Mentions personal use of The Gulag Archipelago.

Transcript context

…Yeah. So, one of the things that really impacted me when I was a young man, and I read The Gulag Archipelago, was don’t pursue happiness because the ingredients to happiness can be taken from you outside of your control, your health, but pursue spiritual fullness, pursue, I think he words it duty, and then happiness may come alongside. Or it may not. So, he gives the example that I thought was really interesting. In the prison camps, everybody’s trying to survive and they’ve made that their ultimate goal, “I will get through this.” And they’ve all basically turned into animals in pursuit of that goal and lying and cheating and stealing. And then he was like, somehow the corrupt Orthodox Church produced these little babushkas who were candles in the middle of all this darkness because they did not allow their soul to get corrupted. And he is like, “What they did do is they died. They all died, but they were lights while they were alive, and lost their lives, but they didn’t lose their souls.” So, for myself, that was really powerful to read and realize that the pursuit of happiness wasn’t exactly what I wanted to aim at. I wanted to aim at living out my life according to love, like we talked about earlier. Trying to be that candle.…

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