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A Holiday to Heaven: A Discussion of ‘The Great Divorce’ by C.S. Lewis

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CHAPTER

The Refugiary in the Great Divorce

In Scrutape letters, he says she was a woman who lived for others. And people always wonder how much she subtracted from his life. But I think you got a fair amount of material from living with Mrs. Moore all those years. You know, Lewis talks about the roughness and density of life. We see dignity and depravity everywhere. John Tolkien said that his mother Edith and Mrs. Moore were actually very good friends.

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Speaker 2
Yeah, me and George had this idea that we're going to write an essay on together. So I'm going to try and explain it to you now. It's not fully thought out, but we'll see if we can get there. The difference between observable and hidden metrics and how they influence our motivation. So a lot of the time people will trade a hidden metric for an observable metric. Good example of a hidden metric would be something like peace of mind. Okay. And something like an observable metric would be money. People will happily trade something which may be more valuable, ultimately, for something which is less valuable simply because they can measure it more effectively. Yeah. Like times an interesting one because John Lennon lyric, isn't that? I give
Speaker 1
you everything I got for a little piece of mind.
Speaker 3
There we
Speaker 1
go. But it's a very interesting point because that idea of going, you know, if you can't measure it, we tend to go towards measured. Correct. And so the idea of going these and actually what matters is it's, you know, emotional. Yeah.
Speaker 2
There's no dashboard. This is why George tries to have a dashboard for all of the things that he does. He's got this end of day assessment type form, custom type form he's made himself that auto populates to a Google sheet. And at the end, yeah, he's he was born and in cell but managed to ascend out of it. He has got himself to the stage where he's tracking what were the three things that I did today? What was my sense of presence? How connected was I? All the way down. And his goal is to track this over time, right? To see what are the correlations between my actions and the way that I felt. So he's trying to make the hidden observable. And the problem that we have is that things that really, really matter to us like connection and peace of mind and, you know, adopamine and serotonin balance throughout the day, like how content and fulfilled did I feel? All of these things, they're just fucking words. There's this nebulous ephemeral wishy, what's trying to hold smoke, right? To try and work out what this is. But money, a bank account, it's a fucking good game. The number of followers I've got on social media, it's a really fucking good game. So I'll chase down the observable. Well,
Speaker 1
it gets back to that story of like, what's the most successful story in human history? Money. Money's the greatest story ever told. Because what even is it? Really, when you break it down, it's kind of, it's not anything. And yet everyone believes in it. Everyone believes in that story. And what you're getting to is what's really important in life. And the stuff that maybe you can't measure is kind of what matters, right?

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