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In my first talk, I suggested that our culture had become infected with acetya, especially in two forms.

First, a kind of rejection of responsibility, which perhaps in a slightly overwrought way,

I call a hatred of being, a hatred of place, and a hatred even of life itself.

Although that's from Avagoras.

You can blame him for that language.

But a sense that responsibility just weighs too much and we don't want it.

The Czech novelist Milan Kundar at the beginning of his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being,

is playing off this notion from Nietzsche of the doctrine of eternal return.

And there's a sense of whatever Nietzsche means by that, that you want to have a life where your

actions and choices can bear such weight that that action could occur again and again

and recur again for eternity and kind of be up to the task

of happening again. But then Kundera, or at least the voice in the novel, says, why do we want weight?

Why not prefer instead lightness? Sort of freedom. If you're aware, if you know the story of the

three metamorphoses in Nietzsche, you have the camel and the lion and the child, and the camel loves its load and its duties and its obligations.

And the lion discovers that it needs to reveal all of those obligations as arbitrary and false so as to remove them so that the child can finally emerge and be free to create value

for themselves.

I think at our own moment, one of the great temptations so many people face is they would

rather have a kind of unbearable lightness to their life rather than wait.

It's one of the reasons I think why we see marriage in such precipitous decline. We now have more single households with single heads of

the household than we do married families in the United States. And a lot of that just simply seems

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