HIGHLIGHTS

• Sisyphus, Pandora's Box, and hope
• Hope is a double-edged sword
• False hope can trivialize pain and suffering
• Our big brains allow us to ask "What if?"
• At the root of most anxiety is uncertainty
• Our relationship with uncertainty and truth has changed drastically
• Religions are rigid in their modernist truths and cannot adapt
• Suffering is a fact of life
• People waste their gifts because they avoid risk

QUOTES

Jon: "It is hard for us creatures to function without some sense of hope, some sense that tomorrow could be better. And yet at the same time, hope is a really dangerous commodity because it raises our expectations and sets us up for disappointment."

Jon: "If we think evolutionarily, we've been given a negativity bias. We have this bias towards the negative that is we encounter uncertainty, we don't see it as a wonderful surprise that is waiting to occur. We instead look at it and say something bad is going to occur because that kept us alive. It was a survival adaptation to think towards the negative."

Jon: "Much of our struggles as humans can be traced back to an attempt to resolve uncertainty. Of course we can think of lots of negative ways to resolve uncertainty. We try to minimize it, we try to avoid it, we medicate it. And these are ways that don't free us to live in a fully and robust human way. Instead, our world kind of shrinks in, as we deal with uncertainty in that way."

Jon: "Science did away with much of our mystery and then I think religion started to adopt that and became smaller and started to be more rigid. You mentioned that the institutions of religion may have set themselves up for a fall. I think one of the challenges in our religious rigidity is we're not able to grow and adapt."

Jon: "I think our Christianity as it existed when I grew up will be dead 10 years from now. They won't exist anymore because we had a rigidity around the way we've practiced our faith that has not allowed it to adapt to  changing culture."

Jon: "There is really suffering in America. But as a culture, I think the message is a little bit along the lines of 'we can overcome suffering'. We can make disease, illness, sadness, whatever it is, we can make it go away. So the goal is to make suffering stop. I don't think that's congruent with reality. Suffering is a given reality. And if we don't accept that, embrace that, then we're living in a somewhat delusional way."

To find out more about Jon, please see the links below.

• Website: http://www.jondillowcounseling.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-dillow-a3618b161/

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