Hello, everybody. This is Against Everyone with Connor Habib. This episode features the minimalist,

Joshua Fields Milburn. I'm going to start by talking about certainty and uncertainty,

because I'm sure you all know what I mean when I say, we keep getting all this messaging about uncertainty,

especially in advertisements.

We live in uncertain times when you can't be certain of many things,

rely on this product and so on and so forth.

It's not just products, it's all the messaging in our lives

has to do with uncertain times. What does that mean?

I mean, it means a lot of things, but one of the things that's packed into uncertainty, and

probably the main thing, really, is its relation to things, to materiality.

People's material conditions are important, of course, and some of them

need to be addressed in urgent ways. But when we place our notion of certainty or uncertainty around

material, we have to ask ourselves how much certainty can really come from materiality, from material things.

I don't just mean goods. I mean materiality itself. Materiality is always fleeting,

and that includes our own bodies. There's a Rudolph Steiner quote from 1903.

The human being is a citizen of eternity because he carries something eternal in himself.

We're so far divorced from that principle, from that idea, by thought clutter.

The way we fill our thoughts with thoughts of objects and their hopeful permanence,

which is actually a hopeless permanence, but a hopeful permanence, rather than the eternal,

and its total eternal permanence, and eternity's helpful attendant. Its helpful attendant is meaning, something that is meaningful.

Meaning usures us towards and points us towards and indicates the eternal.

That is to say, it indicates the anchor, the real certainty within us.

...