Yes, Powerful Thoughts Can Change the World

We all know how it goes. One day we're born, one day we die. Everything that happens in between we know and understand, but everything that happened before and will happen after we know nothing about. As a result, it's really difficult to say what exactly the meaning or importance for us being here is. If we can't tell how we came or where we came from, how can we know why we're here?

In the same vein, if we don't know where we're going or what we're going to become, how can we tell if any of our present actions have any significance at all? It is this uncertainty of both our collective pasts and futures that has allowed the question, "What is the meaning of life?" to plague humanity ever since we became sentient. We've never been able to objectively answer this question as a species; however, a lot of us have found comfort in many different ideologies to at least subdue the anxiety that it causes.

In many different religions, a deity made the entire universe, put us all in it, and whatever we do on this Earth will be used to determine when and how we spend eternity afterwards. For some, the meaning of life is the love we share with friends, family, and our loved ones. Some others believe the existence of life in itself is what makes it worth living, but for nihilists, life is meaningless. All action, suffering, emotions—both good and bad—are entirely senseless and meaningless. This is nihilism: the belief in nothing.

At some point in our lives, many of us have been faced with nihilistic thoughts. We're hit by a strong sense of purposelessness, like our lives have no meaning and we have no intrinsic value. Usually, this happens when we begin to question our old beliefs, but also just before we get new ones to hold on to.

It's in that phase where you're growing out of your parents' beliefs, learning new things, getting new experiences, and forming your own views about the world. Usually, all of these thoughts begin with one simple question: why? A three-letter monosyllabic word that's capable of making anything and everything that feels like the rock of your foundation start to become slippery like quicksand, dragging you into the misery that may be just maybe your whole life hasn't been what you thought it was.

Just pause and take a moment to think about your core values and just ask the question: why? Why do you believe those things? Where did they come from? Who did they come from? Keep asking, and eventually, you'll arrive at a point where there's no longer an answer. You'll arrive at nothing. All the religions of the world, all of our scientific discoveries, but yet the question "why?" is one that we still cannot answer.

And so for the nihilist, it is at this point that they come to the conclusion that there is no why, there is no answer—there's simply nothing. As Alan Watts once wrote, "Life is nothing more than a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium." It's really in the name. The term nihilism comes from the Latin word "nihil," which translates to nothing, and "ISM," which translates to ideology—it's the ideology of nothing.

But that doesn't really help us in understanding it completely. Usually, people confuse nihilism for pessimism, but they are very different from each other. Pessimists believe in the worst outcome. They have a downtrending view of the world and tend to focus on the negatives in life because they believe that in the end, evil will always overcome good.

And this is what makes them different: pessimists believe that there's good in the world, but they just don't think humans are capable of doing it, at least in its entirety. Nihilists, on the other hand, do not believe in anything. They don't believe that there's evil in the world; neither do they believe that there's good in the world. In the mind of the nihilist, the world simply exists, and humans created morality, thereby creating good and evil.

Let's take the glass cup metaphor, for instance. Optimists say you should see the glass as half full, while pessimists say we should see the glass as half empty. Nihilists? They say throw the entire cup away because what does it matter if it's full or empty? Full, empty, good, bad—it's all irrelevant. We're all going to die anyway.

Nihilism is also often compared to several other philosophies like cynicism and apathy, but again, they are all very different from one another. Correctly categorizing your thoughts in these baskets may be harder than you think. Cynics believe that people are always motivated by self-interest. They don't believe that anyone can have intrinsically good motives. They have no faith in the human species and believe that we're all entirely selfish, only fighting for our own benefit.

However, the idea that humans are not good means that in the mind of the cynic, good exists out there somewhere—just not in humans. In the mind of the nihilist, nothing exists out there. There's no good or evil. They don't see people as evil; neither do they see them as good because they don't believe either of those things exist. They're simply traits we've applied to things.

Apathetic people just don't care. They believe that there's meaning to life, but they simply don't care about it. Nihilism, on the other hand, is the idea that there's no grand design or purpose, nothing to believe in, and therefore no meaning. This brings to mind the paradox of nihilism: if you believe in nothing, then that nothing becomes something that you believe in. But since you now believe in something, then there is no nihilism because nihilism is the belief that there is nothing.

Nihilism is quite different from other philosophical ideas because it was first a literary invention before it ever became philosophical. As a result, it's not clearly defined as many of the other philosophies that exist. Many different people explained it in many different ways, but eventually, these different definitions got categorized, forming many different kinds of nihilism.

There's political nihilism. Political nihilists believe that for humanity to move forward as a species, all political, social, and religious order must be destroyed. Then there's ethical nihilism; it rejects the idea of absolute ethical or moral values. With this type of nihilism, good or bad is only defined by society, and as such, it shouldn't be followed. If we, as a species, will ever attain absolute individual freedom, we can kind of just do whatever we want.

And then we have existential nihilism—it's the understanding that life has no value or meaning. It's the most popular kind of nihilism, and the one we've been talking about for most of this video. For nihilists, the existence of things like the state, religious bodies, and even communal morality is a breach of our freedom as individuals. If we can't do absolutely anything we want to do, then are we truly free, or have we simply bound ourselves by some kind of invisible mental chain for reasons we can't explain?

One night, I was scrolling through Reddit and came across the question: if you had the chance to save your pet or a stranger, who would you save? An overwhelming number of people said their pet. Pretty obviously, when one commenter was confronted, they simply asked the question: why do you think a human life is worth more than that of an animal? And no one really had an answer. Of course, people tried to beat around the bush, but the question why was never answered.

And that right there is the point of the nihilist. If we can't answer why we bind ourselves by these rules, then why do we choose to do it? Well, it might be because of the existential horror and the emotional anguish that comes with agreeing to the fact that life is meaningless. Think about it for a minute: if life is truly meaningless and everything we're doing has no value, then all the feats of science, the wonders of technology, things like space exploration, and human rights movements—look at how far we've come—and then think about the fact that it all might just be a blip in time with no consequence whatsoever in the grand scheme of things.

Knowing that all the things we experience, the ups and downs we go through—that in the end it's all for nothing. We aren't obligated to understand the chaos of reality; just to laugh at it. Friedrich Nietzsche was a strange philosopher because he argued both for and against nihilism at the same time. Arguing for, he explained that there is no objective structure or order in our world except for the one that we create for ourselves. He once said, “Every belief, every considering something true is necessarily false because there is simply no true world.”

He believed nihilism would expose all of humanity's beliefs and truths as nothing but a symptom of defective Western mythology. As he famously said, "God is dead." Now, he wasn't talking about the actual deity of the religions; he was talking metaphorically about the power that religious orders held at the time and how people were starting to chart their own paths, find their own meaning in life, denying what the status quo was at the time.

But then, in the same breath, Friedrich argued against nihilism, saying that in the coming centuries, the advent of nihilism would drive civilization towards a catastrophe, a disaster waiting to implode—a river that has reached its end. If you look at the most destructive civilizations in human history, we can clearly see that this is true. Long-standing cultural traditions, beliefs, religious institutions, and even financial systems are broken down, and nothingness starts to creep in.

Think about it: if nothing matters and we're all just a random combination of transient atoms, how can we call Hitler objectively one of the worst humans to ever live for trying to wipe out an entire culture? At a fundamental level, most of us understand that all of these things are indeed terrible, but the danger is that because we cannot explain why we feel that way logically, we can never convince another person to follow the same path. And that is exactly what Friedrich feared.

Some people still blame him for the Nazi era because although he saw all of these dangers, he still continued preaching nihilism. He believed that if we could work through the breakdown of civilization that nihilism would eventually cause, we can then create a new course of action for mankind. He believed that to move forward as a species, we must create a new morality—one that does away with the prejudice of what existed before. Because at the end of the day, tearing down your old house shouldn't make you homeless; rather, it should present you with an opportunity to build a bigger and better home.

Pause and look around you for a moment; observe everything that's going on, particularly on social media, and you can see that we as a species might just be heading for another nihilism outbreak. Religion no longer holds any saying what's morally acceptable. People are destroying long-standing beliefs and cultural practices, and are instead charting new courses for themselves. Anything, no matter how despicable you think it is, now has a loyal fan base defending why they have a right to do whatever it is they want to do.

And in reality, why not? That's the question no one can answer. Humanity will keep shifting the needle forward ever so slightly until one day none of us will be able to tell the other that they're wrong. Because why are they wrong?

William Shakespeare once wrote, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.” If life is truly meaningless and we have no purpose for being here, our response should be to make the best out of a bad situation. Instead of seeing the glass half full or half empty, we can simply throw it out and drink directly from the faucet until we're satisfied.

Because at the end of the day, life alone is reason enough for living. In 2012, Drake made a song titled "The Motto," but what most people remember from it is "YOLO." YOLO tells you to live in the moment, enjoy life you have today, and not worry too much about tomorrow because at the end of the day, you only live once. While Drake certainly popularized the motto, he wasn't the first to use the phrase, and he certainly wasn't the first to come up with the idea of enjoying the pleasures of today without worrying about tomorrow.

This idea has been around since the 4th Century BC, as what philosophers call Hedonism—a school of thought that was created by Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates. Hedonism is the idea that the end goal of all of our actions in life is to, one, pursue pleasure and, two, avoid pain. Aristippus believed that the only good cause worth pursuing was one that will ultimately bring you pleasure.

In today's society, we're taught that the way to succeed is to suffer today so you can enjoy tomorrow, to save for the rainy day. Once we get out of college, we're encouraged to find a job and work hard at a 9 to 5 for many years, live modestly, and save as much as possible so we can enjoy our retirement 50 years later.

Aristippus didn't believe in any of that. He didn't believe in the idea of delayed gratification, and he always advocated for people to simply get pleasure from what is present and available. He was completely against the idea of suffering in the present in order to get something that only might be pleasurable in the future. So instead of telling students in college to study hard for their exams so they can land a good job after school, for example, Aristippus would encourage them to fraternize, drink, and party lavishly because these are the pleasures that are readily available to them.

On the one hand, you can see them as stupid and lacking foresight. After all, if you squander everything you have on the pleasures of today, you'll quickly run out of resources, and all of that pleasure will turn into pain. From people losing everything they had because of an addiction to people living in poverty as a result of their own laziness, we've seen the results of solely focusing on the present pleasures.

But on the other hand, there's some wisdom to the school of thought because truly tomorrow isn't promised to anyone of us. What's the point in working hard at a 9 to 5 for 50 years, ignoring all of the pleasures of the time, only to die a few years before retirement? And let's say you do make it to retirement. The sad reality is that one in four people will have a disability by the age of 60, and the older you get, the chances of that happening increase drastically.

Knowing all of this, is it still foolish to think that we are all better off just enjoying the pleasures that we do have in the present? Socrates and other philosophers at the time certainly believe so. A lot of philosophers hated the idea of Hedonism because saying that the end goal of the entire human existence is simply to pursue pleasure and avoid pain just sounded vain. This opposition, combined with the rise of Christianity in ancient Greece at the time, meant that this extremely rash idea of Hedonism died with Aristippus many years later.

Epicurus, who is considered the father of modern-day Hedonism, redefined what Hedonism was. And to do that, he had to start by redefining a certain word: pleasure. For Aristippus, pleasure was a state of ecstasy and excitement— that amazing feeling you have after biting into your favorite food or after that first sip of coffee in the morning. And for most of us, this is how we define pleasure.

But not Epicurus. For Epicurus, pleasure was a state of tranquility. Instead of encouraging people to indulge themselves in constant gratification, Epicurus believed that the true meaning of pleasure was to kill the fear of both death and God, because only then would you truly be able to fully enjoy what this life has to offer. While Aristippus simply encouraged people to pursue pleasure, Epicurus believed that all human beings do everything to gain pleasure and absorb pain.

He didn't encourage it because, according to him, that was our natural state anyway. To defend this point, Epicurus asks everyone to look at how babies view the world around them. They don't really understand how the world works yet, but they do understand two things: when something feels good and when something feels bad.

When something feels good, the baby is joyful and happy; when something feels bad, the baby cries because it wants that pain to stop and it wants to return to said pleasurable state. I'm sure at this point you're wondering if we're all solely pursuing pleasure, then what about selfless acts—acts that are done solely because they are virtuous or valuable for other people and not ourselves? How do we describe those?

Well, in hedonistic ideas, it's simply because those things make people feel heroic, which ends up being processed in your brain as a pleasurable feeling. So at the core, it is still pleasure they're chasing, just not the kind we might be thinking about. According to hedonistic teachings, there are two types of pleasure: there's moving pleasure and there's static pleasure.

Moving pleasure is when you're in the process of satisfying a desire. When you're hungry, you eat; when you're thirsty, you have a drink; when you need a timeout, you take a nap. Static pleasure is the tranquility you feel once you're done satisfying those needs. At this point, the adrenaline has finished coursing through your veins and you're left with a sweet feeling of satisfaction.

In that moment, you feel a sense of tranquility and you keep feeling it until it is sadly replaced by pain because according to Epicurus, there is no in-between; the absence of pain is pleasure and vice versa. But even with this more modest way of explaining hedonism, a lot of people still disagree and even frown at the idea, and this is because of one thing: the idea that pleasure is the only source of intrinsic value.

Think about it for a second: if pleasure is the only intrinsic value, then what do we make of things like finding meaning in life, achieving great things, building and maintaining long-lasting relationships, becoming a legend in a particular field, or even something as simple as living religiously or upholding a set of moral beliefs that we hold dear to our hearts? Pessimists might try to argue that all of those things do not hold any value in themselves and that they're only valuable because we get pleasure from them, but something like upholding religious beliefs isn't always pleasurable.

In fact, most times it restricts the kind of pleasure you can get, but still, it gives people a sense of fulfillment that for them is better than the pleasure they're forsaking. If self-pleasure alone is the aim of human existence, the people who benefit from the wrong that happens in our society will never fight against it. People would never fight for the common good when it might affect them negatively.

But yet, every day, we see people put their own desires on the side to help other people. People get excommunicated from their families, rejected by those they love because they chose to speak up and fight for what's right, even if the issues don't affect them directly. If we're all chasing our own pleasures, that would never happen. We'll all be too busy enjoying our broken society because it benefits us and not worrying about trying to change it for someone else.

Another huge stumbling block that hedonists face when trying to argue their beliefs is the worth of reality. If pleasure is the ultimate goal, then it shouldn't matter whether that pleasure is real or imagined, right? If we say that people always intrinsically pursue things that are pleasurable, then if there is an option for unlimited pleasure, they should never choose anything else, right?

To answer these questions, Robert Nozick created a thought experiment, giving people two options. He asked them to choose between being plugged into a pleasure-giving machine for the rest of their lives and living their current reality with the pain that exists in our world. People always picked this reality because, in the end, living a life that's not real is pointless and meaningless. And even with the option of the most pleasurable thing in the world, people would rather have pain that's real—whatever real means.

As I've said previously, the best memories are the ones you remember with both pleasure and pain. Twenty years after he left his childhood home, Abraham Lincoln came back only to see the entire place in ruin. As he looked at it with tears in his eyes, he said, “My childhood home, I see again, and I’m saddened with the view, and still as memories cloud my brain, there’s pleasure in it too.”

This beautiful mix of pleasure and pain is something that the hedonistic view of the world simply does not account for. When you're graduating high school, you're excited for the adventures that await you in college. You'll probably be leaving home for the first time, and you'll finally be alone, able to enjoy what the world has to offer. That feeling is pleasurable, but the feeling is also painful. You'll miss your high school friends and the simplicity of childhood; you'll miss your parents, your siblings, and the community that you grew up in.

Though these painful thoughts cloud your brain, there will be pleasure in it too. Hedonism is frowned upon in modern-day society because it opens the door for a trap that you can easily fall into. Pleasure is an insatiable desire. If you get hungry and fill your belly, it only takes a few hours and you're looking for something else to eat. It's an unending pursuit, so if that becomes the entire reason for your existence, it can quickly become difficult to control.

This is how most people become addicted. It starts out as just a fleeting pleasure, and before you know it, the reason you're doing those things stops being the pursuit of pleasure and starts being an unquenchable and uncontrollable thirst for those things—a trap that's very difficult to come out of, one that many people get stuck in for the rest of their lives. But this isn't to say that we can't learn some things from hedonistic principles.

As much as we might not like to think about it, it's true that tomorrow is not promised, so we might as well make the best of today. Things like making a conscious decision to enjoy the little everyday pleasures can help us lead a happier life. If your car breaks down and you have to walk to school, don't be in haste; embrace the journey. Walk with a friend, make jokes with them, and always leave each other on a good note. Craving a cup of coffee? Head out to your favorite coffee shop and order your favorite drink; you've earned it!

You don't have to wait until you're retired before you can start reaping the fruit of your labor. Take those vacation days; the promotion can wait a few more months. Stay on that call with your friends for an extra hour; missing an hour of study probably won't make you fail. Because even if seeking pleasure might not be the ultimate goal of human existence, it's certainly a worthwhile pursuit.

Hedonism is about taking in the pleasures of life, doing things that make you happy. Some of the things that make me happy are the universe and space; it's why I named this channel after the aperture of a telescope through which you can see the universe. I've always wanted to be able to touch and feel the universe, and thanks to the sponsor of today's video, Gentle Bands, I can finally do that. Gentle Bands is a company that makes rings using raw materials harvested from retired spacecraft and dinosaur fossils, so you're wearing something that has not only been to space but is basically also from the past.

Each ring is forged by expert artisans in family-owned workshops, so you know a lot of care goes into making it. I'm sure you guys would love their new collection, Galactic Legends. It includes a bunch of pieces inspired by sci-fi movies and video games. If you're not a fan of wearing rings, each ring comes with a chain that allows you to wear it as a necklace. And if you want to give this as a gift to someone, you can get the ring engraved as well.

I honestly think this is such an amazing ring for anyone who loves space, dinosaurs, science fiction, and things like that. If you're interested in getting one for yourself or someone you love, click the link in the description and use the code "aperture" to get 25% off your purchase.

Back to our story. Imagine you're an Olympic athlete. You could be a track star, a distance swimmer, or a figure skater; whatever sport you choose, chances are you've been training for it since the moment you could walk. You have your gym routine down to a science, you've hired specialized coaches to help you along the way, and you eat a specific meal plan that ensures you perform at your best physically. You're at the peak of your sport, and you've done everything you can to be one of the best athletes in the world.

But to win, your game needs to extend way past the physical, and mentally you have to believe you will win, no matter what. Crouching at those starting blocks or mounting the balance beam, you must think at the end of the day you will end up on top of the podium with a gold medal around your neck—otherwise, what's the point in competing in the first place?

The problem is that every athlete you're competing against shares this belief. And you know that you also know that there's can only be one winner, and so statistically, the chances of you coming out on top are pretty low. Yet you must go against your own logic and believe that no matter what, you will win. This is naive optimism—the belief that good outcomes are more likely to happen to you than bad ones in any given situation.

You must keep yourself unaware or naive of what could prevent you from your goals, and forge forward as if you will achieve them, regardless of any external factors. No matter the circumstance, you believe things will work out for you, even when the odds aren't in your favor or when certain obstacles are in your way.

To be a naive optimist requires a suspension of disbelief. You must adopt a positive stance or perspective in every situation without familiarizing yourself with its nuance or details. It's like walking around with blinders on, ignoring everything that could go wrong—or, in the professional athlete's case, using naivety to forget about all your competitors and the statistical likelihood that you'll lose.

The ignorance of the naive optimist can serve them well. Have you ever felt anxious before a party where you don't know many people? You run over all your insecurities and the hypothetical social blunders that could occur, and it might feel comforting. You go through all the scenarios that could go wrong in your head. What will you do if you spill your drink all over someone or forget the name of a person who swears you've met before?

But is it really comforting, or do you just end up feeling anxious and worried throughout the party, forgetting to enjoy yourself or meet the new people? The naive optimist would go into the night assuring everyone will like them and everything will go off without a hitch. And while this might not be true, awkwardness is almost a given when meeting new people.

When you have positive expectations, you stop anxiety and catastrophic thinking in its tracks. You go into the party with a more open demeanor, making it more likely that you will make a good impression. You could have a similar attitude when interviewing for a job. Believing you'll do well and achieve the desired outcome makes it more likely to happen.

Blocking out the negative possibilities helps you focus on all the good things that could happen and prepares you to confidently communicate your credentials and why you would be the best choice for the role instead of worrying about why you might not be. To take your naive optimism to the next level, you would prepare for the interview as if you already have the job.

Despite the other candidates interviewing for the same role, as someone who overthinks, I sincerely understand just how difficult naive optimism can be. Mental health issues like anxiety and depression, and even just regular worries and life struggles, can prevent us from seeing the bright side of anything.

From the outside, they can be easy to conflate naive optimism with manifestation. Both methods constitute an unwavering belief that you will achieve what you want, but that's about where their similarities end. Manifestation is putting an intention out into the universe and expecting the universe to grant you that wish. It relies heavily on energy and things like journaling and visualization, and at least how it's been popularized suggests that something will happen even if you don't work for them.

On the other hand, the naive optimist knows this mindset doesn't guarantee all their wants and desires will plop into their lap. Asking the universe for the winning lottery ticket or your dream home won't get you those things. Naive optimism is about tangibly working towards your goals and believing you will achieve them because of that work. It's being optimistic about the results of the work you've put in, regardless of the challenges you might face.

Sadly, our society has gotten to a point where being optimistic is now being seen as wrong, and to an extent, I kind of understand. Our shared culture is ridden with political discourse, climate change, rampant inflation, and a general fear that we're headed toward doom, and so it's hard for most people to see or even imagine a light at the end of the tunnel.

As a result, naive optimists are often ridiculed for being arrogant or even stupid. What these people don't realize is that a naively optimistic Outlook might open up a new perspective in these conversations. While everyone is so focused on what could go wrong and the problems we face, you could be the person focused on making the best possible outcome a reality.

Another critique is that naive optimists lack the perspective to see the nuance in complex situations, and it's a frustrating perspective to work with when solving complicated problems with tangible barriers. Optimism is good when doing focused detailed work like policy or engineering, but naivety can hinder you from confronting genuine issues in large-scale projects.

The naive optimist does have their place, but it's also necessary to balance that perspective with a more realistic outlook. One of the best utilizations of naive optimism is at the outset of a massive project or challenge. Naivety is helpful in situations where confronting the whole picture could discourage you.

Consider starting a business, writing a novel, or completing a triathlon. If you begin a big project thinking about all the problems you'll inevitably have along the way, you won't be motivated to start. Instead, it's best to be optimistic that you will complete the project without considering the obstacles, and even if you don't reach your goal, you'll still be further along at the end than if you had convinced yourself that it was impossible from the start.

Naive optimism will always push you further toward success, even if you don't make it all the way there each time, and it allows you to try new things and pushes you out of your comfort zone because you're not as focused on what could go wrong. You build confidence and trust in yourself by giving yourself that chance; however naive it might seem.

It reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and usually this phenomenon refers to the type of person with a low skill in a particular area who grossly overestimates their ability. Anyway, think of an audience member watching a ballerina on stage and thinking, "That doesn't look so hard! I could do that!"

Fast forward to them in a ballet class, struggling to do even the most basic steps with proper technique. Often, the Dunning-Kruger effect has a negative connotation: people are so ignorant about their abilities that they don't even know how ignorant they are. But it's actually not that bad because it is the Dunning-Kruger effect that allows people to take the first step to achieve greatness. Yes, that audience member who watched the ballerina grossly overestimated their skill, but that naivety allowed them to enter the dance studio.

And sure, they may have two left feet at first, still though, through perseverance and an unwavering belief that they can succeed in just a few years of training, they too will be pirouetting and leaping across the stage while another audience member watches and thinks to themselves, "I’m pretty sure I could do this."

This is why kids learn stuff so quickly. If you spend significant time around children, especially toddlers, you'll notice they're very optimistic about their abilities—overly so. From dressing to pouring juice to cutting their hair, they think they can care for themselves despite their lack of life skills. But their naive optimism is what builds those skills; it allows them to practice.

So eventually, one day, the orange juice ends up in the glass instead of all over the floor. Older children also tend to overestimate their abilities, allowing them to have zero fear when trying new things. They're like little sponges, eagerly soaking up information. They learn quickly and hungrily because they don't possess all the self-conscious baggage surrounding ignorance.

It might be helpful to adopt a child-like mindset when learning new things. It comes from a want to learn and forgetting how likely failure will be at first. Overcoming that initial mental hurdle is the most helpful thing naive optimism can do for you.

Another instance where naive optimism can aid you is when facing a difficult life decision. Maybe you or someone you know is dealing with a chronic illness, financial stress, or relationship struggles. A naive optimist would believe in their core that they will make it about the other side. They wouldn't spend time considering what might be in their way or the realistic likelihood that things might turn for the worst.

Now, I'm not trying to say that naive optimism will make these situations quickly melt away; instead, this philosophy is meant to help you see a favorable resolution in cases where it's too easy to focus on the negative. As humans, we tend to have a bias towards the negative, and evolutionarily this makes sense. We're urged to protect and prepare ourselves for the worst that life can throw our way, but an emphasis on the negative isn't helpful.

It can cause you to overblow situations and indulge in unnecessary worry, feeling overwhelmed by negativity when life inevitably becomes difficult. As normal. But just because you encounter a challenging situation doesn't mean that you have to give up the idea that at some point things will get better and work out for you.

With a naively optimistic attitude, you can make better decisions with your future self in mind. Naive optimism takes practice, and as a chronic overthinker, it's not a mindset that comes naturally to me. The key might be to fake it until you make it. If you act like a naive optimist, you will likely sincerely adopt the attitude over time.

Start with the small things: "I will complete everything on my to-do list," "The meeting with my boss will go well," "I'll successfully bake a loaf of bread from scratch." Then hopefully this attitude will seep into more influential sectors of your life. Even if you don't become the textbook example of a naive optimist, these thought patterns will get you further than if you didn't use them.

Remember your ideal Olympic athlete self; you must believe you will win the race to reach the starting blocks. And when the race begins, you are in places ahead to where you would have been without this belief. Even if someone runs faster and beats you, the idea that you would win still did more for you than the belief that you'd lose. And there's always the next race—the one you know you'll definitely win.

But if you're still in your head, unable to entirely give yourself over to naivety, it might be helpful to check out another theory: optimistic nihilism. The belief is that nothing matters, but rather than letting that be a reason for fear and anxiety, embrace it as a good thing.

Why? Click the link on your screen right now to find out. Consciousness: it's our awareness, our understanding, our ignorance. Our daily consciousness leaves out more than it takes in, and due to this, it leaves out important things. Things that would help relieve us if we knew them. If we had a higher awareness, a better consciousness, we would feel better; we would be more at peace with things.

The deep-down truth of things is screened by our consciousness. Our sensory organs will pick things out; our eyes can only see certain things, our ears can only hear certain things. We have to create instruments and other tools to see things we as humans cannot, to expand our understanding and thus our ego or consciousness.

Humans evolved and became the dominant species on Earth by a long shot. It's due to our innate ability to network with each other. If humanity was wiped out and restarted—like loading an old save file—communities would still form. Structures within society are inevitable due to the variety of brains. Some are good at critical thinking; others are more artistic. However, we are all wired with some innate features.

Just as humans form societies that evolve, other creatures do as well. But we're different. We are customizable characters. Basically, we can kind of mold ourselves into whatever kind of person we want to be. We can't know for certain that animals or any other life on Earth is conscious or can even function in the same way that we do.

Let's put it this way: I know that I have my own thoughts and feelings and emotions, but how can I know for certain that you or anyone else does? There's no way I can go to your head and see things 100% from your perspective. I can't know what you're thinking or if you can even think in the first place.

To truly understand the universe, to understand and actually experience life, you have to give yourself up. There's no point in sustaining bliss and being permanently at an all-time high. The life you're living is what you have put yourself into, what ego you've formed—only you don't want to admit it. You want to believe it happened to you.

Day-to-day, you play non-bliss in order to be able to experience bliss. You put yourself into bad situations, you let in the negative experiences in life just to feel some kind of satisfaction when it goes the other way. Self implies other; white implies black; death implies life. You can feel your existence as fundamental, not as an accident.

At the basic level, at the lowest level imaginable, you are the fundamentals of existence. The same thing that makes you is the same thing that makes up everything else. If you can step back from what you believe, if you can step back from what your sensory organs have turned you into, you start to see things for what they actually are.

Do you define yourself as a victim of the world or as the world? Love is only possible due to the lack of self. You give up all your secrets; the walls you've built to keep people at an arm's distance slowly lower one by one until you're a completely open book—until all your pages have been read and the rest of the pages are blank, waiting to be filled with this newfound love.

In basketball or soccer or football, you're constantly giving the ball to someone else. The point of the game is to have the ball in your hand for the least amount of time—to constantly be passing it to someone else, to shoot it, to get it out of your hands. It keeps the game going. And life is the same way. If you define yourself as only being what your ego is, as the things you do voluntarily, then you're the victim.

It's because of some higher power that you were put here when you didn't ask for it, but what about the things you do involuntarily? Do you beat your heart, or does it just happen to you? You do those things even though you don't know how. Words don't work here. As Alan Watts said, "Everyone is fundamentally the alternate reality, not God in a traditional sense, but God in the sense of being the self—the deep down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not."

A mind that can ask, "Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of all of this?" tends to forget. As I said, your consciousness tends to leave out critical information at times. A consciousness that can view the world and take in sensory information tends to forget what's behind those eyes—a mind that hasn't gone deep enough to find where those questions come from.

Because the same place those questions come from is the same place those answers lie. The brain controls everything. In order to go to the extremes of the universe—to places we can only dream of going—we must first dive deep into something that is all inside of us. Take the Big Bang, for example. Now there are hundreds, thousands of theories as to how we came into existence, but let's go with this one: you believe that you are strictly you.

Your human body is all that you are and all that you have ever been. You're simply a small speck of dust in a vast sea of galaxies, stars, and planets—you're irrelevant. But rolling back the clock, things get smaller. The universe was more compact; the atoms that make you up are building blocks of the universe, of the hot gas clouds that form stars, that allowed solar systems to form, that allowed planets like Earth to form.

If you keep rolling back this clock, you were around at the very instant everything came into existence. That is you too. When everything was infinitely small, you were there. But we define ourselves as being only us, mere humans walking on a planet that we didn't ask to get put on. But frankly, every one of us somehow made this happen; we just go on and pretend we didn't. It's because of how we define ourselves.

Are you the victim, or are you the world? As cringy as it may sound, everyone you meet is just a small packet of the universe—a present—whether they're a pleasant one or not. That was packaged together from billions of years of engineering and architecture on a universal scale. But instead, we define ourselves as something completely separate from it—something not connected whatsoever, which is a foolish view.

We tend to search for how the universe came into being, but we're just the universe trying to understand itself. In order to get to that conclusion, we have to reframe our mindset. We're not as different as we all think. Your name is given to you at birth; your ideas and personality are collected from the world—scraps, bits, and pieces here and there cling to you like a magnet. So what part of you is you?

We are all different manifestations of consciousness, but we are all fundamentally the same thing. We all may have different egos, different personalities, but when you step back and drop the ego, we are all connected. View the universe as a forest; every one of us is a twig, a leaf, a branch, but together we form life.

Our origin—our roots—are connected together just as the roots of trees form a vast network that brings these massive forests to life. Humanity's roots all come from the same place. Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transferred from one form of energy to another. But many of us have this fear that it's all going to come to an end. And while yes, your life will end, your energy will not; it will continue onward forever.

But our consciousness has convinced us otherwise. We form this thought process almost like we've been hypnotized to think that we are all there is and all there ever will be, and that it's all going to come to an end. This leaves us unsatisfied and unhappy. But the universe is continuous, and you are technically the universe, so you will continue on as well.

Your death is not the end of you; it's the death of your ego. Many people experience the same exact thing while living ego death; it tends to be induced through psychedelic drugs like LSD, shrooms, and the list goes on. While working on this video, I actually experienced it myself, and although not intentional, it provided clarity in a way I've never before experienced.

It's not the ego in the vernacular sense as describing a person's self-worth; it's the philosophical ego. It's the complete loss of subjective self-identity. Everything that you believe you are will disappear. You're void of emotion, of connection to anything around you, of connection to what makes you you. The idea of being a person doesn't make any sense. The words I, me, and myself have zero meaning whatsoever.

The world can normally be put into two categories: myself and not myself. While experiencing ego death, this line is blurred. I am completely gone; there's only the awareness of existence. The lifetime accumulation of your thoughts and emotions are put on pause; it's as if you're on a cliff approaching an infinite void beneath you. Your life is continuous and exists all the way up the mountain until you reach the edge. Beneath you, though, is the unknown.

Ego death is jumping into that void, leaving behind everything you've ever known. It's as if you've stepped out of your body into a separate entity. You start to see things for what they actually are, but things don't actually exist. "Things" is just a noun; it's a fragment of speech, and speech is just another instrument we've created to try and understand the world around us.

Our senses allow us to go about our daily lives and traverse the world, but they don't really offer any explanations, so we have to make them up ourselves. While experiencing ego death, you disconnect from all of that. You have a heightened awareness. It's truly as if you're experiencing a higher level of consciousness that no person can understand.

You reach this level that words can't explain. The instruments we made to try and understand our place in the universe shatter completely. Explaining it in terms of "I saw" or "I felt" doesn't seem reasonable. Our languages are instruments created to explain things that someone experiences, but while undergoing ego death, there is no someone; there is no me.

So how do you describe it? It's as if your slate was wiped clean; your character save file was corrupted, but you're still in the game. Because of this, ego death can be scary, but it can also be a very enlightening experience. It's both constricting and freeing; it's white and black. It's like you're defining what life is like through experiencing death.

We cannot be more sensitive and welcoming to pleasure without being more sensitive and accepting of pain. You're flying and sinking at the same time, being pulled from below and above in every direction at once. While going through it, I ended up reaching a moment of acceptance. Ego death, while often extremely anxiety-inducing, offers a glimpse into a reality free of that.

A life free of your personal flaws, your daily thoughts, your responsibilities. It personally feels as if time is frozen and wherever your mind wanders is free to judge things as they truly are. You are the observer and the observable. Surprisingly, the conclusion I came to is the same conclusion I came to while making a previous video of mine, and it's that nothing in life really matters.

Fear, in general, tends to come from us not being able to make peace with the chaos that is the universe, not being able to cope with the idea of entropy—that everything is tending towards disorder. Forming an ego is disorderly. In the same way, you go further and further down your own tunnel and stray further from everyone else.

Experiencing ego death is breaking out of that tunnel, pulling back, and understanding that the network of these tunnels that encompass every human on earth all eventually return back to the same place. When I die, when my ego is completely gone forever, when my physical body breaks down and no longer resembles the form it's in today, I'll still somehow be here.

Right now, I'm an hourglass. The sand is slowly leaking its way to the bottom, and eventually, it'll all be there. It's the end of the line for me, but when that day comes, the universe will stop by, take the hourglass, flip it over, and whatever made me me will then become something entirely different. We're all just a temporary collection of atoms, and whatever you and I subjectively believe we are wont last forever, but objectively, we will.

For now, just enjoy the ride.

Hey! If you like the videos we make and would want to support us to make bigger and better projects, we've recently just updated the Patreon. We have different tiers with perks like access to a private Discord server, a peek behind the curtains to hear from the team that makes these videos, discounts on all the merch we'll create in the future, and many more perks that will be decided by you guys—the patrons. If you don't have the means, then please don't feel obligated in any way. Subscribing and watching these videos is more than enough support.

But if you do have the means and want to support in some way, then this is the best way to do so. The link is in the description. Thanks for watching.

In the city of Cypress in 300 BC, there lived a very wealthy trader called Zeno. While on a voyage from Phoenicia to Perus, his boat sank along with all of his cargo. Because of that single event—an event that was entirely out of Zeno's or anyone's control—this very wealthy man suddenly became poor in an instant.

Imagine you were Zeno. How would you react to your entire life's work getting flushed down the drain by the sheer force of nature? What is the proper reaction? Would you be angry? Sad? Would you feel life has cheated you? For most of us, these would all be normal reactions, but not for Zeno—the father of Stoicism.

One small change lasts in eternity, and one small reframing of your mindset can cascade into larger and more impactful changes later down the line. The core of Stoicism is the very definition of acceptance and indifference. After reading the works of Socrates and other great philosophers, Zeno created and taught Stoicism. According to Zeno, although we don't have much control over what happens to us, we do have control over how it affects us, and we must use this control to great effect.

Rather than crying over spilled milk—or in this case, drowned goods—Zeno focused on maintaining his composure over the situation, remaining calm and neutral despite his predicament. Today, people inadvertently view Stoics as people who cannot be broken—people who don't often linger to the emotional extremes, going through things like fits of rage or bouts of anxiety. But the original idea behind Stoicism was much more than that.

Rather than just a way to describe people who are unemotional, Stoicism was a way to view, describe, and understand the world. It was a way of life, and that way of life has lasted for centuries. Stoic philosophy can be applied to situations today the same way it was applied thousands of years ago, and its benefits are just as impactful.

Stoicism allows us to process these negative emotions from negative experiences and turn them into the thoughts that give us a unique perspective of the world. Perspective is everything, and everyone in the world has different experiences and thus different perspectives on things. Since the Stoics gathered, discussed, and taught philosophy in a public place, their general philosophy was widely known.

They believe that the Stoic principles could greatly benefit anyone and everyone, and so it didn't make sense for them to hide that knowledge behind the four walls of a school or of the palace courtyards. As a result, everyone—from slave to emperor—could learn and become a Stoic, and they did. Some of the world's most notable Stoics include Epicurus—which translates to "acquired," as he was once owned as a slave—Seneca, who was a well-renowned statesman, and Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor and one of the most powerful men to have ever lived.

The early Stoics practiced what they preached, avoiding all forms of segregation and leading the fight against inequality. They even invented the word "Cosmopolitan," which literally means "citizen of the world." When people hear that word now, we think of cities like New York, Toronto, Dubai, and London because of how diverse they are. This was the type of unity and togetherness that the Stoics preached, even at a time when it wasn't popular.

Women were allowed to freely learn about Stoicism and become Stoics themselves. So why do so many people adopt Stoicism as a way of life in a world full of unexpected turns of events? Our emotions can tend to get in the way of things. In reality, we don't really get sad because bad things happen to us; we get sad because unexpected bad things happen to us.

Rain is a good thing; it helps to water our plants, provides water for livestock, and keeps the temperature cool and humid. But the truth is, when that dark cloud catches you outside without an umbrella, it's never a good experience. So why don't we start crying once it starts to rain?

It's because although the situation is bad, we've learned to expect rain. It's something that is unavoidable. We can't control the weather; although it sucks, the rain passes and the light returns. Stoicism teaches us that in the same way, we should expect that everything bad that can happen will happen.

Picture the worst outcome and be content knowing it could happen. One of the Stoic exercises is known as voluntary discomfort, an exercise aimed at increasing feelings of gratitude. Sleep on the floor of your kitchen; take cold showers when you normally take hot ones; eat nothing but potatoes for a few days.

Things like this help you to understand that no matter how hard it gets, you'll still survive, and potentially thrive, if your mindset is right. By being able to withstand these uncomfortable situations, we indirectly prepare our mental for future misfortunes.

With the current state of the world, where advertisements are constantly being shoved down our throats, we're made to believe that if we don't have the next best thing, look a certain way, or make a certain amount of money, that we will never be happy. This message is more important now than ever.

We enter the world not knowing much of anything. We grow up being taught things at home, in school, and by observing the world for ourselves. The thing is, a lot of times all three of these sources of knowledge teach us in different ways. The question is: do we need to internalize all of this knowledge?

If we do, we could unknowingly be setting unrealistic expectations for our lives, leaving us ultimately disappointed and unsatisfied in the end. That's no way to live. We should instead focus on improving ourselves for ourselves. We should do things for ourselves and only for that reason.

Attaching any external hope or secondary attachments to the actions we take almost always lead to disappointment. Most of the time, we end up trying to fulfill that emptiness with external things—blowing all your money on a fancy car, a house, or even starting a family. Sometimes we do all of these things for their external value and not their internal value.

But Stoicism teaches us that if you approach life this way, you place your happiness in the hands of external forces—forces that can always fail. Cars almost always break down, natural disasters wipe away entire cities, and divorce rates climb higher and higher each year. But even the free things in life come at a cost—the cost of space, both physical and mental.

As Seneca once wrote, "Learning to live with less will create space in your life for the things that truly matter to you." Instead, we must place our happiness on our intrinsic value as humans and on nothing we have or can physically acquire. We must choose to do our best to keep a cool head regardless of what life throws at us because regardless of what it is, we want at the end of the day we don't have any control over the majority of things that happen to us.

But we do have all the control over how we react to those things. That is the dichotomy of control—the most important principle in Stoic philosophy. Stoics teach that we must learn to separate what we control from what we cannot control. We need to determine our value not from things we can't control, but from the things we can.

Striving towards goals is a good trait, but breaking down when those things don't go your way is, in a Stoics point of view, useless. Making YouTube videos is, well, a lot easier than being a Roman Emperor, but it can still prove to be challenging sometimes. First, you must form your idea, which takes forever; then research that idea, scrap it because it sucks, start over, script the video, create the video, edit it, make the title, thumbnail, and everything else before you hit upload.

Everything up until the point where you click upload is all up to you. However, once you click that upload button, the power shifts to the YouTube algorithm. Still, a lot of people judge the success of their YouTube channel or Instagram account based on how many views and subscribers or followers they have—metrics of which, for the most part, are beyond your control.

Stoics teach that instead you should judge the success of your work based on the amount of effort you put in and not on the outcome of your external hopes. Trust the process. Think about a person who's been working hard at their job for the past six months. He now feels he deserves a promotion, and so he walks up to his boss with this performance report.

The boss says thanks but doesn't grant him the promotion, and he goes home thinking he must suck at his job. He doesn't consider that the boss might have simply woken up angry, someone else might have been better qualified at the time, or maybe the company was just losing money and couldn't afford it. He doesn't know the reason, but he's still upset.

If he simply placed his value on the quality of the performance report he turned in, kept doing what he was doing to earn the promotion he wanted, he could have been much happier overall. With the right perspective, his goal wouldn't have been diminished but just postponed.

It's this reframing of your mindset that is crucial. A true Stoic does not view their successes based on the financial gain of their ventures but is comforted by the fact that they can live a comfortable life without all the things money can buy. These are the four main virtues of Stoicism: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.

Wisdom is being able to separate between what is internal and what is external, and the ability to choose our reaction to the things that happen to us. As Victor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space, and that space is our power to choose our response.” Courage—two words: persist and resist.

Temperance—or moderation—is what I just did there: doing more with less, saying more with fewer words. While Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are fighting at the top of the Forbes list, Stoics believe that the limit of wealth should simply be having what is essential then having what is enough. Justice is the most important of all the virtues; it instructs that no one should do harm to another because we were all born for each other to do good to one another and not to ourselves.

Nelson Mandela was one of the most famous African leaders in the world. While he was fighting against apartheid, he got sentenced to life imprisonment, where he stayed for 27 years before finally being released. When he was released from prison, he was elected president of South Africa, and thus many people thought he was going to brutally punish all the people that had anything to do with apartheid or his imprisonment. But of course, he did not.

Throughout his time in prison, Mandela read the works of Marcus Aurelius and learned many of the core values of Stoicism, all of which he practiced throughout his life. Instead of calling for the heads of the wrongdoers, Nelson Mandela urged his people to instead seek the opposite: to relax and rebuild. He stressed that the past was now beyond their control, and that the only thing they could do was find a way to move forward and build a better nation.

This is the way of the Stoic. In modern-day medicine, Stoicism is at the core of procedures like Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy and Logotherapy. REBT helps patients to identify negative thought patterns that might be causing emotional and behavioral issues. It allows you to challenge the reasoning behind all these negative thoughts with logic, and when you realize that many of them are unfounded, you can then replace them with more productive and healthier beliefs.

Logotherapy, on the other hand, is based on the Stoic principle that humans are driven by purpose. Even in the darkest of situations, we can fill our lives with meaning and happiness by simply finding out what that purpose is. As many of us know, though, this is easier said than done. It's a process, much like everything else. We have to rewire the way we think—out with the old, in with the new.

To fix our problems with happiness, we must practice self-worth by redirecting our definition of value to the things that we can control. We can stop getting fixated on the things we cannot control, and overall, we can lead a much happier and more fulfilling life. Stoicism helps us steer through past and present storms into calmer and more peaceful waters.

And if our ship sinks and we all drown, we can take peace in the fact that we lived a good life, albeit not as long as we had hoped. Because remember, everything has meaning.