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sleep is good death is better yet surely never to have been born is best these lines close a 17th century poem by German writer Hinrich Hine the piece is titled death and his brother's sleep Compares these two states suggesting that we experience a bit of death each time we fall asleep while sleeping we Glimpse the void and briefly know what it would feel like to no longer exist some might find it unsettling to conceive of sleep as a practice for death but when your head hits the pill every night where do you go exactly this

proximity to our final resting state might be alarming for some While others might find solace in this brief Escape think of a time when you've been horrendously embarrassed or undergone immense stress or grief when your head hits the pillow you are free from whatever is bothering you even if just for a few hours you get that sense that when you close your eyes you collapse inward shrinking so far into yourself that you vanish entirely death of course is is final and so it's impossible to know what it would feel like yet you can be sure

that your problems and your worries won't follow you into the Afterlife if there is any under the Sweet release of death you would be free the thing with death though is that a footprint of your life would still be left behind loved ones would warn your loss embarrassing moments that people would still remember but there's a third option that's not temporal like sleep and doesn't leave hurt behind like death if you're watching the video right now chances are you've flirted with this third option you've had the desire to not exist what exactly is this feeling

how does it differ from death and what can it teach us about life the desire to not exist is stronger than death to not exist is to have every trace of yourself and every Mark you've left on the world erased no one would have ever known you all your achievements and accomplishments vanish along with their failures to die would be to still leave behind some memory of who you were to not exist swipes away everything you are and never were while the implication is intense the desire is often fleeting sometimes knee-jerk it overcomes you in

an instant maybe at a time when life isn't going your way perhaps you're going through a breakup where you lost a loved one or it could be that you've just had one of those days where life piles everything on top of you and you feel like you're being crushed you see a list of problems before you in the fantasy of slowly drifting away is more appealing than facing your issues headon though it's not often discussed I would bet that most people have wish to not exist at some point could this desire serve a purpose in

our lives and why at times can it feel so overwhelming the word desire itself describes an intense wish for something one doesn't have it transcends a mere want and is affiliated with something usually unobtainable think about the desire for fame or Fortune to be well-liked or beautiful desires often surpass our daily wants and needs like food or water to desire something is in some ways to be seduced by it you see it right before you yet it's just out of your grasp the desire to not exist is frustrating because unlike fame or fortune that still

exists within some realm of possibility it's impossible to have never lived the person watching this video exists you have existed nothing not even death can change that so the desire to not exist can never be fulfilled it doesn't spring from any coherent logical belief this desire is often not discussed because of its Pro Pro imity to suicide and suicidal ideation but it's very different it lacks the concrete outcomes and implications of suicidal ideation the desire to not exist can never come true while death by Suicide is unfortunately obtainable although it can never happen this feeling

can still be overwhelming if you think about it too deeply and too often it can quickly lead to a terrible mental health state for most people though this feeling of never having been offers a way to cope with the heavy burden of life it provides temporary relief from whatever you're going through and helps to decenter you from your experience by imagining a world without you you understand how insignificant many of life's problems are if the odds shifted by even a minute fraction you wouldn't be here today and none of this would matter so why should

it bother you so much if you find Comfort when you imagine your non-existence I would encourage you to look further into nihilism a nihilistic worldview detaches meaning from all Realms of reality it's the philosophy of meaninglessness after all when you turn that Inward and apply it to selfhood technically from a nihilist point of view you already don't exist throughout your time here on Earth there is no such thing as the coherent self nihilism might sound scary initially but it doesn't have to be we made a video about optimistic nihilism that I think would be really

good to explore on the other end of the spectrum though there's a different philosophical school of thought that centers very heavily on the existence of the self r cart and other philosophers Center their thinking around the existence of the self because you know you're thinking you can perceive that you're conscious of your mind proving its existence all other aspects of reality can be thrown into doubt how can you know that an apple is really red or that the people in front of you are really here couldn't a malicious force be deceiving your every perception Your

Existence seems to be the only thing you can be sure of and while most people don't live in as much constant doubt as the card's philosophy suggests most of us do experience the self as tangible and coherent I think therefore I am seems ingrained in our daily lives and most of us except for the hardcore niist out there go about our days with the knowledge that we are but it can be pretty difficult to experience your existence in every waking moment of every day with no break to make matters worse sleep can sometimes be elusive

especially when you have that much on your mind if you manage to sleep sometimes you have nightmares that force you to continue to exist even in what should be moments of of rest living can feel so intense because there is no Escape being alive can sometimes feel exhausting even when you aren't busy or overwhelmed but especially when you're overstimulated the desire to not exist can creep in think about being at a party or a family reunion where you make many vague social connections with people you barely know you must constantly be on performing Your Existence

to those nearby especially for an introvert socializing like this can be draining and it can make you want to fade into the background or Oblivion social media intensifies the need for you to be perceived constantly online you always exist even when you log off your social media profiles are available to anyone who wishes to find them meaning you are perceived without your awareness and what you post affects these perceptions meaning you must always be your best self online even when showing a more vulnerable side it's still a part of yourself you choose to share not

only do you have the burden of existence online but it has to be your best existence and you must maintain it over time what I've described so far is a baseline existence it's what's required of you daily as you interact with people in your family at school and at work it's also the existence that you inhabit between you and yourself the perception of yourself that theart talks about or your inner monologue and at times it's not other people we're sick of you can also want to escape yourself the want to leave yourself is inherent in

the desire to not exist the mind sometimes feels like a prison of of your own making which makes it even more unbearable you can sometimes get that itchy feeling like you want to jump out of your skin thoughts in your head can make you feel annoyed or angry with yourself unfortunately while we can find respect from other people we cannot Escape our minds the desire to no longer exist can be pointed inward something we fantasize about when we no longer want to be ourselves all these aspects are compounded when life gets busy or unpleasant dealing

with grief a breakup or losing your job alongside the stress stress of familial obligations and basic self-maintenance might make you want to wither away this is why this desire is more common than we realize or discuss we must remove the shame associated with admitting that sometimes existing can be tiring we need to create safe spaces for people to share that feeling without labeling it as suicidal ideation when it's not it's not that you don't want to be here anymore you wish you never were it's a desire for Stillness privacy and quietness even from our own

thoughts well this desire can't ever fully be fulfilled the feelings associated with it can be recreated albeit temporarily by purposefully embracing boredom and engaging in mindfulness practices we can quiet the mind and get that Stillness we desperately crave close your eyes and imagine yourself drifting out of your body and away from yourself imagine you are actively detaching your body and then your mind you're essentially practicing what it feels like to not exist exist many people use and abuse substances as a shortcut to achieve the feeling of non-existence the temporary escape from the self this method

is unsustainable and will probably make you feel worse about yourself in the long run we underestimate how caught up we are in ourselves and how much our existence weighs heavy on our minds it can feel excruciating to be alone with yourself when all you want to do is escape yourself but trying to do the opposite of existence in a healthy sober way might satisfy your want to disappear and when you do return to yourself instead of feeling the crash after a dopamine hit you'll feel calmer ready to face all that comes with existence watch this

video next to understand the power of meditation and how you can use it to temporarily fulfill the desire to not exist has anyone ever accused you of acting like you're the center of the universe maybe you were 10 years old upset that your mom wouldn't take you to buy candy or if you were so focused on an upcoming project that you totally forgot to wish your coworker congratulations on their promotion it happens to the best of us most of us are wired to be a little selfish we evolved to survive after all Airlines even tell

us to secure our oxygen masks before our children's but being reprimanded by our parents are a friend for being a little self-obsessed is different from feeling like we are truly the only person who exists what would that be like everyone and everything else being a figment of our imagination actually being the center of the universe it seems like a fun wh if game to play but if you think about it long enough could it make sense are you sure the phone you're holding in your hands is even real could you be certain that the woman

you just bought a coffee from was indeed there the only thing we can be certain of is our own mind at least that's what the philosophy of solipsism tells us solipsism is an extreme type of skepticism that anything external from our minds does not exist the outside world other people their thoughts and emotions simply don't exist outside of our perception of them solipsism is presented as an explanation for what the external World actually is it basically says it isn't anything it's make believe imaginary literally in our heads the house we live in the people we

love the car we drive and the food we eat they are our perception the sky the moon the whole solar system are merely figments of our own minds solipsism equates the existence of anything with one's personal experiences thoughts emotions and behaviors they are the only things we can be certain of as individuals it tells us that we are indeed the center of the universe many philosophers have argued similar ideas to solipsism trying to solve the gap between our perception of things and their actual existence for example George Berkeley similarly wanted to know if things we

did not see actually existed he asked the classic question if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it does it make a noise he answered no that something like the noise the tree makes only exists if someone can perceive it but he didn't go as far as solipsism takes us he felt that solipsists were actually absurd he reason that if a solipsist thinks their mind is the only thing in existence then it can't be perceived by anything or anyone else if it can't be perceived then it cannot exist if

the only thing that existed was the mind and its perception then the actual World wouldn't be there and then we'd be what nothing maybe we would live in The Matrix living in an illusion a figment of someone else perception that only some know isn't real but the thing about the idea of the Matrix sword for that matter solipsism in general is that it doesn't really appeal to Common Sense we know that our dog exists because we just do solipsism is more about logic we can think to ourselves I only have direct access to the contents

of my own mind sensory experiences thoughts and memories these contents are completely private I might share them but no one really knows them besides me at the same time I'm unable to access anyone else's mind so I can only infer their existence indirectly therefore the only thing of certainty is that my mind exists we can't logically assert anything else so we end up sealed in this prison cell of our perception of the world around us we experience our own mind in every single moment of our lives but simply assume that other people are having the

same lived experience we will never be sure that they actually possess thoughts and emotions like we do natural selection gave us the capacity for Theory and the ability to Inuit it other people's emotions and intentions it also gave us the ability to deceive one another in fear that we are being deceived ironically wouldn't the ultimate deception be pretending to be conscious when someone is not solipsism prevents us from knowing if this deception is actually happening by reminding us that the intentions of other people and things can never truly be known we lack what neuroscientist Kristoff

Co calls a Consciousness meter a device that would measure Consciousness in the same way that AU thermometer measures temperature without any sort of instrument we rely on our own preconceptions that other human consciousness is akin to our own because the elusive Consciousness meter is an impossibility theories of Consciousness like solipsism are endless and completely speculative there are different degrees of solipsism that answer that question for example metaphysical solipsism tells us that definitely the self is the only existing reality but then there's methodological solipsism which goes even further and says that the brain is actually a

part of the the external world because it only exists in response to what is on the outside in this branch of the philosophy the only thing that is certain are thoughts therefore we can reject solipsism but still understand that the feeling of being estranged from others and perhaps confronting the idea that we are alone there's no way to know if what we perceive exists outside our minds could we fully be dreaming over our world solipsism tells us that we might be it rejects the idea that we can assume the existence of other people's Consciousness and

present something known as the problem of other Minds the problem of other Minds is the basis of solipsism it says that since we can't enter other people's heads and see the world from their point of view it's impossible to prove that they exist we can't feel their sadness anger or joy we can though understand that our emotions are real when someone dies we feel the pit of deep grief inside of us when we fall in love it feels like an explosion inside our Consciousness we know that these feelings are real because well we feel them

what about other people's feelings one of the criticisms of solipsism is its close relation to narcissism recently it seems like you can't go on your phone watch TV or even have a conversation with a friend without the idea of self-care coming up for some this might just mean a weekly yoga class or enjoying a face mask before they go to bed but the line is thin between extreme self-care and self- worship putting ourselves first can be healthy but valuing only ourselves leads to broken relationships isolation and even struggles with mental health unfortunately for those who

believe in solipsism the philosophy supports the rather narcissistic idea that our mind is the only mind that matters this can therefore be defined as self-centered putting our World Views mental States and opinions above everyone else because if our mind is the only one that is sure to exist why wouldn't we now of course most people can discern between their own thoughts and emotions and those of their friends family co-workers and even strangers this idea called mentalization is the ability to to suspend what you know or perceive so you can acknowledge someone else's experience basically to

have empathy and put yourself in someone else's shoes it can be hard our world is more divided than it's ever been It seems impossible sometimes to accept someone else's point of view especially if it's contrary to your own but stepping outside of our experience and accepting different perspectives is one way to avoid the pitfalls of narcissism solipsism however says we can't do this it tells us that we can't look Beyond ourselves to see these other perspectives because that person their mind and their view of the world simply does not exist like anything solipsism can be

taken to the extreme in what's known unofficially as solipsism syndrome a person feels that the only reality is the reality of their mind actual reality isn't real they might feel plagued by feelings of loneliness Detachment or indifference to anything outside their own thoughts restricted to looking at the world from a single window solipsism syndrome isn't officially recognized by the American American Psychiatric association but disorders like dep personalization der realization disorder describe similar symptoms these issues of mental health can go even further in solipsism OCD when someone has OCD they have intrusive thoughts urges visions and

fears that preoccupy elements of their life solipsism OCD is when those intrusive thoughts all revolve around the idea that you might be all alone in this universe imagine that for a moment feeling trapped in a makeb believe World quite questioning everything you see hear and feel from anyone or anything you encounter over the course of your entire life it's a scary thought and a lonely one too when people suffer from solipsism OCD they experience NeverEnding doubt and work day in and day out to find some sort of proof that they aren't alone their lives become

a cycle of questioning and fear they'll seek reassurance from other people that their mind isn't the only mind of course the theories behind solipsism tell us that reassurance in the form of someone else can never exist like solipsism syndrome solipsism OCD tends to be found in people who spend long periods of time alone think about astronauts who live in space sometimes alone then here on Earth there are people who constantly turn inward and lose their connection with others by relying on their own minds this much they can become convinced that their mind might be alone

in this universe because of these potential extremes there's always been an attempt to refute solipsism logical rejection has proven elusive solipsism is after all squarely based in logic instead people argue against its likelihood rather than trying to prove a reason out rebuttal we might ask the question how could a single mind conjure up an endless universe of experiences items people and places this video you're watching right now the Mona Lisa the Berlin Wall your mother your pet your job is everything out there created by some deep inaccessible part of our mind seems unlikely some more

specific rejections of solipsism come in religion if a God exists then he she or it watches over us and knows our thoughts this means that we can't be isolated in our own experience we'll always have a higher power than our own mind art also offers a counter to solipsism by striving to tell us how someone else feels art presents opportunities for empathy art even explores the depths of one's own mind just like solipsism does in Charlie Kaufman's film I'm thinking of ending things other people are just projections of the Disturbed protagonist Kaufman asks us to

think about what it might feel like to question the the existence of everything but ourselves art is a way of venting our own anxiety about the idea that we might be alone in the world and perhaps that venting is our way of avoiding narcissism or something even worse what might be the ultimate rebuttal to solipsism maybe love love is transcendent between two minds and it's the feeling of knowing someone else from the inside and feeling like they know you in the same way this extreme emotional connection breaks the barrier between two consciousnesses however even in

love that barrier can come back up just long enough to remind us that we are indeed separate from the other person and in that moment of Separation do we come back to your existential question are they all in our head but without descending into existential fear what can we take away from the ideas behind solipsism we can understand that we will always face the limitations of our own reasoning we can't refute an idea like solipsism so we just have to let it exist as a possibility we can't escape our own minds we can't step outside

our ourselves no matter how hard we try and we'll only ever experience life with the minds that we have but maybe that's reassuring and even motivating that we only get one mind so we might as well embrace it and use it to its full capacity with that one mind might we Defuse The Power of a singular idea like solipsism because solipsism demands certainty it sets unrealistic expectations for knowledge maybe we can't rule it out but we can't rule out a lot of stuff like Bigfoot or aliens in fact we aren't actually certain about most things

but that doesn't mean we don't accept them as true we embrace our loved ones as full humans with emotions and Consciousness that we try to be kind to we look at beautiful mountains with Wonder and think about the millions of years of erosion and weather that went into making them we are experts at Living Without certainty it's what we do every day so if the mind is the only thing that is certain as solipsism tells us maybe we can enjoy that one bit of fact but beyond our mind there's a lot of uncertainty that we

can Embrace rather than fear in life anything is possible because we can never fully understand how the world works and the laws of physics prevent us from being able to tell the future everything we predict is a probability some are a lot more probable others are less probable while some have astronomically low chances of ever happening the probability is vanishingly small but it remains nonzero would you get hit by a car will you get struck by lightning will we ever achieve world peace if there is a chance that Anything Can Happen what are the odds

I was scrolling through the deepest parts of the internet one day when I came across this man Roy Cleveland Sullivan the man who has been hit by lightning seven times in his lifetime the odds of getting struck by lightning once isn't that low it's just about 1 in 15,000 even if you live in a small town chances are that that somebody in that town has been struck by lightning at least once the odds of being struck seven times in a period of 80 years that's a 1 in 10 to the 28 chance this seems like

such incredible and unfortunate odds until you consider the fact that you're more likely to get struck by lightning seven times then you are to shuffle a deck of cards into perfect numerical order those odds one in 10 to the 68 probability is something that we can't really comprehend as humans if we did we'd stop worrying about a lot of things and stop taking granted for most of the things we should be worried about like sharks no thanks to the movie Jaws humans now have an immense fear of sharks but the reality is you're more likely

to get killed by a vending machine than you are to get killed by a shark the odds of getting killed by a vending machine are 1 in 112 million while the odds of getting killed by a shark are staggering 1 in 250 million now the odds that you'll be attacked by a shark are much lower at 1 and 3.7 million but even that is still too high for the monsters we've branded sharks to be for context you're more likely to get killed by a dog at a 1 in 11 12,400 chance then you are to

get killed by a shark but we still keep them in our homes as Loving Pets you're more likely to get killed by Hornets wasps or bees at 63,5 than you are to get killed by a shark in fact you're more likely going to get killed by the government for committing murder at 1 in 119 ,000 then you are of getting killed by a shark when you put a little thought into it you realize that most of the time our fears are Sensational and not rational when something tragic happens and it Garners a lot of public

attention we are more likely to be afraid of that thing even if it is much less common than the less notorious things the most prominent example of this is the way we treat plane crashes now yes when planes do crash it is tragic but because they cause such a big spectacle and have lots of media coverage we forget that it is still by far the safest way to travel passenger airplane incidents are very rare and your odds of dying in a plane crash are very slim at 1 in 205,000 that's incredibly low when you compare

it to your odds of dying in a car accident which is just 1 in 107 for motorcycle riders it's 1 in 890 and even pedestrians aren't safe at 1 in 541 but wait maybe the reason the airplane deaths are so low has to do something with our fear before people go on an airplane they usually prepare well in advance no harmful objects are allowed on board and there's always usually more than one designated pilot who is trained for years on safety practices before they were ever allowed to fly a plane compare that to road travel

where we don't really think that much about it and you can maybe see why things are the way they are and with the odds that you'll be involved in a drunk driving accident in your lifetime being incredibly high at 2 and 3 you can see what I mean we barely give it any thought hopefully we can all do better try to reduce the risk by simply designating a driver beforehand or taking an Uber when you go out for fun another thing we should be worried about is right-handed appliances yes it's true that most of the

world is right-handed for some reason but if we're learning anything as a species it's inclusiveness we must do the same with dominant hands because as it is the odds of a left-handed person dying simply because they used a right-handed Appliance wrong is 1 in 7 million and while the chances look ridiculously slim it has to happen to somebody if you don't die hey you'll get a lot of free money from that lawsuit the ambidextrous people among us can help us decide what appliances are better suited for what dominant hand and we have a surprising amount

of them one in 100 to be exact now this does not include people who have had to learn how to use their non-dominant hand because of injury or out of curiosity it's just people who were born with an amazing control of both of their hands art is very subjective what some people might find beautiful others will find ugly what one might consider great acting others might see it as over-the-top and annoying you see much unlike science art doesn't have a definitive set of rules and so they don't have a strict guideline for judgment either and

while this allows for creativity it also makes it very difficult to find success in the world of the Arts if you want to be a surgeon for instance you know that if you pass the med school exams in turn go through residency and so forth you'll make it you have a set path to follow but if you want to be a supermodel or a rock star or a YouTuber it's not that straightforward you have to work hard at it every single day and even then your odds are very slim you can be a theater kid

all your life go to film school practice as much as possible but in the end the odds that you'll become a movie star aren't very encouraging at just 1 in 1.1 million it's amazing so that that even with the odds as Slim as this every year thousands of people will travel from all parts of the world to La trying to fulfill their dreams of being on the big screen when interestingly you have a much better chance of winning an Oscar at just 1 in 11,500 than becoming a movie star but of course this Oscar includes

all the technical awards that are given when everyone is taking a bathroom break and most people would much rather take a 1 in 1.1 million chance than to receive an award when no one's watching if you're a writer however the OD are slightly in your favor there's a 1 in 220 chance that you'll write a New York Times best seller if you put in the time and the effort necessary these odds are definitely going to go up bringing you that inch closer to making your dream a reality sports are closer related to science than Arts

because most of the time if you work at it hard enough you'll achieve some kind of success but how hard can you work when there's only so many medals to go around millions of people around the world dedicate their entire lives to competing in the Olympics yet only one in 662 th000 will ever win a medal and that's the thing about scarcity when there's such limited space the odds of ever being able to do or acquire said thing just gets increasingly thinner think about the number of children who have worn a space suit and helmet

to career day in school and told everybody that they want to be astronauts now think about the fact that the odds have becoming an astronaut are 1 in 12.1 million and you get sad for those little kids whose dreams will one day have to be crushed what if they wanted to be president well the chance of becoming a US president is 1 in 10 million unless you're a religious 6ft tall Harvard Law graduate and Military veteran then your odds go up astronomically especially if you're a Harvard alumni because as surprising as it might sound the

odds that the president of America has attended Harvard is 1 in 3.58 so if you want to have the best chance of becoming president you know what school to apply for however getting into Harvard is is almost as difficult as becoming president when you're done with a Chance of just 4.6% of getting in you might want to apply to some backup schools as well at the end of the day we all just want to be successful whether it's through the Arts or going through the so-called traditional route of finishing college and getting a good job

we all just want to have enough money to live comfortably while we're still young but sadly the odds are stacked against us there's a slim chance of just between 6.4% and 22.3% that you'll be a millionaire with different factors like race education wealth status and age helping to place you somewhere in that range while the chance of becoming a billionaire well there's 8 billion humans in the world and only around 2,000 billionaires so basically non-existent getting old has a Bitter Sweet Taste to it on the one hand you're getting wiser more mature and you have

a much better understanding of the world than you did when you were younger but on the other hand you're also getting weaker you're forgetting things more and sadly your body just keeps breaking down one after the other and the stats don't really help at all if you're under 20 right now there's a one and4 chance that you'll be disabled before you retire and it gets worse there's a one in two chance that at the age of 75 you'll have disabling hearing loss this is why whenever people say they want to work hard now so they

can enjoy their retirement I kind of feel bad for them because most times at at that age you don't really get to enjoy anything all you can really do is sit around and reminisce on a life that once was and when the Grim Reaper comes you say goodbye to your loved ones and move on and that's why you should do everything you want to do right now for some reason there's a 7% higher chance that you'll die on your birthday than on any other day going out together with the candles but for a few of

us living to 100 is possible with the odds of that happening being approximately 1 in 5,000 780 with those odds increasing significantly if you're biologically a woman on the other hand of the spectrum one of the most incredible human achievements is being born if you're here watching this video right now you deserve a round of applause you ran you fought you survived and Against All Odds you made it the odds of you existing were 1 in 5.5 trillion but here you are you might have been the one in 20 chance of being born on your

mom's EX due date or you're like most of us who were born around 2 weeks before or after you might be the one in 250 who are geniuses burdened with the weight of advancing our civilization or like the rest of us who are cheering them on whoever you are whatever it took you to get here that was an incredible feat one that is unrepeatable not in this lifetime at least if you're watching this right now you've won you've won the game of life you just don't know it yet as of May 2019 there are approximately

7.7 billion humans on our planet 7.7 billion people just like you and me living their own lives with their own jobs relationships hobbies and not one is the same as any other the number of events of situations of interactions that happen on a daily basis across everyone on Earth is a number so high that it's hard to Fathom but something that is even harder to understand is how you're even here in the first place a lot has happened over the course of history like a lot of things there was nothing and then there was something

there were a lot of things and all of this the entire history of the universe has led you to this very second the timeline we live in the one where you're breathing and using your senses to get all the information from this video what are the odds of that happening everything has led to this moment but by the numbers you shouldn't even be here in the first place in order to be living a life like you do today you had to be put here but even at one time the Earth wasn't here the universe had

to form in the exact way it did for life to form on Earth the fundamental forces of nature just so happened to come together in the way that they did luckily gravity is a thing and it's proved to be useful so useful that it's pretty much the glue that holds together any Star Planet Galaxy pretty much anything the strong and weak nuclear forces are able to keep us as humans held together at the lowest levels imaginable luckily one Lost Planet roaming the solar system collided with Earth over 4 billion years ago and that is why

we have the Moon that is why we have seasons it's why the climate is just perfect it's why we have liquid water on Earth Earth currently remains as the only place in the entire universe known to Harbor life forms of any kind time out of millions billions whatever the number is out of all of those planets only one has life for certain but even one out of a billion are better odds than you being alive for some reason that I wish I could tell you one day a microorganism one that couldn't be seen to our

naked eye began feeding on the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean this little almost insignificant organism played the most important role of them all for all they knew world above them didn't exist but one day it would over millions of years Evolution took place these microbes began to be able to replicate themselves and each and every single step of evolution began the pure numbers of the situation doesn't do a Justice the odds of everything being so perfect that each step brought us progressively closer to becoming modern humans humans that could realize they're human

that from one microb spawned an entire species that took over the entire planet over a few 2,000 years on a universal time scale that's quite literally nothing but now let's think about humans what separates us from everyone else the minds of animals have continuously gotten more advanced over time but a human mind is something completely different sentience Consciousness where you're aware of some internal state of being you don't wake up in the morning because you thought about it your brain just did it we don't think about breathing we don't think about blinking your brain automatically

takes in all of your senses and creates a picture a view of the world in your head for all we know the Earth could be something completely different from what we see day today but the way we perceive it all comes down to how a three-b organ in your head can put together a puzzle with the pieces being all of your senses but it isn't perfect it's easy to trick for example listen to this and try to imagine it right now you're probably thinking of a restaurant it has multiple tables all having a little world

of their own you might be imagining waiters moving food around this little Universe of its own was created in your head all from just your sense of hearing humans have the ability to picture things to see them from a different perspective to take our imaginations and make them a reality this works great actually every invention ever made was due to that spark that initial burst of creativity the brain built us as individuals and we built the world luckily we're on a planet with hundreds of different elements some of which work great for shelter or technology

some work great as food sources to Keep Us Alive some release certain chemicals in your brain that make you feel a certain way and these chemicals released form you as a person for example the fight ORF flight response that we get when we're in danger is the result of adrenaline a hormone in your body happiness is the result of having large amounts of Serotonin and the most important one involving Your Existence today the love formula sorry to break it to you but you see you couldn't have gotten here by yourself even if you wanted to

you may think you're the result of Randomness but actually everything happened the way it was supposed to your parents met which by itself is an extremely low probability event depending on your age out of millions or possibly billions of people these two met at the perfect timing for example you watching this video offsets your daily activities by about 10 to 15 minutes everything you do after you finish watching this video will alter your life in some way as weird as it sounds you're actually changing the course of your life right now some events that should

have happened won't and others that shouldn't have happened will every day you stray further down your own personal timeline one that not any other single person on the planet has lived except you your parents are no exception to this they both lived their own lives were raised by different parents hopefully worked different jobs had different friends but somehow ended up meeting and not only did they meet but they liked each other enough to stay together to come to the decision to have a child you unless you were a mistake like me not even kidding it

keeps going a woman has about 300,000 eggs inside her body a male can have billions or trillions of different sperm throughout his life but only specifically one of each could make you and it did the odds of that are one in 400 quadrillion if the situation hadn't been perfect if that one stoplight hadn't been green if that line at the grocery store wasn't so long there's a pretty high chance that your parents would have never met these lucky situations don't stop at your parents they keep going it extends to their parents and to their parents

all of which somehow ended up up living long enough to have kids this goes back tens of thousands of years even your ancestors thousands of years ago when the life expectancy was literally 30 years this continues all the way back to that very first little microbe at the bottom of the ocean floor over 4 billion years ago your life is the result of a family tree that hasn't been broken for billions of years what are the odds that all of that happened perfectly you're more likely to be struck by lightning a thousand times in a

single day than you are to be alive you're more likely to be a victim of an airplane crash every single day of the year back to back to back then you are to be alive you're more likely to win the lottery nine times in a row than you are to be alive some may say you were put here for a purpose Others May say you just got lucky the universe has 10 to the 80 Adams the odds of you being born are much lower than that the number of 50/50 coin flips your family has went

through when it comes to living long enough to have children or dying before carrying on the family line it goes back tens of thousands of millions of years this gets more interesting when you consider alien civilizations the odds of us meeting are already low but when you think about everything that had to happen for two different civilizations coming into existence close enough to each other to actually contact each other it's just crazy to think about no matter what age you are no matter where you live no matter your gender you are alive this is a

luxury that by the numbers you shouldn't have even been given what's the point in living a life that you aren't trying to squeeze everything out of looking at the regret in the faces of people who are too old to do the things that they really wanted to do in life is perhaps one of the scariest things in the world waking up in the morning and realizing that your existence is actually a miracle something that seems so perfect so orderly came from an infinite set of of possibilities the amount of thoughts you have in a day

the number of neurons that are fired and exist in your brain are inconceivable in magnitude this doesn't happen by accident everything that could have happened didn't it only happened in the way that set the universe into its current state the smallest of things the tiniest of decisions makes the biggest differences the biggest impacts understanding how little of a chance there is that you're here today is terrifying but yet I find that more than anything else it gives me purpose it gives me a reason to say that I and everyone else have a reason to exist

I believe you exist for a purpose but that's for you to figure out I Can't Tell You Why We Exist but I can tell you one thing that's for certain we shouldn't have even been here in the first place Copus was a great king of Greek mythology so clever he was able to outwit Gods themselves twice he cheated death first by capturing Thanatos the god of death then by tricking the goddess of of the underworld forany into releasing him back into the lands of the living the gods weren't happy with this and so for his

arrogance Copus was given a deceptively simple punishment roll a boulder up a hill the problem was that the boulder had been magically Enchanted to fall back down to the bottom every time Copus managed to get it to the top effectively condemning him to an eternity of repeating the same impossible and meaningless task classical interpretations of the myth View as an allegory for the futility of trying to escape death no matter how powerful or clever a person is we're all doomed to meet the same fate more modern audiences have found something more relatable about cop's struggle

seeing it not as a simple parable about the inevitability of death but more like a metaphor for the drudgery and monotony of their own lives every day we wake up make coffee take the train to work stare at a computer for hours get yelled at by our boss stare at the computer some more then take the train back home home binge Netflix or YouTube while eating dinner go to bed and then wake up and do it all over again just like Copus we seem condemned to repeat the same meaningless tasks over and over and over

most of us do this every day for the rest of our lives as though we're sleepwalking never waking up or stopping to ask why for some of us one day were're standing on a street corner preparing to go to work when in an instant we're struck by the strangeness of it all suddenly nothing appears to have purpose life is halfhazard and meaningless you look around and you whisper to yourself why are all of these people even in such a hurry for that matter why am I what's what's the point of all this why am I

even alive there's a modern day problem with absurdism money or the lack thereof the reason many of us never pause to ponder our meaning is because we don't have the economic stability to do so it's difficult to think about the meaning of life when you're worrying about keeping keeping a roof over your head which is why we're getting to a point where Financial stability may just be the first step towards embracing the Absurd human beings crave meaning it's part of our biology we're evolutionarily programmed to search for patterns and chaos to try and understand why

things are happening it's how we learn the problem is that existence is at best random and irrational nothing really seems to matter your loved ones die stars explode natural disasters wipe out entire cities millions of people spend half their day on Tik Tok and for what yet we keep going constantly striving to create order by giving these things purpose despite the universe denying it this conflict is what the french Algerian philosopher Albert Kimu referred to as the Absurd it's an irreconcilable Paradox we yearn for meaning in a meaningless Universe Kimu uses the myth of Copus

as an allegory to describe this relationship we can try to push the boulder to the top of the hill but inevitably it will roll back down more often than not the effectss of this are intense feelings of anxiety alienation and hopelessness we shout into the void but are meant only with deafening silence not even in Echo for most of history people have turned to religion for answers you didn't need to worry if your life had meaning because some higher power was there to provide it this all changed in 19th century Europe as new forms of

Science and philosophy threatened to replace Christianity as the central axis around which people's lives revolved notable text such as Charles Darwin's the Origin of Species challenge previously held beliefs about the nature of humanity leading to a radical shift in society away from religion German philosopher Frederick NCH noted this famously declaring God is dead and we have killed him despite what some may think that statement wasn't claiming that God had literally been murdered nor was nich celebrating rather it was an observation that without Christianity Society had lost the foundation upon which it had built centuries old

systems of morality metaphysics and meaning n felt a great deal of anxiety about this saring that without a clear replacement people would succumb to nihilism I've talked about nihilism before in another video so I won't go into depth here but to give a brief explanation nihilism is the belief in nothingness a belief that rejects the idea of objective truth according to n nihilism was a necessary step on the journey away from religion but it wasn't the destination because it presented a very real problem if people viewed life as having no inherent meaning it would likely

lead them to despair because of this he sought to speed up the arrival of nihilism so that he could in turn speed up its departure he believed that after nihilism had passed Humanity could finally arrive at the true philosophical foundation on which society could Thrive unfortunately while he successfully expedited nihilism arrival he failed to do so with its departure in fact n's philosophy was taken up by many of the violent ideologies that Define the early 20th century well over a 100 years later nihilism remains rampant throughout Global culture trust in both secular and religious institutions

is at in all-time low our governments are corrupt there are CEOs with more money than some countries and our spiritual leaders often appear ineffective and out of touch most people today report that Faith plays little to no role in their lives instead we've begun looking to science and reason for answers but these haven't been able to offer a efficient solution to the problem of meaning either so what are we to do should we just simply accept Our Fate conclude that our lives were without purpose and allow the boulder to roll back over us well 20th

century philosophers Alber Kimu and Jean Paul Sara didn't think so both argued that in the absence of objective meaning we as freak and rational beings must fight to create our own purpose s is credited as the father of modern existentialism a philosophical School concerned with our plate as individuals for fored to assume responsibility for our lives without certain knowledge of truth though its roots can be traced back to 19th century figures like sa and kard and Fodor Doo yski SAR differentiated himself by rejecting the idea that humans are relying on an external power like God

to provide us with meaning he claimed that man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself and referred to those who would Outsource this responsibility to a higher power as acting in what he called bad faith in s's view existence proceed Essence we are conceived and only after being born do we figure out what our purpose in life will be this might seem like an uncontroversial opinion to us today but in the mid 20th century this was a radical idea for most of human history it was assumed that Essence precedes existence since the

time of Plato and Aristotle it was widely believed that our purpose as individuals was assigned to us before birth the meaning of your life was ready made by the gods prepackaged before you were even born Sara's claim was a direct contradiction of this widely held belief a declaration that we as humans aren't beholden to gods or Kings to provide us with meaning only to ourselves for Sara the only problem of existence wasn't its lack of meaning but rather its absolutely terrifying level of Freedom after all without an objective meaning or morality every one of us

is responsible for Designing our own purpose according to our own ethical code Kimu largely agreed with Sara's diagnosis that we live in a meaningless Universe where we as humans are in his own words abandoned to freedom however he didn't agree with the cure to kamu this solution to the problem of meaning wasn't as simple as making up your own the universe would naturally rebuke our attempts to do so no matter how hard we tried we can push the boulder up the hill but it will always fall back down this in turn would still will give

rise to feelings of the Absurd as well as the associated sense of anxiety alienation and hopelessness that accompanies it to Kimu there were only three possible reactions to this the first of these is suicide which kumu famously wrote is the one truly serious philosophical problem rather than grappling with the absurdity of life you can simply refuse to play the game the only issue is when you're gone you can no longer enjoy life however meaningless it may be and also doesn't actually solve the problem it only allows the Absurd to decide your fate it's essentially admitting

defeat the second possible reaction is the solution of Faith which kamu Dub's philosophical suicide similar to SAR concept of bad faith it's when a person rejects the burden of creating their own meaning by Shifting the responsibility to an external ideology this amounts to a kind of denial where the individual deludes themselves into thinking they've conquered the problem when in reality they're just avoiding in it it's simply an attempt to replace the Absurd with a set of man-made beliefs the consequence of which is the abdication of existential Freedom importantly Kimu doesn't limit this to religion any

ideological system can serve this function nationalism capitalism or even the values of our own family when we allow external systems to dictate meaning to us we give away the potential to determine our life's purpose how many of us took a job or studied for a degree solely because our parents told us that we should in a world as complicated and confusing as ours it can be tempting to contract out our thinking and just go along with what we're told but the risk of Ruin we run in doing this is ending up in a situation where

we're unhappy and unfulfilled that's why many of us pause on that random Tuesday afternoon and ask ourselves why am I doing any of this if instead we make our own choices we can decide meaning for ourselves and follow a path that calls to us instead of one that's just just prescribed of course there's no guarantee of success in fact according to Kimu you are destined to fail again and again what he argues though is that this is the only true solution to the problem to acknowledge the meaninglessness of life and continue living anyway or as

Kimu puts it the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion the universe will always reject all the Ms by the individual to create meaning just like Copus were doomed to Forever push the boulder up the hill knowing that no matter how hard we try it will inevitably roll back down to the bottom yet we must fight back against the Absurd because it is by virtue of our struggle that we Empower ourselves to live life the way we want it's not

about the destination it's about the journey this philosophy effectively rejects nihilism as nothing more than a stepping stone on the way to absurdism life is meaningless sure and the only rational course of action is to behave as such there is no plan no objective truth and everything happens purely by accident but this doesn't necessitate nihilism if we instead choose to embrace the Absurd we can view our circumstances as an opportunity to change our perspective Kimu notes that it's not meaninglessness that hurts rather it's the desire for meaning being continuously rejected if we can put aside

our desires and simply accept life for what it is we open up ourselves to experiencing it fully living as passionately and as intensely as we like in a world without meaning we are free to constantly invent and reinvent our life's purpose changing it as often as it suits us today you may be stuck in a redundant deadend job but tomorrow you could easily quit and go about completely redefining Your Existence maybe you want to be a chef or a classical composer ER maybe you want to spend the next year backpacking through the Wilderness or volunteering

with an aid organization all you have to do is find the courage to acknowledge your own freedom and you can be whoever you want to be knowing this we can abandon any expectations for the future and instead choose to live in the present moment it isn't necessary that our actions lead to something bigger there's no goal we have to reach no afterlife to prepare for then we can find joy in every situation no matter how unpleasant or absurd because well it doesn't really matter although we may be faded to fail there's no reason we can't

be happy while we do it this might lead to Greater empathy for our fellow humans as we recognize that every person alive is fighting the same fight that we are we can feel a sense of camaraderie and knowing that we're all in this together we'll never make it to the top of the mountain the meaning of Our Lives will forever elude us but as Kimu says the struggle itself towards the Heights is enough to fill a man's heart it's because of this that one must imagine Copus [Music] happy life is hard I bought a new

pair of shoes the other day walked outside into the rain and ended up stepping into some mud now they're ruined and I'm bitter but then I took a step back not literally of course but I really thought about it and I came to the conclusion that nothing in life really matters here's why the Earth has been around for 4 and 1/2 billion years one day humans became a thing and we became conscious this world seemed perfect for us it wasn't scorching hot it wasn't deathly cold we fit right in the middle the gravity on Earth

was perfect it allowed us to move and run and catch animals that conveniently existed for us humans to eat there was water to drink there was oxygen to breathe it's as if we were put here for a reason we began creating things we began working together as a species building Empires covering the planet and fighting each other for whatever reason fast forward a couple million years and here we are today computers Rockets Elon Musk they're all here somewhere along the line we also in a way created something out of nothing it's called time we've laid

out definitions of time seconds minutes hours years but it doesn't really matter we made those for our own use time is nothing more than a way to measure the passing of events but we've only really set up these units of time based off of ourselves a day is how long it takes the Earth to spin around once a month is about how long it takes the moon to orbit the earth and also spin around once a year is how long it takes the earth to orbit the sun once you get about 78 Earth revolutions around

the Sun in this journey called life as poetic as that sounds there's 's not much scale to these things once we pass a human lifetime sure we can judge how long a thousand or maybe even 10,000 years are but after that the time scales of things are just too much for our brains to handle as much as you think you understand the 13.8 billion year lifespan of the universe you really can't put that into an imaginable scale on the scale of a human life the universe is unbelievably old but in terms of the universe's lifespan

pretty much nothing has happened yet it's barely even started we can make predictions about the next hundreds of trillions of years of the universe's life we can figure out how and when our sun is going to blow up we can figure out when our galaxy is going to collide with another we can come up with theories that describe why the universe we've been put into as expanding faster than anything else physically possible but yet we have zero idea what happened in the fraction of a second between when there was nothing and when there was something

for some reason as far as we can tell we're the only conscious beings to have ever existed but we don't even know what being conscious is we developed Consciousness only to be aware of the fact that nothing else is we've grown so aware of our surroundings that the smarter we get the smaller we become as this thing we call time goes on we begin to realize things things that prove that the Universe probably wasn't made just for us you were most likely born in a hospital if not props to you for making it this far

back then you were your parents' entire world for a small time which is cute but you aren't everything 360,000 people are born each day of all of those people with the same birthday some are going to do big things and change the world others are just going to die that just happens but Earth is just one planet in our solar system there's eight or nine of those for now for Life as we know it to exist it's kind of hard to believe that there might be other life out there it takes so much to happen

for us to be able to exist we've discovered over 4,000 exoplanets to date planets that don't revolve around our sun and we found multiple examples of earthlike planets roughly the same shape size temperature but yet there's nothing there from what we can tell so if there are so many planets that could have life why haven't we seen it yet why are there no signs well we're just one solar system in an entire galaxy there's over 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone but that's just one Galaxy we're part of the local Group which is a

collection of 30 galaxies near our own Andromeda is one of them that's the one that's going to collide with our galaxy in about 4 and 1/2 billion years by then you'll be long gone and soon after that so will the Earth the Sun at this point will be reaching the end of its life it's going to expand in size and by the end it will completely consume the Earth shining over 3,000 times brighter than it does today but even though our home planet will be gone the rest of the Galaxy wouldn't even notice billions of

years on a multi-trillion year time scale is truly nothing but even so there are some things that we're observing in the universe's infancy today that will drastically influence the far future to keep it short the universe is expanding this is nothing new a lot of people know this but many people don't know is that this expansion is speeding up now we don't know why but we have an idea of what's causing it dark energy I made an entire video about this so go watch that after this dark energy is stretching the fabric of SpaceTime we

don't know what it's made from we know it's there we observe its results but we don't know exactly what it is or what it's going to do dark energy at least according to our current calculations will eventually stretch the SpaceTime between galaxies faster than the speed of light the light emitting from our neighboring galaxies will travel towards us at the fastest speed possible but even this won't be enough the light will never reach us because the space between it is stretching faster than the light that is traveling through it it will spread the universe so

thin with galaxies that when we look out to observe what's around us we won't see anything we're going to end up all alone confined to whatever Galaxy we end up in but in the end even our galaxy will start to go dark the fate of the sun is the same as it is for all stars in the universe eventually trillions of years down the road these lights in the sky are going to begin turning off one by one by one without any new stars to keep things running the universe is going to get a bit

colder depending on their size these dying stars begin to turn into white dwarfs or neutron stars providing the last glimmers of light in a cold and dark Universe this is the very Last Hope for any surviving life forms in the universe but eventually trillions of more years after the last stars like our sun die even these white dwarfs will begin to dim out some of these neutron stars roaming throughout the universe may Collide by chance resulting in the brightest known events in the entire universe [Music] supernova but once these Supernova conclude the universe is again

plunged Into Darkness all matter that used to make up the galaxies we see today will begin to fall into the black holes that kept things held together for so long the big bang that created the highest temperatures ever known to physics ultimately results in the most dormant dark and cold configuration possible from a universe teaming with light and Beauty to a cold Barren Wasteland a universe dominated by black holes but even now the universe has just begun these black holes are going to be around for a while and the things we used to call galaxies

with stars and planets and life are now just going to be full of black holes black holes and more black holes this is how the universe is going to spend most of its time cold dark and alone we're no longer talking about millions of years here the time scales are now on quadrillions of years but even these black holes won't last forever through Hawking radiation these black holes will slowly very slowly begin to evaporate away one subatomic particle at a time until eventually after all the black holes Fade Out of existence there is nothing left

in the universe a universe where nothing changes where time becomes pointless there's nothing the nothingness of space though will continue to expand because of dark energy a force that accounts for 70% of our universe that we don't even completely understand yet matter as we know it today the things that make up everything you see only accounts for barely 4% of the stuff in the universe so maybe just maybe we're a fluke we were never supposed to make it to the end but we still have a role to play out today we are one species on

one planet in one Galaxy in an almost IND distinguishable part of the universe whether or not we came to exist not much would be different every day we matter a little less and a little less until eventually we realized that in the grand scheme of things we don't matter at all our galaxy could just disappear it wouldn't really change much we came to exist in such a weird time but it's also pretty unique we know we're just the beginning a blip in the universe's potential but the only way to fulfill that potential is to start

making progress today it's not a stretch to say that there won't be others like us random spurts of intelligent life spread throughout trillions of trillions of years but now we're at one of those stages where life is possible and probably the easiest it's ever going to be you get One Life to do whatever you want there's some things you can avoid like school or taxes but other than that you're free to do mostly whatever you'd like if we can't figure out our purpose for coming to exist on this planet if we can't figure out why

or How the Universe came into being then our purpose is whatever we want it to be if you want to sit around and play games all day there are people doing that if you want to build a multi-billion dollar company that's going to help Propel Humanity to other worlds there are people doing that as well anything you want to be or do can be done and should be done like I said our own purpose is whatever we want right now if good things are happening to you if bad things are happening to you it's actually

not going to last forever you have zero idea what the future holds for you and the most random of experiences can reroute your future in an instant everyone was built a hand in life that we honestly just didn't ask for some people's hands are better than others but we all have to play with the cars we've been given in the best way we can there's a chance that we humans may never figure out why everything in the universe acts the way it does is there life anywhere else or are we the exception for every answer

a 100 new questions pop up there's infinite possibilities as to how we came to exist but there's infinitely just as many things to do while we're figuring that out there's dogs to feed there's people to meet there's science to be done so whatever you do while we figure out our spot in the universe this universe at least just try to enjoy it because no matter what happens to you no matter how many times you mess up no matter how far Humanity Ventures out into the unknown in the end it doesn't even [Music] matter sleeping