self-centredness is NOT "self-care": losing the human face online

I just started filming without turning on my audio so that's . . .

nice. Okay. Throughout my life, I’ve always been described as “nice.

” And I had always been happy with that description. Giving compliments, hating conflict, never wanting to hurt people’s feelings, being GOD awful at bargaining because I don’t wanna argue with you! me: "is it possible to get this for $25 instead of $30?

" them: "ehhh-" me: "oh ok, no problem, sorry! " I’ve had people tell me, “Olivia, you’re such a nice person. ” In fact, you’re sometimes too nice.

And I knew that. When some guy I had barely talked to tapped me on the shoulder during a test and whispered “What's the answer for Question 5? ” I risked getting caught cheating to mouth back my answer.

When people cut in front of me in lines, I never say anything. The thought of being not nice has always felt worse than being too nice. In the past few years, I’ve seen increasing negativity towards “being nice for the sake of being nice”.

There are people who discourage being considerate of others if it doesn’t benefit the self or if they don’t owe them anything. If you're spending your time trying to show everyone that you're not danngerous and you're always available to help, then you will at best be momentarily praised, and then ignored. Because your lack of danger makes you irrelevant to one part of the brain.

Being nice isn't how you get what you want. I truly understand where this attitude comes from, trust me, being a nice, soft-spoken woman has definitely led me to being taken advantage of, but I don't think that means we have to be self-centred. I might be digging my own grave by saying this because I know she’s beloved, but I feel like the huge popularity of Thewizardliz is indicative of this self-centred culture.

I see people say that she’s just teaching us to be confident and to stop comparing ourselves to others, but when I frequently see her pushing the rhetoric of “life rewards people who prioritize themselves” “how people act is totally in their control, how you react is totally in your control” I started prioritizing my own needs and wants. Whatever I want goes first. That's it.

I do not care anymore. it’s giving self-help hyper-individualistic believes-in-self-made billionaire vibes rather than thinking about community and structures. Now, for the most part, I don’t believe in demonizing individuals for systemic problems and ideas, I know what Liz uploads online does not define her as a whole person.

She is just one example I think people would recognize as a symptom of larger causes— and it’s those larger cause I want to focus on. I recently came across these two videos by a creator named Michelle who sums up what I had been feeling pretty well. I made a couple of videos the other week talking about how I think politeness is an important social contract that needs to be upheld because we all owe each other like, basic decency and manners at face value.

I mean like, for example, sometimes you should just do something because it's the nice thing to do I really didn't think I said anything controversial in that video, but the amount of backlash I received from people telling me I was being hypersensitive, I expected the world to coddle my feelings, the amount of people who think that honesty trumps everything and that me being polite to people and considering people's feelings is me being "fake" and being honest is more important their a better person— Ya'll are fucking ridiculous. Being honest does not exempt you from being a bad person. Honestly has its time and place and it can't be used as justification to say hurtful, uncalled-for shit.

Gen-Zs on the internet tend to be quite vocal activists. And so on a macro scale, on the grand scale of what we want to see in the world, we want the world to become a more tolerant, kinder, better place in which everyone—of any ability, whatever—can thrive. But on a micro scale, when it comes to our, like, personal, real relationships in real life, it becomes: "I don't owe anyone anything", "politeness is fake", "I'm just being honest and if you can't handle that, you're a baby.

" But like, if you think about it, that directly contradicts the whole worldview of wanting the world to be a better, kinder, more tolerant place. 'Cause if we really did want that, then it would start with us, and with us being kind to the people around us. And like, sure, being a mean person because you're just too honest is much better than being a mean person because you're a literal bigot, but it doesn't mean it's not hypocritical to vouch for kindness on this big, macro scale and then not deliver it at all on a micro scale.

This video from Khadija about sensitivity on the internet is also really great. They inspired me to expand on their thoughts and to bring some philosophy into it. So let’s start with the ideas of: For a long, long time, Western philosophy assumed the self as the starting point.

Rene Descartes questioned how he could know anything at all, including his own existence, and then famously said “I think, therefore I am”. He assumes himself to be the most solid anchor of reality. Immanuel Kant’s moral system assumes that everyone is a free autonomous being, so when we make moral choices, we can rely entirely on individual rationality.

Moral people are those who have self-control over their instincts. Existentialism asserted that we are free individuals, free to do anything at any time. The focus is on protecting and maximizing the good use of everyone's self-freedom.

Now those were very watered down summaries, but I think it's clear enough to see how these individualistic philosophies influence popular individualistic thought today. Underneath one of thewizardliz videos, this was one of the top comments: "Quote of the day: 'I choose myself, and I will always continue to choose myself. '" What this self-focused philosophy has led to is philosophy like Hegel’s influential Subject-Object relation.

The subject is a consciousness, like you and me, and objects are unconscious inanimate things like this camera. Except. .

. [sinister music] this city is only big enough for one subject… Since Hegel says humans have an inherent freedom, any time two conscious subjects come into contact there is a fundamental feeling of opposition to the other consciousness because they threaten your own ability to act totally free. This water bottle, this teddy bear, they can’t cause different circumstances; they just get what they get.

[sinister music] You’re gonna be a book forever, and if I rip out a page? Well you’ll only have 282 pages instead of 283 pages, and there’s nothing you can do to change that… but a conscious mind, another person, has the potential ability— [cat meows] [cat meows] That is another conscious mind messing with me. [cat meows] Say sorry!

—but a conscious mind, another person, has the potential ability to shape the world in a way that conflicts with other conscious minds. Hey, other conscious mind here! Make sure you stream (G)I-dle And, uh, follow me on Instagram right here to find out how oliSUNvia really sits.

Guys. . .

Whooo! Okay. Woah.

Sorry about that. Got conflicted with the other conscious mind there. Hence, there always exists a desire to differentiate oneself from other conscious subjects.

Both subjects struggle to impose one’s will onto the other, to kind of capture the other under their control. This creates the One and the Other relationship. Thus, the subject is related to the world with a possessive mindset.

The language we use to refer to other things and other people becomes possessive. When we speak about knowledge, we say “I possess knowledge” or “that computer contains knowledge” and then knowledge is expected to be appropriated for the Subject’s purposes. Relationships are spoken of as “being mine" and then we use our partners to be happier.

Under the Subject-Object framework, the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre believed that romantic love was doomed to fail because it involves two conscious beings, so two subjects, trying to possess each other as objects while also wanting them to be completely free subjects. So it creates this contradiction. You want complete, utter reassurance that your partner is yours, an object that you can reliably appropriate for your desire to be loved, but you also want them to be a subject that freely chooses to stay with you 'cause no one wants a partner who only stays because they feel like they have to, but then the thought of them being a free subject who can stay or leave at any moment terrifies you and so you try with your subject might to possess them as an object, but then the same problem repeats over and over.

[film projector noise] But the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas flipped all of this self-centred philosophy around. After seeing the atrocities of World War II and having been a Holocaust prisoner himself, he saw the ethical failings of Western philosophy. Philosophers kept asking what it means to exist, what constitutes being; but for Levinas, the fundamental question of existence is: what right do we have to exist?

what justifies our being? His method of philosophy is phenomenology, which is hard to define, but basically, it’s trying to describe first person experiences without any presumptions or biases about that experience. Quote, “.

. . .

to understand our situation in reality is not to define it, but to be in affective state … To think is no longer to contemplate, but to be engaged… with what we think. ” Picture the first moment you see another person’s face, before you interact with them, before you judge or categorize them. What is the raw first person experience?

Levinas says there is something unique about the human face that hits us with an awareness of “humanness. ” I know “humanness” is really vague but that’s the point— it’s this indescribable feeling that signals the closeness of the other, revealing, quote, “extreme exposure, defenselessness and vulnerability. ” You don’t get this experience when you look at someone’s arm, or hair, or arm hair.

For example, when we apologize for a wrongdoing, we are told to look people in the face; only then does it feel like we’re really acknowledging their humanity. Also think of how concealing someone’s face is a common method of dehumanization. I recently re-watched How to Train Your Drgon, which I feel like I don’t need to issue a spoiler warning for because if you haven’t seen it then what have you been doing with your life?

Before meeting Toothless, Hiccup talks about how he wants to kill a dragon so bad "Can't stop myself. I see a dragon and I have to just. .

. kill it, you know? " but when he actually comes face to face with one, he sees the humanness, or I guess, dragonness, of this living creature.

He is made aware of his responsibility for the vulnerability of another life. And that's something he doesn't get until he's face to face. Now similar to Hegel’s Subject-Object relation, Levinas says that contact with another human makes us aware that we can impose our will onto this other human.

But this is where Levinas and Hegel differ. For Hegel, this will power makes the Other our opposing competition, we are scared of them. But for Levinas, it makes the Other “our whittle baby.

” Recognizing that we have the free will to hurt the Other at any moment makes us scared for them. In his book Ethics and Infinity, he writes, “‘Thou shalt not kill’ is the first word of the face”. He says that our mere existence does violence to others.

Now your first reaction might be like, "woah, talk about being over-dramatic. " But take this passage from his work Ethics as First Philosophy: Quote, “My being-in-the-world…. my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, driven out into a third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing?

” Think of the popular phrase, “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. ” Levinas is referring to all existence, not just a capitalist one, but I’m using this phrase as a familiar analogy. “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is supposed to alert us that simply existing means that you are benefitting from land obtained from violent colonialisation, living in a house built from materials that were likely mined by exploited workers, eating snacks until you’re stuffed while millions of people die from starvation; the list goes on.

Withholding or abstaining from active violence does not make us innocent. Being responsible for others doesn't happen only when we owe people something or when we want to balance out our karma. That responsibility is always there simply because we exist alongside others.

Ethics is not about autonomous individuals acting out of obligation to each other; rather it flows out of experiencing the radical vulnerability and dependence of the Other. It is the Other that calls our being into question. We have to justify our right to be in light of our responsibility toward the Other.

There’s another super interesting contrast between the way Levinas and many people today think about being an individual. People today constantly talk about how you shouldn’t become too dependent on others because you should be your own person. Self-care and caring about others are seen as distinct acts; in fact, caring too much about groups turns us into sheep.

"People are just wonderful as individuals. You see the whole universe in their eyes if you look carefully. But as soon as they begin to group, as soon as they begin to clot, When there are five of them or ten or even groups as small as two, They begin to change.

They sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group. " But Levinas doesn't think of individuals as isolated selves. He says that facing the vulnerability, the mortality of the Other is what individuates you, because no one else can take your place in facing the Other, in being responsible toward them.

In that moment of contact between theses two subjects, how you respond, whether by caring for the other or choosing to hurt them is a moment of self-expression, and your choice towards the other is what separates you as an individual. Levinas is questioning Western philosophy’s assumption that we can just start with freedom and choose whether we be good people or not. Quote, “Responsibility for my neighbour dates from before my freedom in an immemorial past, that was never present and is more ancient than consciousness…” For Levinas, we are not fundamentally free.

We are fundamentally responsible. If you pass a severely wounded person on the street begging for help, Levinas says there is an immediate inclination in us to help them, even though they are a stranger. It doesn’t matter who they are or how if they can benefit you because your responsibility to them isn’t based on how important they are to yourself.

You just want to help. And in this moment of facing vulnerability, that’s when you recognize that the Other is important in and for themselves. Levinas was a fan of the author Dostoyevsky.

Levinas actually cites a passage from The Brothers Karamazov in one of his texts. Quote, “How are you,” she said, “most of all responsible for everyone? There are murderers and robbers in the world, and what terrible sin have you committed that you should accuse yourself before everyone else?

” “Mother . . .

my dearest heart, my joy, you must realize that everyone is really responsible for everyone and everything. ” Obviously I recognize how radically self-sacrificial Levinas’ philosophy sounds. So you’re saying that I’m fundamentally responsible for the well-being of every human I ever interact with?

Is enjoying the arm hug of a cat really causing violence to “the Other? ” But I understand Levinas' work as exploring more of an ethical mindset rather than a rulebook for actions. So I'm editing at the airport right now.

Sorry if there's any background noise, but I just wanted to interject with something I forgot to say while filming. I know a lot of the "stop being nice" sentiments come from people getting hurt and being taken advantage of when they were nice, when they were kind to others. It makes sense why those bad experiences would make you feel like you're worse off being nice.

Trust me; I get it. I've definitely had moments where I'm like, "Hm, maybe it's time to enter my villian arc. " I am in no way advocating for us to be people pleasers or to tolerate unfair treatment.

I know how much that sucks from personal experience. I can be a horrible people pleaser and I'm still working on it. But with Levinas' philosophy, I hope the default mindset we cultivate towards others is "I hope I can be kind to you.

I hope I do not hurt you. And I want to be responsible for your well-being. " I hope we get to a place where we want to approach others with a genuine intention of cherishing their humanness, and even when they upset you or hurt you, you still remember their humanness.

We can, of course, still hold others accountable, be angry at them, set boundaries, without sacrificing an empathetic mindset. I think one of the worst lies we've been told is that you can either be nice and understanding but then get taken advantage of and have your energy be drained by others, or you can set boundaries and have accountability, but you have to put yourself first before everyone else and you need to detach yourself from people. But you can't have both.

But I believe we can and should strive for both. It's hard work because it's counter-culture, but it's work worth doing. I want to remind the people that Levinas is doing phenomenology.

He’s telling us "stop thinking", now’s the perfect time to get that lobotomy you’ve been putting on hold! Instead, be present in your first person experience and let that change your awareness. For example, I’ve had this necklace here for years and it’s the first necklace that I’ve really loved.

I still love it, it’s my favourite necklace, you’ve probably seen me wear it in most of my videos and lots of my Instagram posts. But I’ve been trying to let it go for a while now because it’s lost a lot of its silver coat, it looks quite rusty. From the objective perspective of a rational decision-maker, I agree that I should get a new favourite necklace.

But from a phenomenological perspective, before I let my brain do its thinky think, my immediate reaction when I see this necklace is not judgment about its rusty condition. It’s a feeling of warm fondness for all the memories its carried with me. I don’t experience any judgments about its physical qualities.

And so even though reason tells me I should let the necklace go, I can’t help but think “no keep it” because my immediate personal experience with the necklace was attachment. This phenomenological experience might make me aware of how objects can reflect my experiences as a subject – but it doesn’t give me a rule book on how to decide whether to throw out or to not throw out every piece of jewelry I come across. This is the same with Levinas’ concept of the face.

Yes, when we rationalize our contact with other people, the face is just a physical collection of physical body parts. It doesn’t tell us anything about how we should treat people. But in the precognitive stage before we do any thinky think, the face hits us with a feeling of the Other’s humanness.

The precognitive experience is not something we consciously control, it is like an experience we can’t help but have. And if we that can’t help but have it, doesn’t that speak to how fundamental it is? From this phenomenological experience, I can change my mindset about how I relate to others in the world and what my ethical priorities are.

So. . .

yesterday you were reading Freud and Nietzsche, and today you're reading what? Ah. .

. [chuckle] I hope you can see how this connects to Michelle’s tiktoks I mentioned earlier. If we think about ethics as an inherent responsibility to others and as a top priority, then it is not ‘fake’ or ‘soft’ or 'hypersensitive' to be nice for the sake of being nice, to want to consider other people's feelings even if they don't benefit us.

Did you, did you, did you give me money? Did you pay my bills? Because if you, if- Next time someone wants to give their opinon about my life, you gonna have to pay my bills.

if you're not contributing to either my happiness, to my bills, to anything that makes me happy, you're not relevant to me. And if you have an issue with me you can always call me. You don't have my number?

Honey, you're not important. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The digital world makes it easy to forget about this ethical responsibility because the face is gone.

Sure, you can see a 2D flattened image of someone's face, but it loses the physical, real humanness that comes from being in contact with them in person. It doesn't actually feel like you can hurt them because there's no closeness to signal vulnerability. People online feel so removed from humanness that it’s easy to be overly negative or overly positive without feeling the full weight of the responsibility that comes with these interactions.

I think this is what causes the discrepancy in younger generations between wanting toleration at a larger global level but being like, “Oh, I don’t owe anyone anything” on an individual level. When we talk about bettering the conditions of a very general group like “humankind” or “the disenfranchised”, there is no face to be met with. Thus, we are not forced to come face to face with human vulnerability; we do not fear for it.

As such, it’s easy to say we want to destroy the evils of capitalism for “the working class” without understanding the full weight of that responsibility. Ending bigotry for “all people” can turn into more of a ideological stance than a real life project. It’s part of what makes dismantling faceless structures difficult - people can get caught up with trying to say the right ideas and forget about tying it to real individuals.

[TV playing] --"for justice. " What are you doing? !

There's rioting in Tunisia! The Cape is premiering! Humanity is premiering, you jagg!

However, interacting with a real, specific individual presents us with humanness. We can't run into theory or abstract ideas. We are forced to acknowledge someone’s vulnerability, and suddenly, taking responsibility for them seems significantly more daunting.

And now, it can feel easier to ignore that responsibility when it's staring at you in the face. It’s like those people who dedicate their twitter page to complaining about capitalism’s evils but then yell at grocery store workers and get annoyed when you e-transfer them $10. 40 instead of $10.

42. Katouche Goll--who I am very sorry if I pronounced your name wrong-- stitched Michelle’s tiktok about individual vs. global action with her experience as a disabled person.

She explains how it doesn’t matter if people can spit out the “correct” moral theories about ableism— in their individual interactions with her, they do not treat her kindly. People use virtue signaling as a placeholder for common decency. And I know this because as a disabled peron, people forget their decorum and decency when they relate with you.

I think a lot of people can resonate with this idea that the person who bullied you in school is not like a mental health advocate, the expert on power structures and power dynamic, and you almost feel gaslighted because you're like, "what? " "Is this the same person? " And that's not because people don't change or can't improve themselves but it's because people can get away with being nasty, foul people while spouting ideas that are "correct".

Disabled people, however, poke holes in this facade. Anytime I bring forward any of the issues that I've experienced, people are always so quick to empathise with the harm doer. People find it very difficult to acknowledge that they themselves can perpetuate systems of harm.

I think it’s easy for people to believe that if they just angrily critique the horrible system, then they are above it, they do not participate in it. But hey you know why we’re not even close to successfully dismantling something like capitalism? It's because it’s HARD.

Because established systems are pervasive. We have to admit that being born and raised by capitalist structures affects how we frame actions and the world. It gives us unconscious biases, even if we despise it.

It’s like saying, oh if I criticize and hate abuse and am aware of its awful effects, then my past abuse won’t affect me anymore because I'm criticising it. The whole point of systems is that they becomes so integrated into both our external and internal being that we become unaware of its effects. For example, there's a chapter in the book Braiding Sweetgrass that really opened my eyes to how economic structures also affect our non-economic relations with others.

Growing up, the Native American author Robin Wall Kimmerer lived in a community that operated under a gift economy which she contrasts to the private property economy of modern capitalist society: Quote, “It’s funny how the nature of an object— let’s say a strawberry or a pair of socks— is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity. The pair of wool socks that I buy at the store. .

. I might feel grateful for the sheep that made the wool and the worker who ran the knitting machine… But I have no inherent obligation to those socks as a commodity, as private property. There is no bond beyond the politely exchanged "thank yous" with the clerk.

I have paid for them and our reciprocity ended the minute I handed her the money…. I don't write a thank-you note to JCPenney. But what if those very same socks were knitted by my grandmother and given to me as a gift?

That changes everything. A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note.

I will take good care of them, and if I am a very gracious grandchild I'll wear them when she visits even if I don't like them. When it's her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return. ” In a gift economy, a gift is valuable because it establishes a grateful bond of reciprocity.

In a private property economy, a gift is valuable because it is free and we have a right to own as much as we want. This difference in economic systems— between whether we have a reciprocal responsibility or an individual right of ownership— really affects our response to people, not just objects. It's why in a modern capitalist society, it’s easy to turn a blind eye to the exploited workers who made your favourite sweater.

You are told that you have a right to own that sweater. You don’t owe its producers anything. There is no expectation to give back to those labourers.

The fundamental mindset here is “how much can I possess by giving as little as possible”? Kimmerer contrasts this to her experience at a flea market where everything was free. Even though she could take as much as she wanted for the best deal you could imagine, she felt an obligation to not take too much and to give back eventually.

The mindset in a gift economy is, “how can I appreciate and reciprocate this bond? ” Furthermore, in a gift economy, the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes because you are building bonds between more people. This is extremely different from our capitalist societies where the notion of private property discourages sharing.

The more exclusive something is, the more valuable it is. Ugh, everyone has a podcast. Why are you all so against everyone?

You've been conditioned to believe that things are only valuable if very few people do them. In an individualist society, you need the mythology of the individual and so the individual, to become an individual, has to be differentiated from everyone else. So you become so obsessed with finding people who don't remind you of other people.

And in so doing, what do you do? You are alienated from humanity, from a genuine love in everyday people and everyday things and everyday phenomena that are not about something that no one can access or get into or achieve, okay? And you bet this also feeds into the “I don’t owe anyone anything” mindset.

Being online so often only intensifies this individualism. The online world is designed to make us self-centred. Algorithms are trained to make us feel good, to give what we like.

We start treating posts and people as if they are performers for us. I’ll see a video of someone dancing and sure, maybe they’re not the best at dancing, but the comment section will say things like, “never dance again” or “i’ve never scrolled so fast in my life“, and it's like, have you considered that their dance does not exist for the sole purpose of impressing you? People can still dance for fun, right?

Even if they’re not good at it? The funny thing is, if you go to an actual party in person, no one gives a shit if you are a bad dancer. No one is going up to dancers they disapprove of, telling them “oh absolutely not, I can’t believe you decided to pull out that move.

" But online, each person becomes subject to our judgment. You are the sole spectator in your enclosed world. I get the same kind of thoughts when I see tiktoks giving an opinion or explanation on something, and the comments are like “well I didn’t ask”, and I’m like, "okay, then just scroll past?

" Not everything revolves around your interests. You don’t need to be “brutally honest” when it’s just an excuse to not have to consider other people’s feelings. Remember when Benoit Blanc said, "It is a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth.

" “Brutally honest” people need to think about that. All that being said, I do understand why younger generations are so concerned with being fake and probably see brutal honesty as a corrective measure. We grew up with misleading ads constantly being shoved down our throats, the age of photoshop on social media, people have been more willing to speak up about experiencing assault or harassment from public figures we once loved… this has all taught us to be hyper-skeptical.

This skepticism seems to start towards companies and public figures and other people in power, but as more and more people get online and started to build personas online, I feel like we all become public figures in some sense, which causes a general pessimistic lack of trust in people and so one’s automatic reaction can be critical. But is being blunt or brutally honest really a tell-tale sign of authenticity? As I explained in another video of mine, desires can be thought of as existing in different orders, where the higher orders are more representative of what you really want.

Some thinkers have distinguished between 1st order and 2nd order desires and say that autonomy is complying with your 2nd order desire. For example, if your 1st order desire is "I want to eat cake" and your 2nd order desire is "Yeah, I agree, I could go for cake. " Then you are acting autonomously.

If your first order of desire is, "I want to scroll on tiktok" and your second order desire is "please, you’re better than this. Free yourself from this prison of dopamine addiction" then choosing to scroll on TikTok wouldn’t be an autonomous choice. Similarly, if my 1st order desire is “I want to tell my co-worker that her haircut is bad” but my 2nd order desire is “I don’t want to hurt my co-worker’s feelings”, then it is not inauthentic to keep my mouth shut.

I’m not being fake by choosing to comply to my 2nd order desire when it is higher than my 1st one. Also, people who defend the right to be mean by saying ‘you just can’t handle honesty” seems to assume that the truth always must be harsh, which honestly reminds me of edgelords and sad tumblr girls who thought you had to be negative to be real. Do I really need to explain why that reasoning is false?

I hope not. If we are too cooperative, too generous, and stuff like that people either see you as a threat or the see you as a coward. .

. " Before I finish this video, I can’t ignore the fact that pressure to be nice disproportionately weighs on women. As a result of this, I’ve seen more women advocate for women to stop being nice.

The most common reason for this is that nice women get taken advantage of, especially since women are expected to be agreeable. It’s why assertive women still are conceptualized differently from assertive men, even when they act the same way. An assertive man is usually praised for being a "go-getter", for being a leader.

And even if people call him annoying and pushy, it's no threat to how proper of a man he is. But an assertive woman is an annoying, pushy, woman because assertiveness is outside the concept of womanhood. I completely support the fight to speak up when you’re being disrespected and to have feelings of frustration taken seriously.

But who I don’t agree with are neoliberal “girlbosses” who demonize the desire for validation from men. I agree that many men will validate you for their self-interested reasons. But I find it odd to frame it as if it is the woman’s fault to crave male validation.

It's as if we are failing as feminists or should be ashamed of our desire to have a genuine connection with men. Shouldn’t we instead be trying to create a world where women can feel happy about male validation because they can be confident that it’s genuine? Be skeptical of the random men hyping you up in your DMs, but let’s not shame women for wishing they could receive genuine validation.

Let’s instead acknowledge that everyone wants, and dare I say needs, validation and recognition as social beings. In Jean Paul Sartre’s book Nausea, the main character lives alone, rarely socializes, and then he starts to have an existential crisis. "Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face.

Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends.

Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say. .

. nature without humanity. " He doesn't understand who he is.

He doesn't even feel human to himself. Because with no external recognition of his being, he has no confirmation of any of his identity. Because with no external recognition of his being, he starts to question who he even is.

I understand that we should not rely 100% on external validation, but I think it’s more than okay to deeply care what others think of you. Of course, this doesn’t apply to the amoral realm, things that aren’t considered good or bad, they just are things. Haircuts, the fonts you use on your Instagram stories, whether you think Frozen or Tangled is a better film.

But if several people think that you are selfish, it’s not wrong at all to care about this reoccurring opinion of you. I know it’s hard to decide where to start with all the information I just gave you, but if you want an easy way to practice being nice for the sake of being nice, you can start by signing up for my streaming service, Nebula. As someone who'd like to be a lawyer one day, I really love this class about how lawsuits work from Legaleagle, a creator who breaks down serious, law-related news like the Hunter Biden plea, but he also has videos related to pop culture like this one on The Little Mermaid.

But a lot of his content, like his classes, are exclusive to Nebula. And it's not just him. Apart from great channels like Legaleagle being on Nebula, we as creators don’t have to worry about restrictions the way we do on YouTube.

I've had videos demonetized or age-restricted on YouTube which sucks when you work really hard on your content. But with Nebula, we can create with more freedom and test experimental ideas. By subscribing to Nebula, you'll be directly supporting your favorite creators, enabling them to continue making content that you love.

When you sign up using my unique link, you'll not only get access to Nebula but also Nebula Classes. You can watch experienced creators tell you about things like the video editing process or telling culturally authentic stories. Or improving your jazz improvisation.

If you sign up using the link below, you can get support me directly and get both Nebula and Nebula Classes for a 40% off annual plans which is as little as over $2. 50 a month, all while supporting me and my fellow content creators. Thank you for your support!

And of course thank you to all my Patrons who support this channel. There's someone that is showing up on my list as just weird widget symbols so I'm so sorry, don't know how to say that, but shoutout to you. [Reading Patron names] Thank you so much for watching, let's keep talking, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Bye!