculation involving twenty minutes, fifty repetitions, and the two percent of your life you could fix this week. What Abraham is actually offered turns out not to be faith in the conventional sense at all, but a trade: everything you are comfortable with, in exchange for something you already know you want more.

What does a seventy-year-old man who has never left his father's tent have in common with the first murder ever committed? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson works through the story of Cain and Abel and arrives somewhere nobody expects: a precise, almost clinical account of how resentment is manufactured, step by step, in an ordinary person who believes he has been treated unfairly. Along the way he explains why Freud and Jung both thought Nietzsche's solution was impossible, why your reputation is a better place to store wealth than your bank account, what you are actually doing when you tell your son it matters how he plays the game, and the one experiment he ran on himself that he says is worth the price of the ticket on its own. Then Konstantin Kisin comes out to argue that none of it requires God at all, and the conversation turns to the pill, the family, and a question about what has to change in a culture before a technology becomes thinkable. The story of Cain and Abel turns out to be less about an ancient crime than about a door you have already been offered, and whether you opened it.

Why would a grown man pay money to sit in the dark and be terrified, and what does that have to do with the reason the modern world feels like it is coming apart? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson argues that everything you think you know about how you see the world is backward: that you do not navigate by facts or reason but through a story, and that the direction you secretly aim decides what you are able to perceive at all. From the first date in a crowded restaurant to the three great stories fighting for control of the West, he builds toward an unsettling diagnosis of a civilization living unconsciously on inherited wealth, illustrated by nothing less than a children's cartoon and a myth older than the Bible. Then the writer Konstantin Kisin joins him on stage to push back, and their conversation turns to the hardest question of all, whether the ancient stories are merely useful or actually true, and what it would cost us to find out we cannot live without them.

What does a golden rope in a dying man's dream have to do with the person in your life you can no longer reach? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson sets out after three questions that turn out to be the same question, what is a man, what is a woman, and what is the highest thing a person can aim at, and pursues them through the strangest doorway imaginable: the despair of the most successful author who ever lived, who had everything a human being could want and still could not find a reason to stay alive. From Tolstoy's vision of something infinite suspended above the abyss, to a treacherous brother who remade himself into the founder of a nation, Peterson builds toward a practical answer with startling reach. And in the most moving moment of the night, his wife Tammy steps on stage to tell the true story of how she won back a sister she was losing, using nothing more than the one thing almost no one is willing to do. What begins as a lecture on identity ends as an instruction manual for getting back the people you thought were gone for good.