Picture a fully grown elephant standing quietly at a pole, tethered by a small rope. No chains, no cage, nothing that would stop it from walking away. In Saqib Rizvi's 2018 YouTube video "Beliefs & The Purpose Of Our Lives," that image opens a short argument about the beliefs we inherit, the proof we rarely ask for, and why a search for the purpose of existence requires us to set our own tradition down long enough to hear everyone else. The talk moves from a parable about conditioning to a critique of blind faith, then to a call for something like judicial impartiality toward religion, mysticism, and science. It runs under six minutes and is unpolished, but its questions carry more weight than its answers, and that is where the interest lies.
Rizvi builds the video around a short story about a man named John who walks past a village farm and sees the elephant. The animal is not restrained by anything that could hold a creature of its size. John asks the trainer why it does not simply break free, and the trainer explains that when the elephant was a baby, the same rope was used to tie it. As the animal grew, it became conditioned to believe it could not get loose, so it never tried again. (Around 0:43 in the video, the trainer's answer lands, and the rest of the talk is an extended reading of it.)
The craft of the parable is in what it removes. The rope is not strong enough to hold the animal now; the animal is strong enough to pull it apart with little effort. The only thing still holding the elephant is a memory of a constraint that no longer exists. Rizvi makes the transfer explicit:
"In a similar fashion, for many of us, this is how our beliefs hold us back and prevent us from exploring new possibilities." (Saqib Rizvi, "Beliefs & The Purpose Of Our Lives," 2018, around 1:05)
This is the central move of the talk. The barrier that stops us is rarely external. It is a belief formed early, when we had no means of testing it, and it persists because we never checked whether it still applied.
Rizvi is specific about the territory he means. He says the beliefs that affect us most are the ones about "our very own existence, the nature of reality, this world around us." He lists the sharp divides that shape most people's lives: God on one side and no-God on the other, religion against atheism and agnosticism, mystics and messengers set against scientists and philosophers, and finally the way we choose to live day to day.
Those categories matter because they are not abstract. They determine which community we belong to, which stories we tell about where we came from, and what we think a life is for. Rizvi's observation about inheritance is blunt: "It isn't surprising that we end up following the same religion that our parents were following, and we think that OUR religion or OUR faith is THE right one." (around 2:02) The point is not that families pass on faith. It is that the conviction of rightness arrives along with it, often before any question has been asked.
Rizvi grounds his argument in a dictionary definition. A belief, he notes, is "an acceptance that something exists or something is true, especially one without proof." Once that definition is on the table, the talk becomes uncomfortable in a useful way. If a belief by definition runs ahead of proof, then holding it firmly is not evidence that it is true. Firmness is simply what acceptance feels like from the inside.
He then asks a sequence of questions that do most of the work in the video: "Have we ever questioned the validity of our beliefs? Did we ever get a proof that what WE believe IS the absolute truth?" (around 2:35) He names three reasons people avoid asking them. The first is fear of isolation from one's own community. The second is convenience: it is "quiet difficult to find answers" to questions about God, religion, existence, and the nature of reality, so it is easier to stick with the answer already given. The third, implied throughout, is that the belief is comfortable and the question is not.
These are not accusations so much as diagnoses. Rizvi is not calling believers foolish. He is describing how the social and emotional costs of doubt tend to outweigh the intellectual appeal of asking.
Rizvi goes further than asking whether beliefs are proven. He calls the idea that one should stick to one particular belief "deeply flawed," and he gives a reason rooted in change: "Everything in this world is changing every moment and humanity is developing because every moment, old ideas are being replaced by new ones."
From there he proposes a model for how understanding should work. He compares it to an organisation, which depends on the teamwork of its employees and departments. If we want to understand "the nature of reality and the purpose of our existence," he argues, it should be "a teamwork and a collective understanding of all humanity which includes all faiths, religions, communities, scientists, thinkers, philosophers." (around 3:31) The analogy is worth pausing on. No single department runs the whole company, and no single tradition, in his framing, holds the full picture. Each contributes a piece, and the whole is assembled only when the pieces are allowed to talk to each other.
The conclusion he draws is conditional: "If we keep an open mind and learn what others have to say, only then we will be truly searching for the purpose of our existence." Openness is treated not as a mood but as a precondition for the search being genuine at all.
The talk's most memorable passage is a courtroom image. Rizvi asks us to imagine a lawyer who becomes emotionally attached to her client. She listens only to the client and never considers the argument of the opposing party. Is she impartial? Is she truly fighting for justice? He answers his own question without hedging: "You know that the answer is NO." (around 4:19)
Then he applies it directly: "we need to get emotionally detached from our own religion, faith or belief, and learn about and consider the arguments of others." The word "detached" is doing delicate work here. Rizvi is not telling anyone to abandon a faith or to stop caring about it. He is saying that caring about a conclusion makes it harder to evaluate the case for it. A lawyer who is devoted to her client can still be a good advocate, but she cannot be a fair judge of the evidence against him. The video asks us to hold our faith in the same tension: to be loyal to it and still willing to weigh what the other side says.
This is the most demanding idea in the talk, and it is also the easiest to misread. Impartiality here is not indifference. It is the discipline of letting an opposing argument arrive at full strength before deciding it has failed.
Near the end, Rizvi lists the thinkers he believes we have a lot to learn from. On one side are "mystics like Jesus, Buddha, Jalaluddin Rumi." On the other are "Scientists and Philosophers like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Stephen Hawking, Carl Jung, Socrates, Confucius, and many more who have contributed greatly to our understanding of reality." (around 4:57)
The list is revealing for what it does. Earlier in the video, Rizvi had set mystics and messengers against scientists and philosophers as opposing camps. Here he places them side by side as contributors to the same inquiry. That reframing is the quiet thesis of the talk: the divide he began with is, in his view, a false one, and the search for purpose needs both kinds of attention. He does not elaborate on what any of these figures argued in the video. The list functions as an invitation rather than a reading guide, and a viewer who wants to follow it will have to do the reading independently.
The video does not prescribe a method, so what follows is an extension of its logic rather than something Rizvi states. One practical approach is to take a belief you hold firmly and trace where it came from. Ask whether you chose it after examination or inherited it, and whether anyone you trust has argued against it in good faith. Then read one serious thinker from a tradition you do not belong to, and try to state their position in terms they would accept as fair. The test Rizvi's lawyer image implies is whether you can present the opposing case well enough that its own defenders would recognise it.
This kind of inquiry does not have to end in a change of belief. Rizvi's argument is about the quality of the search, not a predetermined destination. A person may examine everything and return to the same faith with firmer and more examined reasons. What the talk rules out is the decision made before the question is asked.
An honest reading should note the video's limits. At under six minutes, it argues by parable and rhetorical question rather than by evidence. The elephant story is memorable, but it is an illustration, and it cannot by itself establish that any particular belief is unfounded. Rizvi also asserts that sticking to one belief is "deeply flawed" without showing how a person could hold any conviction at all while remaining perpetually open to revision. There is a real tension between the call for impartiality and the strong verdicts the talk delivers.
The list of thinkers is similarly unexplained. The video names figures whose views on God, reality, and purpose differ sharply from one another, and it does not show how they might be brought into a shared understanding. Rizvi is clear that he is "just starting" his journey, and that candour is worth respecting. It also means the video is best read as a sketch of a question rather than a finished argument. Its most durable contribution is the question it leaves: what would you have to stop assuming in order to find out what you actually think?
Rewatch the first ninety seconds of the video and pay attention to the moment the trainer explains the rope. Then ask which of your own convictions might be a rope you were tied to as a child. Next, choose one thinker Rizvi names whom you have never read, and spend a session with their argument before deciding what you think of it. Finally, keep the lawyer in mind. The aim is not to stop being loyal to what you believe. It is to be able to stand in front of the strongest opposing case and still know why you stay.
