everybody is a total mess (and you should be one too)

hello giraffe how are you today why the long neck oh you've got the sads haven't you well why don't we phone a friend and cheer you up ring ring yes hello this is elephant elephant says oh hi giraffe would you like to invest in my crypto startup we'll [ __ ] you twice good day hm maybe elephant's a little busy let's see if Tiger has any helpful advice ring ring tiger says top on AR well that didn't go very well did it I bet you feel even more alone now don't you Giraffe you're probably thinking

about graduating from weekend roast potato binges to weekday gin tonic Benders aren't you no no giraffe that's not the way probably now look the world is awful at times it really is the only thing I dislike more than living here is myself but that's okay we all get the blue sometimes it'd be weird not to considering how strange everything is perhaps the real problem is that we've built a culture where we aggressively enforce the idea that confronting the sad truths of the world is unhealthy or weird despite the fact that we all do it that

we have to and that actually at the bottom of it underneath kind regards and birthday cards everybody is a total mess and you should be one too so there's about 8 billion of us little parasites at the moment and average life expectancy is around 26,000 days which means that chances are about 300,000 people are having the worst day of their entire lives today and Isn't it nice not to be one of them but it will come our turn at some point of course and what does one do when one's life falls apart how the hell

would I know do I seem like a happy person to you but we might want to talk about this obscure composer you won't have heard of who in 1876 wrote to his nephew saying indeed my life is of little Worth to anyone were I to vanish from the face of the Earth today it would be no great loss to Russian music that was actually oh you know [ __ ] chaikovsky easily one of the greatest composers who ever lived Swan Lake The Nutcracker you know the C and yet somehow doubted himself constantly or take this

writer a struggling unknown considered himself hideously ugly and stupid and disliked his work enough he wrote to a friend asking that after his death all of his stuff was to be burned he died at 40 from tuberculosis and his friend ignored his wishes and had his stuff published anyway the man was oh you know France [ __ ] Kafka one of the greatest writers of last century or how about this unknown Mexican painter living in the shadow of her famous lover convinced of her naivity sure she was a failure maybe you've heard of her husband

Diego Rivera you've definitely heard of her though Freda [ __ ] Carlo today we would generally know Diego Rivera as her spouse not the other way around we love you Freda but those are all artists it' be a bit suspicious if they weren't all a little bit no well how about this American statesman in the 1800s who lost his mother at 9 then his sister at 19 then his 11-year-old son himself he suffered numerous bouts of the sads writing once I am now the most miserable man living if what I feel were equally distributed to

the whole Human family there would be not one cheerful face on the earth wouldn't expect you to know him that was just Abraham [ __ ] Lincoln add to the pile Michelangelo Florence Nightingale bethoven all of them slipping into periods when they reported they went to a place for a while from which they simply could not find their way back to themselves the thing is we only know about their struggles because their lives are well studied we're not famous but we get the blues too of course and oddly it turns out that our brains mostly

process physical pain and emotional pain in the same regions and find it rather hard to tell them apart the sads actually do hurt have you hung out with people after their hearts have been broken it's like they've been shot now if so many of us go to the bad place in the course of our lives and if civilization is so old how come we still don't have an agreed sense of how to combat or even talk properly about the emotional ouchies we know what to do about Dicky tummies and broken legs why don't we know

how to fix broken Souls uh probably because we rarely know how to describe any of this stuff even to ourselves English is terrible for talking about complex emotions especially the sad ones other languages are far more specific for example yah the Arabic for hoping you die before someone you love so you don't have to live without them or the French for literally the wit of the staircase for when you think of the perfect comeback you could have said to a joke or an insult but you've already left the party or Cavalier scalati Italian for reheated

cabbage as in trying to restart a relationship that didn't go great last time it won't this time either please stop it but we're lacking for nice things in English too cfun Portuguese for when you're running your fingers through the hair of someone you rather like or coo yoan Japanese for when you first meet someone and you already suspect that the two of you might be destined to fall in love and my personal favorite valim samite German for the feeling of solitude you get when you're alone in the woods which isn't supposed to be sad at

all but surely that can also be the worst experience because there are two modes of being out in the woods no there's the old having a map and a plan and a big backpack full of Amsterdam Truffles and then there's the other mode when you're stuck in the woods lost at Twilight out of allies with nothing but a terrible sense that you're never ever getting out of this place and you're completely alone in the struggle to Chinese literature now why because shut up and as an introduction we'll first meet Jang zong Chang a 19th century

warlord poet who penned such distinguished work as you tell me to do this he tells me to do that you are all you are all bastards go [ __ ] your mother no this was real honestly or the sky God is also named Jang why does he make life hard for me if it doesn't rain in 3 days I'll demolish your temple then then I'll then I'll have Cannon's bomb bombard your mom but let's jump 2 and a half thousand years back to 4th Century BC China ler is a great scholar who eventually gets tired

of the Kingdom he's living in and decides to go off and be a Hermit so one story goes anyway but a god recognizes him at the city Gates as he's trying to leave and says I'll only let you through if you write down all of your wisdom loudu agrees and knocks out the da de Jing the founding text of dosm a religion still million strong in China Malaysia and elsewhere today now no one's actually sure if ler even existed it's unlikely but the da de Jing sure does daoo literally means the way or the path

if you like that is the unfolding of the universe more or less and one of the central questions of the daed Jing is cosmically we know sod all about why anything is here historically we're often powerless and in our personal lives we're strangers even to ourselves sometimes how the hell are we supposed to live like this and the dowst answer partly is that we have to give up trying to be masters of everything wo way or doing but without striving abandoning the fantasy of control and accepting that we're not in charge of any Destinies least

of all our own why do birds migrate because they feel like it why did I spend all of last Monday drinking Mojitos and lying on the floor pretending to be an iggly Wiggly squid because I wanted to the universe knows what it's doing and we are a universe anyway the more we try to impose our will on everything around us the more futile It all becomes and so we get wonderful lines like happiness is the absence of striving for happiness or the world belongs to those who let go or do you have the patience to

wait until your mud settles and the water is clear the original dsts are 2,000 years dead now but they weren't aliens they worried about exactly the same stuff we do grief political turmoil and a frustration at having to exist down here and their reply to all that was fairly novel we don't live in Utopia we live in a mysterious zoo of [ __ ] largely beyond our control the only choice we get is how to react to it all now I waste your time with all this only because the daa Jing is one of the

first serious attempts in history to address the horrors of being alive and it's probably not a coincidence that much of dosm really got going a few centuries after ler when China fell into the Waring States period as in seven very angry States beating the Jolly Dickens out of each other constant Warfare and just at the point when everything became fractured Chinese thinkers began hungering for a mindset to live through the chaos by it's funny how that happens personally or historically something goes awfully wrong and we end up looking for new ways of seeing but anyway

it's all right because stuff calmed down and everything went swimmingly after that except for over in Europe at that time Athens is getting pulverized by the Spartans in the pipian war with thousands dead but in the after MTH of all that instability out pops stoicism an attempt to Simply accept a changing and unpredictable world if you can't put the fire out then you may as well toast marshmallows over it but it's all right because stuff calmed down and everything went swimmingly after that except then in 64 ad with the great fire of Rome destroying just

oh 70% of the city then 79 ad with Vesuvius the volcano going off and barbecuing thousands of people then 165 with the antonine plague sweeping through the Roman Empire killing oh just 10 million people but it's all right because stuff calmed down and we're just in time for what's sometimes called the worst year in recorded human history 536 a mystery fog has just turned up probably thanks to a volcano going off in Iceland the fog will last for almost 2 years turning the sun into more of a cloudy Moon it'll be the coldest decade in

2 and a half Millennia crops start to fail because obviously widespread famine gets going setting the stage in a few years for the Justinian plague which will kill eventually tens of millions then 755 and the anlan Rebellion begins in China a civil war that will kill around 30 million people then the Mongol campaigns wiping out maybe 40 million people that's so much murder that it removed maybe 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere enough that we can still see it today in Antarctic Ice cores but it's all right because then 1349 Europe gets to

enjoy the Black Death wiping out Millions but out of that however comes humanism where we begin playing with the idea of relying on human reason and compassion rather than exclusively upstairs Heavenly stuff then the Spanish Conquest rest of the Americas in the 15th century Millions will die to violence and disease then the 30 years war in Europe in the 1600s maybe a mere 8 million dead but it also partly inspires the enlightenment pushing personal autonomy and representative government then the Industrial Revolution bringing in enormous Innovation but also Urban poverty out of which though we'll end

up with among other things Romanticism and utopianism then the Napoleonic Wars with Millions dead because of course then the first world war kindly dispatches about 50 million people then the second install killing 70 million this time out of which though we'll get existentialism and deism and pacifism and a bunch of other fun flavors of delightfully modern Madness it' be better not to have the tragedies in the first place but it is pretty neat how resilient we can be even as everything goes down the toilet in our own little lives and on the big Global stage

and that we know just as well as our ancestors did life is cruel and intolerably awful at times but if one dares to stare directly into the unavoidable abyss of pain loss and tragedy the reward at the other end is often new [Music] eyes and maybe beer as well I don't know I [ __ ] hope say but it's all right because here in the present stuff has finally calmed down and everything is definitely going to go just swimmingly from now on I used to see my neighbor in the lift of my apartment block sometimes

he was about 40 and always disgustingly optimistic I would tell him how I'd just broken my foot or have my bike stolen and he'd say something like oh but that's great you must have learned so much about yourself the responses always made me want to go out and purchase very pointy medieval weaponry and so I started avoiding him then a bit later I was in the basements of the block storing some stuff and found an old public death notice and the notice happened to be talking about my neighbor's wife it turned out she had died

a few years before I stopped avoiding my neighbor after that his Relentless positivity was still sort of irritating but in it now I saw an incredible quiet strength that I never stopped admiring oh no I thought everyone is secretly broken aren't they being a kid is this weird experience of everyone older introducing you to the world oh yeah they say there's the library and there's the cinema and the bakery and that's the cave of hopeless despair you'll end up in sometimes where all of your dreams are savagely crushed for no obvious reason and you say

sorry what and they say oh and over there is the juice bar but something happens or nothing happens and one morning a little older you do wake up in the cave seemingly alone it's very dark in there and you wander about for a while but you can't find the exit no problem you think I've got this Compass but the needle just keeps spinning no problem you think I'll dig my way out but soon your hands are bloody so you abandon that no problem you think I'll just wait for rescue but all you hear are the

distant voices of the rest of the world on the beach outside apparently having a lovely time without you and so you carve your name into the Rock because what else is there to do here but sit in misery and wait for nothing but you do come out of the cave again of course often with the help of friends or sometimes via events just as mysterious as those that brought you in here but you come out of Despair and fall back into the world and hopefully everything is fine once more strangely though perhaps a while later

you pop back to the cave out of curiosity but with a torch this time and find that your name was not the only signature on the wall there were hundreds of signatures of everyone you've ever known Millions from all the others who did their lonely time in here as well because it would be odd to go an entire life without occasionally losing the plot it would be weird to live as a talking primate knowing just enough to know that we know basically nothing surrounded by disasters losing people forever as we do and not have a

bit of a [ __ ] wobble now and then it isn't amazing so much chaos and suffering has happened across history rather it's amazing that it happened and we're still here still being decent sometimes that in spite of all the horrors we still came up with democracy and aspirin and winter fashion for cats that we can continue to continue in the face of loss and despair and because of that because we continue a while from now we get to stand on the high cliff looking out on the warm day with all of our wisdom as

we experience yet another feeling we don't have a word for in English a numo the strange sense at having arrived now in the future and wishing you could tell your past self that everything will be okay because it will be until the next time you take a little vacation in the cave of Despair perhaps and another version of you Waits quietly ahead in the future having braved those hard times as well so that you can return back to yourself once again as we always always do [Music]