Life's Biggest Paradoxes
In life, anything is possible because we can never fully understand how the world works, and the laws of physics prevent us from being able to tell the future. Everything we predict is a probability; some are a lot more probable, others are less probable, while some have astronomically low chances of ever happening. The probability is vanishingly small, but it remains non-zero. Would you get hit by a car? Will you get struck by lightning? Will we ever achieve world peace? If there is a chance that anything can happen, what are the odds?
I was scrolling through the deepest parts of the internet one day when I came across this man, Roy Cleveland Sullivan, the man who has been hit by lightning seven times in his lifetime. The odds of getting struck by lightning once aren't that low; it's just about one in fifteen thousand. Even if you live in a small town, chances are that somebody in that town has been struck by lightning at least once. The odds of being struck seven times in a period of 80 years? That's a 1 in 10 to the 28 chance.
This seems like such incredible and unfortunate odds until you consider the fact that you're more likely to get struck by lightning seven times than you are to shuffle a deck of cards into perfect numerical order. Those odds? 1 in 10 to the 68. Probability is something that we can't really comprehend as humans. If we did, we'd stop worrying about a lot of things and stop taking for granted most of the things we should be worried about, like sharks. No thanks to the movie "Jaws," humans now have an immense fear of sharks, but the reality is you're more likely to get killed by a vending machine than you are to get killed by a shark. The odds of getting killed by a vending machine are 1 in 112 million, while the odds of getting killed by a shark are a staggering 1 in 250 million.
Now, the odds that you'll be attacked by a shark are much lower at 1 in 3.7 million, but even that is still too high for the monsters branded as sharks. For context, you're more likely to get killed by a dog at a 1 in 112,400 chance than you are to get killed by a shark. But we still keep them in our homes as loving pets. You're more likely to get killed by hornets, wasps, or bees at 1 in 63,225 than you are to get killed by a shark. In fact, you're more likely to get killed by the government for committing murder at 1 in 119,000 than you are of getting killed by a shark.
When you put a little thought into it, you realize that most of the time our fears are sensational and not rational. When something tragic happens and it garners a lot of public attention, we are more likely to be afraid of that thing, even if it is much less common than the less notorious things. The most prominent example of this is the way we treat plane crashes. Yes, when planes do crash, it is tragic, but because they cause such a big spectacle and have lots of media coverage, we forget that it is still by far the safest way to travel. Passenger airplane incidents are very rare, and your odds of dying in a plane crash are very slim at 1 in 205,000. That's incredibly low when you compare it to your odds of dying in a car accident, which is just 1 in 107. For motorcycle riders, it's 1 in 890, and even pedestrians aren't safe at 1 in 541.
But wait! Maybe the reason airplane deaths are so low has to do something with our fear. Before people go on an airplane, they usually prepare well in advance. No harmful objects are allowed on board, and there's usually more than one designated pilot who has trained for years on safety practices before they were ever allowed to fly a plane. Compare that to road travel, where we don't really think that much about it, and you can maybe see why things are the way they are.
With the odds that you'll be involved in a drunk driving accident in your lifetime being incredibly high at two in three, you can see what I mean; we barely give it any thought. Hopefully, we can all do better—try to reduce the risk by simply designating a driver beforehand or taking an Uber when you go out for fun.
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Back to our story—another thing we should be worried about is right-handed appliances. Yes, it's true that most of the world is right-handed for some reason, but if we're learning anything as a species, it's inclusiveness. We must do the same with dominant hands because, as it is, the odds of a left-handed person dying simply because they used a right-handed appliance wrong is one in seven million. And while the chances look ridiculously slim, it has to happen to somebody. If you don't die, hey, you'll get a lot of free money from that lawsuit.
The ambidextrous people among us can help us decide what appliances are better suited for what dominant hand, and we have a surprising amount of them—1 in 100 to be exact. Now, this does not include people who have had to learn how to use their non-dominant hand because of injury or out of curiosity; it's just people who are born with an amazing control of both of their hands.
Art is very subjective. What some people might find beautiful, others will find ugly. What one might consider great acting, others might see as over the top and annoying. You see, much unlike science, art doesn't have a definitive set of rules, and so they don't have a strict guideline for judgment either. And while this allows for creativity, it also makes it very difficult to find success in the world of the arts. If you want to be a surgeon, for instance, you know that if you pass the med school exams, in turn, go through residency and so forth, you'll make it; you have a set path to follow.
But if you want to be a supermodel or a rock star or a YouTuber, it's not that straightforward. You have to work hard at it every single day, and even then, your odds are very slim. You can be a theater kid all your life, go to film school, practice as much as possible, but in the end, the odds that you'll become a movie star aren't very encouraging—that's just one in 1.1 million. It's amazing that even with the odds as slim as this, every year thousands of people will travel from all parts of the world to LA trying to fulfill their dreams of being on the big screen.
When interestingly, you have a much better chance of winning an Oscar at just one in 11,500 than becoming a movie star. But, of course, this Oscar includes all the technical awards that are given when everyone is taking a bathroom break, and most people would much rather take a 1 in 1.1 million chance than to receive an award when no one's watching.
If you're a writer, however, the odds are slightly in your favor. There is a one in 220 chance that you'll write a New York Times bestseller if you put in the time and the effort necessary. These odds are definitely going to go up, bringing you that inch closer to making your dream a reality.
Sports are closer related to science than the arts because most of the time, if you work at it hard enough, you'll achieve some kind of success. But how hard can you work when there's only so many medals to go around? Millions of people around the world dedicate their entire lives to competing in the Olympics, yet only one in 662,000 will ever win a medal. And that's the thing about scarcity—when there's such limited space, the odds of ever being able to do or acquire said thing just get increasingly thinner.
Think about the number of children who have worn a space suit and helmet to career day in school and told everybody that they want to be astronauts. Now think about the fact that the odds of becoming an astronaut are one in 12.1 million, and you get sad for those little kids whose dreams will one day have to be crushed. What if they wanted to be president? Well, the chance of becoming a U.S. president is one in 10 million, unless you're a religious six-foot-tall Harvard Law graduate and military veteran. Then your odds go up astronomically, especially if you're a Harvard alumni because, as surprising as it might sound, the odds that the president of America has attended Harvard is one in 3.58.
So, if you want to have the best chance of becoming president, you know what school to apply for. However, getting into Harvard is almost as difficult as becoming president, with a chance of just 4.6% of getting in. You might want to apply to some backup schools as well.
At the end of the day, we all just want to be successful, whether it's through the arts or going through the so-called traditional route of finishing college and getting a good job. We all just want to have enough money to live comfortably while we're still young. But sadly, the odds are stacked against us. There's a slim chance of just between 6.4% and 22.3% that you'll become a millionaire, with different factors like race, education, wealth status, and age helping to place you somewhere in that range. While the chance of becoming a billionaire? Well, there are 8 billion humans in the world and only around 2,000 billionaires—so basically, non-existent.
Getting old has a bittersweet taste to it. On the one hand, you're getting wiser, more mature, and you have a much better understanding of the world than you did when you were younger. But on the other hand, you're also getting weaker, you're forgetting things more, and sadly, your body just keeps breaking down one after the other. And the stats don't really help at all—if you're under 20 right now, there's a one in four chance that you'll be disabled before you retire, and it gets worse. There's a one in two chance that at the age of 75, you'll have disabling hearing loss.
This is why whenever people say they want to work hard now so they can enjoy their retirement, I kind of feel bad for them because most times at that age, you don't really get to enjoy anything. All you can really do is sit around and reminisce on a life that once was. And when the Grim Reaper comes, you say goodbye to your loved ones and move on. And that's why you should do everything you want to do right now.
For some reason, there's a 7% higher chance that you'll die on your birthday than on any other day, going out together with the candles. But for a few of us, living to 100 is possible, with the odds of that happening being approximately one in 5,780, with those odds increasing significantly if you're biologically a woman.
On the other hand of the spectrum, one of the most incredible human achievements is being born. If you're here watching this video right now, you deserve a round of applause. You ran, you fought, you survived, and against all odds, you made it. The odds of you existing were 1 in 5.5 trillion. But here you are! You might have been the one in 20 chance of being born on your mom's exact due date or you're like most of us who are born around two weeks before or after. You might be the one in 250 who are geniuses burdened with the weight of advancing our civilization, or like the rest of us who are cheering them on.
Whoever you are, whatever it took you to get here, that was an incredible feat—one that is unrepeatable, not in this lifetime at least. As light travels through space, it behaves like a wave, but light is also made of tiny particles called photons. This is the paradox of wave-particle duality, and it has completely revolutionized modern physics.
The universe is filled with intriguing paradoxes like this—statements that challenge our understanding of reality and force us to question our deepest assumptions. These paradoxes have the power to change our lives in profound ways, opening us up to new possibilities and reshaping the very fabric of our existence. Here are paradoxes that will change your life. Well, the lotto jackpot has grown to over 64 million dollars. It all started with a lottery ticket.
If you go out and buy a lottery ticket knowing fully well that your chances of winning are 10 million to one, it'd be logical to assume you didn't win. You'd also be justified in thinking that your friend, your uncle, his sister, their cousin, and their dog all have losing tickets. You're justified in believing that everyone who bought a ticket will lose, even when you know the lottery was fair and there has to be a winner. You're justified in believing something you know to be false.
This demonstrates that truth is relative; it depends on context, prejudice, and your perspective about the world. Because the truth is, the only thing you can prove with certainty is that nothing is certain. This is why people don't consider Pinocchio saying, “My nose will grow now,” to be a paradox. His nose will not grow because he didn't lie; he simply made a false prediction.
If we have a set of all sets that do not contain themselves, does that set contain itself? Imagine there's a barber who shaves all men who don't shave themselves, and only men who don't shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself? This is an example of Russell's Paradox, a paradox that shook the mathematical world. These paradoxes playfully nudge us into realizing that self-reference can often lead to unexpected contradictions.
Contradictions aside though, we all want to be happy, but those who seek out happiness directly often don't find it. This is the paradox of hedonism. If we truly want to be happy, we need to stop searching for happiness and pursue other meaningful activities like nurturing our relationships or serving others. Only then can we be truly happy.
The pursuit of pleasure in its raw form often leads to disappointment, while a life lived in service can lead to unexpected happiness. Deep down, we all know this. Endless partying, decadent eating habits, and shopping sprees—we know these activities are never as fulfilling as we think they are, and more often than not, we're left with a sense of emptiness after the dust settles. It's called post-indulgence clarity.
We see this paradox even in our relationships. Expecting your partner to completely control your happiness often makes them unable to make you happy, at least not in the way you want it. The reality is that to have good relationships, we need to be somewhat independent of them. People think that to find the right partner, they need all the options in the world to pick the perfect person, but in truth, having more options isn't always better.
Just look at the fact that we have all these dating apps at our fingertips, and many of us still can't find a healthy relationship. This is the paradox of choice, and contrary to what we think, many options often leave us less satisfied with our final decision. I once watched a TikTok where this guy said men today see more beautiful women while scrolling through TikTok for five minutes than kings from the past did in their entire lives. And although it was a joke, he was entirely correct. But it's not a good thing.
According to biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the human brain isn't built to deal with more than five to nine options for a partner. After that, the brain goes into decision paralysis, where it almost refuses to pick. So, the next time you feel inundated by options, remember that less is sometimes better, and more data may not always be more informative.
Learning is great. Asking questions and figuring out how things work is how our species has gotten to where it is today, but learning is also a paradox because the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. It's an amazing paradox, one that encourages you to never stop learning. Paradoxes are everywhere—in mathematics and statistics, like Simpson's Paradox. Here, trends that appear in a different group will disappear or even reverse when the groups are combined to form a larger group.
In the 1970s, UC Berkeley was accused of gender bias against women in its admissions process. At first glance, the admissions data made it seem like men were more likely to be admitted than women. But when the data was broken down into individual departments, most departments had admission percentages that were significantly in favor of women. The problem was that a higher proportion of women were applying to more competitive departments with lower admission rates.
So when compared to all the men in the school, it seemed like women had lower rates of admission. But when compared to the men in each department, it was clear that the women actually had a higher rate. This is unfortunately how misinformation spreads; it's usually not with wrong data, but with the correct data expressed without proper context.
Because the reality is that, often as paradoxical as it may seem, the whole is different from the sum of its parts. Change is ever-present in our lives. The human body replaces billions of cells daily, and every seven years or so, you are an entirely different cellular collection. So if we're constantly changing, how do we know the person we are today is the same person we were seven years ago?
One might say the essence of who we are remains, but that essence is really just the result of our thoughts, beliefs, and experiences, which are also changing. So who really are you? Maybe you like defining yourself based on your struggles. How hard you pursue something, do you want to achieve? But have you ever thought that sometimes trying too hard to get something almost makes it impossible to get? It's the backwards law, and it's an interesting concept with lots of layers to uncover.
If you're interested in a dedicated video about the subject, just let me know in the comments below. In 2016, after his infamous penalty miss against Chile, Lionel Messi hung up his boots with his beloved Argentina in what seemed like the last nail in the coffin. Messi simply had enough. On the club stage, success seemed to come to him so easily, but where he really wanted it—where he desperately tried to do it all by himself—victory seemed elusive.
Consider the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise coined by Zeno, the father of stoicism. In this paradox, Achilles gave a tortoise a head start and raced it to infinity. Zeno argued that Achilles will never truly overtake the tortoise because when he reaches where the tortoise started, the tortoise will have moved a little further, and this pattern will continue till infinity. The paradox is silly, but it challenges our perception of movement, space, and infinity.
The realization it leaves with us, especially with Messi's story, is that sometimes, no matter how much you try, some things seem just that little bit out of reach. Messi had to accept that part of his legacy was beyond his control. The Argentine Football Federation was underfinanced and poorly managed, and there was no one around him when he needed support, with criticism pouring down from all sides and embarrassing defeats one after another.
The dream would remain just that, a dream. Yet, as soon as he let go, the tide began turning. Messi took almost a metaphorical back seat, dropping deeper than his traditional role, playing farther from the goal than he had ever played. His job now wasn't to shine himself but cast light on the others, many of whom were young kids who were fans of him when he hung up his boots in 2016. But there he was on December 18, 2022, nearly six years after that missed penalty, lifting the World Cup.
Very few stories are as remarkable as Messi's. Most of us live and die without doing or being anything special. Or is that so? If there's nothing oddly special about us, the earth and the life it holds, then the universe should be teeming with life, and yet it isn't. You might say maybe that it is, and we just aren't advanced enough to search the galaxy to find it, and you'll be right. But considering how young our galaxy is compared to others out there, and that if given enough time, any advanced species should be able to figure out interstellar travel, if there are any aliens, we should have seen them by now.
This is Fermi's paradox, and put simply by a New York Times article, it exclaims: if life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now. Maybe equally paradoxical is the insignificance of the question: are we special? When you boil it down to the individual, there are around 20 quintillion animals on Earth—20 billion billion—yet the value of a single life isn't questioned. So why do we think that the universe teaming with life will make us any less unique?
There's something innately valuable about life; what exactly it is, remains forever elusive. And speaking of elusive things in life, the coastline paradox is a geographical conundrum that originated in the mind of British scientist Louis Fry Richardson. It's a concept that challenges our understanding of measurement and infinity, revealing a surprising contradiction that's not only mathematical but also physical.
Essentially, this paradox states that the length of a coastline depends on the length of the tool used to measure it. The shorter the ruler, the longer the measured length of the coastline. This is because a smaller ruler can capture more of the intricate twists and turns of the coastline. But here the paradox arises: theoretically, as the ruler gets infinitely small, the length of the coastline becomes infinitely large.
Consider the coastline of Britain as an example. If we were to measure it with a hundred-kilometer ruler, we would get a significantly shorter length than with a one-kilometer ruler, which would capture more details of the coastline. And if we used a one-centimeter ruler, the coastline would appear even longer. Following this logic to its extreme, the coastline seems to stretch to infinity as the ruler shrinks to zero.
But how can this be? After all, Britain is an island of finite size. The paradox stems from the fractal nature of coastlines; they have a high degree of complexity and self-similarity at all scales. The coastline paradox is not only mind-bending, but it also has practical implications for cartography, geology, and various other disciplines. It teaches us a humbling lesson about the limitations of our measurements and how they can be influenced by the skill at which we look at things.
It's a testament to the unexpected complexities that can emerge from something as simple as measuring a length. The coastline paradox is a stunning illustration of how reality can defy our intuitive assumptions, revealing an infinitely intricate, endlessly fascinating world of surprises. It's a poetic ode to the idea of paradoxes themselves.
From being incorporated into movies to revolutionizing reality in the sciences, paradoxes have captured our imagination—intellectual enigmas, that's what they are; beautiful puzzles that tease our intellect to challenge our perceptions and invite us to look beyond the apparent. They hold up a mirror to the complexities of life in the universe, reflecting an intriguing and elusive existence. Paradoxes gracefully illustrate that our universe isn't a mere collection of absolutes, but a symphony of mysteries, wonders, and unfathomable truths.
For the past month or so, I've been thinking a lot about life. And when people say that, they usually mean what they want to do in life—whether that be their career, relationships, entertainment, or leisure. But I've been thinking differently. Of course, I've been thinking about those things, but I've also been thinking about how much of your life is really yours. How much of your life is really being lived to its full potential? Are you living or are you just existing?
On average, you're gonna get about 79 years on this big rock called Earth. If you live in Monaco, it's closer to 90. If you live in Chad, you'll be lucky to get 50. Regardless, we don't get 79 years of freedom; we have responsibilities and things that we can't ignore—most importantly, our bodies. Assuming you sleep eight hours a night on average, about a third of your life, or 26 years, is going to be spent sleeping. So right away, we're down from 79 to 53.
But it doesn't stop there. Chances are, if you're watching this video, you're going to—or have gone to—school. In the United States, you'll go for at least 12 years—8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 36 weeks a year. This amounts to 17,280 hours spent just inside the school building. But wait, we also have to factor in homework and out-of-school activities, among other things, so this is more like 22,000 to 25,000 hours, or about three years of your life. If you go to college or university afterward, make it five years instead; we're down to 48 years.
Well, all this schooling and money you spent getting a degree has to be put to some use, right? Chances are you'll try and get a job in the field of whatever it is your degree is in. It'll probably be a full-time job, so you'll be working 40-hour weeks pretty regularly, if not more than that. Let's say you get two weeks of vacation per year. The average person works for about 40 to 50 years of their life, so we'll just go with the average and say 45.
Over your entire life, you'll work on average about 90,000 hours, or about 10 years of your life. We have 38 years left! Wait, depending on where you live, your commute to work will vary. You might drive yourself, you might walk, you might use an Uber or a taxi. Regardless, your commute to and from work, on average, takes about one and a half hours a day. Adding this up over your entire working career, it amounts to 17,520 hours, or about two years of your life.
36 years left! All of this work and studying really builds up an appetite, so you should probably spend some time eating. On an average day, we spend about 70 minutes just eating food to survive. In your 79 years of life, you'll spend about 32,000 hours just eating, or about four years of your life. Down to 32!
Well, after you're done eating, you have to clean up and maybe do some chores around the house. On average, you spend about one hour a day doing tasks just around your house—cleaning up after you eat, washing dishes, doing laundry, showering, and plenty of other stuff. This amounts to nearly 29,000 hours over the course of your life, or about three years. 29 years left!
Eventually, all of that food and water has to leave your body somehow. You'll spend about three months of your life just sitting on the toilet. Yeah, of course we also waste time, and we do it pretty well. Over the course of our lifetimes, we'll spend about 115,000 hours on our phones, or about 13 years. This, of course, is just your phone; this doesn't include you watching TV, you playing games, among other things.
16 years left! Assuming you can afford to retire at the average age of 62, you'll spend the rest of your life living the luxuries of retirement—if you can still function properly. Over 50% of retired people over the age of 65 have some sort of disability, with 15% of those people having three or more. Chances are if you are one of these people, you'll be in and out of medical care pretty often. So those final 16 years of freedom you have? It's a coin flip that doesn't exactly entail freedom!
So overall, you have one year in your 79-year life to really and truly do what you want to do. But despite the age you might be—young or old—you may be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. For example, while you're young and in school, from the ages of 1 to 18, you'll most likely be spending nearly every day in the presence of your parents. After you finish your schooling, assuming your parents are in their mid-40s, we'll say they have about 30 years left in their life.
The real world starts to set in—your job, your possible relationships, your important things to do in life take priority. Eventually, if you leave your hometown, you'll only be seeing your parents around holidays and special occasions—maybe 10 days a year. So, 300 days left with the people who brought you into the world. Whereas before, you would see them almost every single day, you have already spent 95% of the time that you will ever spend with your parents in the first 18 years of your life, and now you only have the remaining 5% for the rest of your life.
At the end of the day, there's only one thing that matters, and that's your own happiness. What many people don't realize is that they do so many things in life just to try and succeed as opposed to fulfilling a purpose. They work a job they hate for 40 years just to make that extra thirty thousand dollars a year so they can afford a car that they only drive to work. It's temporary happiness, not genuine happiness.
People go to school to become a doctor because their mom or their dad or somebody else told them to—not because they actually want to. I really hope that every single person watching this video gets insanely rich and famous so that they can finally realize that this isn't the point of life.
The point is to be happy with what you're doing while you're doing it. Alright, sure, the 45 working years or however long you're working is gonna be hard to get past, but what if you don't hate waking up every day to go to work? What if your work is your happiness?
You see, life isn't a straight path. You can't map it out perfectly one-to-one; it just doesn't work like that. We spend every day planning on what we're going to do the next, instead of just taking in the day for what it actually is. Sure, we have to eat, duh. But what if we spend that time eating with friends or family, or just people who make your life better? Your commute to work might be long and tedious sometimes, but what if you spend that time listening to podcasts or carpooling with coworkers and friends?
The 13 years we waste on our phones might seem useless, but what if we use that time to build the business you've always wanted to, or build the brand you've always wanted, or make a YouTube channel to talk to people about the random ideas you get? You'll bring so much value to people that you never even thought was possible.
Let's say you take care of yourself and regularly work out decently well; your chances of being healthy later in life is much more likely, and you'll have much more free time to master the things that you really want, whether that be a skill or just relationships with others. No matter what you or I or any person on this planet does, time doesn't stop for anyone. Time is the one thing you cannot get back.
If you lose a lot of money, it's fine; you can get more. If your friend decides to turn their back on you, it's fine; there are millions of people out there in the same situation. But time? You can't get it back. Once it's gone, it's gone. How many days have you spent doing the same mundane tasks that you hate? And more importantly, when is it going to end?
Life is about choices. Every choice you've ever made has led you to this exact moment, watching this video. And given that you only have one life—at least in this universe—why not make your own decisions? So many people live life predicated on somebody else's opinion, which is dumb. People have so many barriers in life, but they aren't really about money; they aren't about time; they aren't about how you look. It's about opinions.
Other people's opinions—probably about 90% of people are unhappy because they value someone else's opinion more than their own. When you're old and unable to do the things that you could have when you were younger, you'll regret—and regret hurts more than any breakup, failure, or anything else ever could.
Life doesn't have to suck; you don't have to regret everything. That FOMO, or fear of missing out, is a poison. Instead of living, trying to mimic people you see on Instagram or YouTube or social media, just live based on your own terms. Instead of just observing and living passively, really start to think about what you do with your time.
Does that mean call your boss and tell him you quit? No! Does that mean drop out of school tomorrow? No! All it means is to truly decide what you want in life and put yourself in the right direction. It's not gonna happen overnight; that's not the point. There would be no journey then.
Cliché as it sounds, your 79-year journey here is very short. Sure, it's technically the longest thing you'll ever do, but the universe is 13.8 billion years old. If the universe's history was condensed down into 24 hours, the world as we know it—cars, airplanes, and civilization as we know it—would only come into existence in the very last second.
Block out any and all negativity in your life. And once you can truly realize that the only opinion that matters is your own, life can get pretty clear, and the noises inside your head get pretty quiet.
As kids, we believed a lot of different things—from thinking that the gifts under the Christmas tree were kept there by Santa to imagining a tiny fairy that came in at the dead of night to steal the loose tooth from underneath our pillows. Most of the things we believed in as kids are magical information pieced together by stories that we've been told by adults, or things that we watched on TV.
One of those things that some of us watched on TV and actually believed in was Barney. That's right, the purple dinosaur! Barney's theme song, while nonsensical, offers us a rather interesting paradox. The song goes, "Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination. Barney shows us lots of things, like how to play pretend," which begs the question: if Barney was the one who taught us how to play pretend, then how did we imagine him to be in the first place?
It's the classic causal loop, where an event in the future creates an event in the past, which creates the event in the future, and so you're left without a point of origin. Paradoxes are all around us—from the shows we grew up watching as kids, to the songs that were stuck in our heads throughout middle school.
You know that one song by One Direction that goes, "You don't know that you're beautiful; that's what makes you beautiful"? Just think about it for a moment. For her to not know that she was beautiful, she had to have been beautiful in the first place, which means that she couldn't have known what made her beautiful.
As if that wasn't enough, the song is all about telling the girl that she is beautiful. So does that mean then that when the song is over, the girl stops being beautiful because now that she knows that she is beautiful, shouldn't that make her no longer beautiful? What if she stops believing she's beautiful? Doesn't that then make her beautiful again?
It's a weird thing in that the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. Relationships are also weird. Two random people meet each other and decide that they want to spend all—or at least most—of their time together. You're asking each other silly, paradoxical questions like, "If a person who can read minds and a person who can predict the future fight each other, who would win?"
Soon after, you're both in bed on a cold, windy night, sharing secrets you said you'd never tell anyone. You're lying down there with your partner in a windowless room, and then it begins to rain. You don't have any idea of what the weather outside is like; you have no weather app or anything like that. And so when your friend walks in and tells you it's raining outside, you don't believe them.
In that scenario, your friend can say about you, "It's raining, but John doesn't believe it," and it would be perfectly acceptable. So why is it that if you say the same thing—"It's raining, but I don't believe it"—everyone in the room might think you've just lost your mind? Why is the second question absurd and not the first? Why is it absurd for us to say something that is true about ourselves?
Speaking of truth, what do you think would happen to Pinocchio if he said the words, "My nose will grow now"? If Pinocchio's nose grows, then that means he was telling the truth, so his nose shouldn't have grown. What if his nose doesn't grow? Then he just told a lie, and so his nose should grow. Some people don't consider this to be a paradox; the argument is that Pinocchio's nose would not grow because he didn't lie—he simply made a false prediction.
Where's the fun in that? A lot of the times, we say things that make sense to us on the surface. However, on closer inspection, you quickly realize things are not as they seem. Let's say you go out and buy a lottery ticket knowing fully well that your chances of winning are 10 million to one. It would be perfectly normal for you to conclude that you did not get the winning ticket. In fact, it would be considered a bit crazy for you to think that your ticket won.
You'll also be justified in thinking that your friend, your uncle, your sister, his sister, their cousin, and their dog all have losing tickets. You look around you in the store; you're justified in believing that everyone you encounter will probably lose and in turn that no ticket will win. However, knowing fully well that the lottery was fair and there must be one winner, you are justified in believing something you know to be false.
Just how this only goes to show that truth is relative—it depends on context, on knowledge, and perspective about the world. Because the truth is the only thing that you can prove with certainty is that nothing is certain. I watched a couple fighting outside Starbucks the other day. The woman turned to the man who was with her and, in a slightly raised voice, she said, "Deep down, you're really shallow."
While the rest of the coffee shop pretended that they didn't just hear that, I had to pause and think about it for a moment. If he had a deep down, then how can he be shallow? But I bet that's not what was in his mind—or was it? For all we know, he was probably thinking of shallower thoughts deep down in his heart.
For a relationship to succeed, everyone in the relationship needs to trust one another. But this is real life, and sometimes people are insecure, and sometimes it's not their fault. Everything from anxiety to past traumatic experiences—the reality of the world forces us sometimes to be insecure.
This is why people often find it easier to talk to strangers about their deepest, darkest secrets than the ones they claim to trust. It's the paradox of trust. We claim to trust this person, yet we fear they would judge us for our secrets. And on the flip side, we feel most comfortable telling people who we do not trust the secrets that could damn us.
Not long before the couple finished their argument, the baristas in the coffee shop walked out to the little girl and her mom in the chair adjacent to me. They handed the little girl a tiny birthday cupcake and sang the Happy Birthday song to her as she closed her eyes to make a wish before blowing out the candles. I quickly glanced around the room and I thought to myself, "Huh, what are the chances that someone else in here right now also has their birthday today?"
Unlike most rational people, I concluded that it was far too unlikely. There were less than 30 people in the coffee shop that day, and there are 365 days in a year. So, of course, the chances that two random people would have the same birthday would be slim, right? Well, most people would say yes, but according to the birthday paradox, most people would be wrong.
Because if there are 23 people in a room, there's a 50% chance that two of them share a birthday. Now, to fully understand this one, we're going to need some math. So permit me to do a little bit of probability analysis here. Let's start small with just two people.
Let's ignore leap years or twins or any patterns that suggest babies are born more times at certain periods of the year than others, because those are just too confusing. Okay, say you and I are in a room together; there's a 365 out of 365, or 100%, chance that I have a birthday. I do! And a 365 out of 365 times 364 out of 365 chance that we both do not share the same birthday.
Now let's say one other person in the room joins us. The probability that this new person does not have the same birthday as either of us becomes 365 over 365 times 364 over 365 times 363 over 365. And that multiplication just goes on and on and on for however many babies you want. When you get to the 23rd baby, this incredibly long series of multiplication gives you the number 0.492, which is basically 49.2%.
Now, this is the probability that we do not share a birthday. To find out the probability that two random people in this coffee shop do share a birthday, we have to subtract that number from 100, which gives us 50.7%. If you don't fully understand the math, honestly, I barely did too, but it checks out, trust me.
While we're on the subject of math, a teacher once walked into her class on a Friday and announced that there would be a surprise test sometime next week. As she left the class, the students began to murmur to each other about when they thought the test would happen. One clever student stood up and told his mates that the test couldn't be given on a Friday because when Thursday comes around and they don't have the test, then they know that the test is on Friday.
But it has to be a surprise test, so it can't be Friday because they already know it can't be Friday. If it's by the end of Wednesday and it doesn't happen, then they'll know it's Thursday, so it can't be Thursday either. The student continues his analysis for the rest of the week until Monday, and finally he comes to the conclusion that the test cannot be given at all since they would know.
But the teacher said it would be a surprise, so when the teacher walks in on Wednesday and hands them their test sheets, the students are all surprised. How could this have happened, they all asked themselves, puzzled?
We're living in unprecedented times. With Russia's attack on Ukraine, the whole world is currently sitting on basically a live grenade. One wrong move from any of the world powers, and we could very well find ourselves in the middle of another World War. It's in times like these when you just pause and think about paradoxes in the way that our society operates.
We claim to be free, but there is no freedom without law and order. And as the Latin saying goes, "Si vis pacem, para bellum," which, despite my poor pronunciation, translates to "If you want peace, prepare for war." It's a strange thing to think about and an even stranger thing to be living through.
In World War II, pilots could only get out of combat duty if they were psychologically unfit to fly. However, anyone who tried to get out of combat duty proved he is sane. Today, we call this a catch-22, after the satirical World War II novel written by Joseph Heller. We see catch-22s everywhere in our world today.
To get a job, you need work experience, but to get that work experience, you need to have had a job. We've all seen it—companies asking for five years of experience for entry-level jobs, or coal miners who only have two options: to quit working and die of starvation, or to keep working and die of pollution. Most people pick the latter because then they can say at least they tried their best.
The world is unfair. Some people are born into wealth, power, and privilege and never have to work a day in their lives. The rest are forced to struggle and slave away just to make ends meet. Truly, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. On the surface, this statement might not seem logical; however, on close inspection, it may prove to be well-founded and even true.
If I told you right now that humans are perfect organisms and that in our mother's wombs, we first are fishes who then develop into amphibians, then reptiles, birds, primates, before finally becoming what we know as humans, I'm sure you'd look at me like I've gone insane—and I have—but that's besides the point. Just as recently as 1811, because of the works of scientist Johann Friedrich Meckel, everybody thought that was true.
And this is because science is transient. What we once told is truth quickly fades away upon closer inspection, and looking back we can only laugh at ourselves for the scientific facts we once held dear to our hearts. Some other times, these aren't even actual scientific facts; they're just very popular opinions that all of us have collectively agreed to be true, even though they are in fact not.
These are all the times we were wrong! Not everything Meckel said was wrong. Though, in fact, he was the first scientist to correctly predict that embryos have gills—well, slits on their neck that closely resemble gills, at least.
However, unlike what he suggested, we don't pass through a fish phase in our mother's wombs. These slits are most likely due to the fact that both humans and fish share a common ancestor and some DNA, and not because we're trying to attain some kind of biological perfection. I mean, who are we kidding? We're far from perfect!
For a long time, scientists believed this to be true—well, until the late 19th century when Charles Darwin's theory of evolution started to gain traction. We realized that a linear series of evolution in our mother's womb was completely illogical. The theory of evolution is one that has been completely riddled with lots of false claims and ideas that are simply not true.
In reality, evolution is a very difficult subject to research because of the limited amount of fossil information available. As a result, a lot of times all we're left with are hypotheses—some of which are brilliant, and others, not so much. For a long time, scientists believed that all of life was aquatic until one day, many millions of years ago, a brave fish dared to walk on land.
Starting with very short periods on dry ground, the fish started spending more and more time on land, and gradually, its gills got replaced with lungs and it became amphibian. Then the amphibians became reptiles, who became birds, who became mammals. While these scientists got the process of evolution right, that one brave fish was not the first animal to step on land.
The Earth was rich with insects and fungi and was bubbling with life before that fish ever came into the picture. Another hypothesis that we all seem to collectively get wrong is where humans come from. If I asked you right now, you'd most likely tell me that we evolved from chimpanzees, our closest living relatives.
While the second half of that statement is true, the first half is completely false. We didn't evolve from chimpanzees. Yes, we evolved from apes; however, we did not evolve from any apes living today. We, monkeys, chimps, and gorillas, all evolved from a common ancestor, the so-called great apes that lived in Africa around 7 million years ago.
It was around that time in the evolution chain that we split. So although chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, we're further apart on the family tree than a lot of us think. Our much closer relatives, although now extinct, are the Neanderthals. Modern humans split from Neanderthals just around 500,000 years ago.
But even these guys certainly came with their own controversy. For a long time, scientists believed that Neanderthals and humans never lived together—some believing that Neanderthals evolved into humans. But again, that's not true. Archaeologists have since found ancient human skeletons that prove that modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted for thousands of years.
In fact, they didn't just coexist; they actually made it, which is why most humans living outside of Africa have anywhere from one to four percent of Neanderthal DNA still in them today. When we start talking about the theory of evolution in ancient humans, we can't help but talk about dinosaurs. You know, those giant, scary, lizard-looking things from "Jurassic Park"—the ones that have Earth-like tones, lizard-like scales, and roars more earth-shattering than that of a lion?
Well, in reality, the dinosaur was none of those things I just mentioned. First, dinosaurs are more closely related to birds than lizards. In fact, every living bird today is a modern-day dinosaur—a descendant of theropods, a species of ancient dinosaurs. And because they’re birds, they mostly had feathers covering their scaly skin. Fossil evidence has shown that a lot of Tyrannosaurus had feathers, which means that even the great T-Rex probably had a few as well—mostly on its head and tail.
Dinosaurs also never ran fast because they always had to have one leg on the ground. They could only get to around 25 miles per hour, which is still pretty scary because, well, one, they're massive, and two, the average speed of a human is 15 miles per hour! What if you're Usain Bolt? You've got nothing to worry about; you can outrun these guys any day!
And let's be honest—have you ever heard any bird roar? Yeah, me neither! Which is why a recent scientific study has shown that the T-Rex most likely hooted, cooed, or made deep-throated booming sounds like the emu, not a trembling roar like a giant lion.
It's funny when you think about it. Now, we can forgive ourselves for getting these details wrong—after all, all of these things happen tens of millions of years ago before any of this ever existed. But if you look much closer in time, you'll see a lot of things we get wrong every day, even things that are as simple as George Washington’s teeth.
In 1789, when George Washington was inaugurated as president, he only had one natural tooth left. But because the president needed an amazing smile, he wore dentures. Now, in reality, these dentures were made from hippopotamus ivory, brass, and gold, but for some reason, we like to believe they were made from wood. Why we believe that, I have no idea, but it's not too late to change your mind.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a person who often changes their beliefs or behaviors in order to please others or to succeed is called a chameleon. But are chameleons really chameleons? This definition is derived from the assumption that chameleons change the color of their skin to match their surroundings, most likely to camouflage.
While there are animals that excel at using this tactic, like the octopus, the chameleon is not one of those animals. In reality, most chameleon species can only change from green to brown and back to green, and they don't change color to blend into their surroundings. They do it to regulate their body temperature. When the chameleon is cold, it becomes darker to absorb more heat, and when it's hot, it turns pale to reflect more heat so it can cool down.
There is one species of chameleon that can change into any color, though, and that's the panther chameleon. But even those guys don't do it to match their surroundings. Their flamboyant display of colors helps them fend off against males competing for territory and also to attract females. I mean, isn't that why we all buy designer in the first place? To impress each other!
Speaking of fancy, who else was taught that diamonds are made from coal? Sorry, but that's not true at all. It's a terribly common misconception! In fact, most of the diamonds that have been dated were found to be older than even the very first plants that appeared on Earth. And because you need trees to make coal, it's impossible for coal to produce diamonds when diamonds existed long before the material that makes coal even existed anyway.
NASA researchers have even found a number of nanodiamonds in meteorites. Nanodiamonds are diamonds that are just a few nanometers in diameter. Simple enough; they're too tiny to be considered gems! But it's still pretty cool that you can have these precious objects just floating around in space.
Still, it makes you question why we deem them as so precious when in reality, they're extremely abundant in our universe. There are planets in space where it literally rains diamonds! Anyway, of course, these asteroids are floating because there's no gravity in space, right? Well, unfortunately, wrong! There is gravity in space; it’s what holds the moon in orbit around the Earth and the Earth together around the sun with all the other planets.
It's just that as you get further away from the Earth, the Earth's gravitational pull on you weakens, and other gravitational forces begin to take priority. But in reality, everything in space is falling in every direction imaginable all the time. The only reason it seems as if you're floating and not falling is because space is very large and, most importantly, very empty—at least compared to Earth.
For instance, on Earth, if you were to—and I really, really don't recommend it—jump off a building, you could feel the strong winds on your face; you would see the ground appearing closer and closer; you can tell that you're falling quite easily. And in just a few seconds of impact, you're on the ground because the distance between the height you fell from and where you landed isn't that much.
In space, there is no air, so no whooshing sound to accompany your fall. And because it's so large, it takes you anywhere from a few hours to many years to land on one surface when you fall from another. So, it feels like you're floating, but you're not—you're falling, really, really slowly. And that's because of gravity, one of man's most important discoveries.
When you think about the fact that it is one of man's most important discoveries, you would imagine that the story behind it would have been preserved carefully. But the version almost all of us have heard has not been preserved at all. The old tale goes that Newton was tired from all the many failed experiments he had in his career. Tired and frustrated, he sat under a tree to rest his head. As he sat, a ripe apple fell down from the tree and hit him on the head.
And in a Eureka moment, he discovered one of the most important forces in physics: gravity. But the truth is much less dramatic than that. In reality, Isaac Newton was observing the apples falling from the tree of their own accord when he discovered that there must be a force behind it. He wasn't sitting under the tree, and an apple certainly didn't fall on his head.
See, sometimes I understand why we make up some of these stories; they help make us feel better about ourselves when we believe that some of humanity's greatest achievements couldn't have happened without a huge slice of luck. We can keep hope alive for our own share of luck—our own piece of the apple pie!
It's the same with the story of Albert Einstein. We all heard growing up about how he failed in class but still went on to become one of the greatest physicists the world has ever seen. But that's just not true at all! Einstein always excelled in school; he didn't learn to read late in life, and he most likely didn't have a learning disability.
Our teachers must have told us these stories to make us feel good about ourselves—give us hope that even if we have rough starts in school, we can still become geniuses later in life if we worked hard. And while there are a thousand examples of this exact theory, Einstein simply wasn't one of them.
Aristotle was one of the greatest philosophers to have ever lived and was the first true scientist. He practically invented formal logic, and he described and explored the different scientific disciplines and their relations to one another. But for all the good he did, there was one thing he got terribly, terribly wrong: he claimed that the Earth was at the center of the universe.
I mean, why wouldn't he? Most things you observe point to this exact conclusion. Now, while Aristotle wasn't the first to say this, he championed the fight. He claimed that using logic, he had found this to be a hundred percent true and wouldn't back down from his argument. It took the work of Galileo almost two millennia later to discover that the sun was at the center of the solar system and not our Earth. And still, people didn't believe him; in fact, they ostracized him!
And this is just one of the many times that we as humans have overemphasized our importance. In the movie "Lucy," Morgan Freeman says this in a room full of students: "It is estimated that most human beings only use 10% of their brain's capacity. Imagine if we could access 100%." Interesting things begin to happen.
While it's fun to think that humans are capable of a whole lot more if we could just find a way to tap into that remaining 90% resource, reality is far less exciting. Most of the brain is active almost all the time! While they might not be actively used for thinking, they're working busy—doing other things like keeping you alive. Kind of important!
Think about it. The brain is just 3% of the body's weight, but it uses 20% of the body's energy. To burn through that much energy, you would have to be doing something right! Even though we get it wrong most of the time, it's fun to explore the world around us. We will continue to make assumptions about everything we see, and chances are most of it will be wrong. But that's a good thing, because if we never know what's wrong, we can never know what's truly right.
Money—our lives revolve around it. We all want it; we know we all want it. Most of it doesn't even exist beyond the heavy-duty servers of some bank, and yet the pursuit continues for this elusive thing. Despite its presence in everyday life, despite the fact that we spend most of our waking hours working towards money, it still somehow seems taboo to talk about. We like to pretend that money is not important to us.
And sure, money is not the end goal. In fact, one of the most common regrets of people on their deathbeds tends to be that they worked too hard, chasing after money. Of course, for all its value, however, money still can't buy you a meaningful relationship or an experience.
But while money can't buy any of those things, it can make them more accessible. Is happiness not easier to achieve once you know the bills are all taken care of? Is happiness not easier to achieve when you are able to give a loved one something you know they deserve?
At the very least, more money often equates to more choices in terms of how you want to spend your time—whether that is with your loved ones or in chasing a passion you had as a kid. And even if you disagree with everything I just said, in order to change the world, you will still need the backing of financial capital.
Now, with that said and hopefully having navigated through the awkwardness of introducing such a topic, let's cut right to the chase. How much money should you be making? How much is enough? And mind you, there is a very good reason to ask such a question. This is not just for curiosity's sake. Studies show that when you have actually put a metric to a goal, and maybe even written it down, you are more likely to achieve it.
People who vividly picture a goal are 40% more likely to successfully achieve it. So how much? What does the literature say? Well, the relationship of money and happiness is a complicated one. First of all, emotions are generally hard to track, and second of all, this question has not been researched all that much.
However, anyone talking about this topic has to bring up a piece of literature from 2010, authored by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton. Their paper looks into the relationship between income and happiness, but it goes a bit beyond that. The authors decided that simply looking into one metric as a measure of subjective well-being would fail to capture the complete picture and confound the findings.
So they looked at two things: emotional well-being, which is defined as the day-to-day satisfaction, and life evaluation, defined as the thoughts that come to mind when one thinks of life as a whole. You could also think of emotional well-being as the sort of short-term happiness and life evaluation as the long-term happiness.
Now, what did the research find? It turns out life evaluation rises steadily with income. The more people earn, the more positively they tend to think of life in general. Emotional well-being, on the other hand, seems to plateau after an annual income of around $75,000. Meaning, till that figure for the majority of people, each bit of raise in income will feel great, but after it, your day-to-day happiness won't go up by that much.
So there it is, right? That's the magical number. Well, not quite. For one, this is a study from 2010; because of inflation, today that amount is closer to around $93,000. And I should also mention that this study was conducted with U.S. residents as participants. What is considered a good life will definitely vary drastically in other parts of the world.
Let's get that right! Just recently, in the first few weeks of 2021, researcher Matt Killingsworth published the latest findings on the very same question: how much money should you be making to be happy? His findings showed that experienced well-being continues to rise even beyond the coveted $75,000 mark. And not just that—it continues to rise just as deeply as before, meaning the return on investment isn't any worse off the more money you make.
Why does this research disagree with the previous findings? For a paper by Kahneman and Deaton, the data that was collected for emotional well-being were answers to questions about the previous day that has the potential to fail to capture what a person was actually feeling in that moment of happiness or sadness, because our minds tend to play tricks with us.
Killingsworth's research, meanwhile, is collected via an app which pings users at various times of the day. It is more convenient than the traditional forms of surveying, and as such, he had a significantly larger pool of responses to base his findings on. This also allowed him to more truly capture what participants were feeling.
So if we are to accept Killingsworth's findings, then most people's day-to-day happiness as well as their general outlook on life tend to improve with higher income. So does that mean we should all just aim for an astronomically high salary in search of happiness and hope that we get there someday? Is that a realistic target?
There's a thought experiment to try and answer that question for us as individuals. Author Brad Stallery came up with the idea for the experiment. It goes like this: how much money would you have to be paid right here, right now, to never receive another dollar of income from anyone else? Now, you might think that's a straightforward experiment; you just aim for a really, really high number—somewhere in the hundreds of millions or billions.
For most people, I guess the catch is that this experiment will be run in groups of five people, and whoever has the lowest figure in mind will actually walk away with the money. The rest of the players get nothing.
The game theory at play here is actually quite cool. The interesting thing about this experiment is that it pits two of your impulses against each other and, in doing so, forces you to be reasonable. Because of course, you want to aim for a high number, but you also want to win and have the money, so you can't just aim for a stupidly large number.
Of course, this experiment is talking about money paid as a lump sum, while most of the research looks at salaries. The perceptions of well-being might as well be different for the two of them, but it's hard to see what the thought experiment won't work with salaries too. Go ahead and ask yourself that question and see what you come up with. The answer might help you more vividly visualize a target that you can actually work towards.
Of course, we all want to achieve happiness, but more income is easier said than done! When shall we really stop trying? And what if the circumstances are simply not there for a raise or a promotion? Well, that's where the other part of the puzzle comes in—our adaptation. Don't get me wrong. It's a wonderful thing; being able to adapt is what allowed our species to come so far.
But at the same time, it also means that whenever presented with an improved quality of life, we rapidly adapt to it and begin taking it for granted. It would explain why most people live their lives from nine to five chasing after that next raise because staying where you are, regardless if you make five figures a year or seven, brings with it a heavy feeling of obsolescence.
Then there's obviously an element of comparison. We've known this for a while—that comparison is the thief of joy. You might have a seven-figure salary, but you won't be anything close to happy if you compare yourself with Jeff Bezos, who has more money than brain cells—literally!
Studies also show that for the same salary, people living in a rich neighborhood feel worse than people in a poor neighborhood. While both participants likely take joy from their salaries, they also compare them with that of the Joneses. If the Joneses make less than you, you're happy; if they make more, you're not.
Research also says easily accessible money improves well-being more than money that is stowed deep inside someone's pension. The closeness of a number that you can glance out of your pocket can be a reassuring breath of air. Having only $500 worth of disposable money in a bank account can improve life satisfaction by up to 15%.
Then of course, there's the question of what you do with the money that eventually leads to happiness. If you simply make more money for making money's sake, you might still get some joy out of it, assuming you're successful. It's much like a game, but the elation will pale in comparison to that of a person who spends his hard-earned cash in a better way.
Buying time is often seen as one of the best ways to spend your money, in that it allows you to focus on the most joyous aspects while offloading the more laborious aspects to someone who will happily do them. The gig economy has made this more accessible than ever before, allowing people to spend more of their time on the things that truly matter—even if it means having a little less in the bank account.
This might mean paying someone to do the dishes so you can read a book to your child in bed, or it could mean purchasing a more expensive ticket to be able to spend some time with family. Material possessions also draw a lot of attention when it comes to the relation between wealth and happiness. The research is clear on this too: spend on experiences, not things!
The reason is that experiences are exclusive. Nobody can feel what you felt on that trip with your best friend; nobody can buy that exclusivity. Despite the fleeting nature of an experience, it can last a lifetime. And unlike the value of objects, which tend to depreciate over time, experiences only seem more enjoyable in hindsight. Our minds tend to overlook the small bumps in an experience—the delayed flight or the poor Wi-Fi—and remember only the good parts.
So instead of aiming for a certain salary figure, it might make more sense to aim for experiences and pursue the ability to afford those experiences. Of course, this is not to say that material possessions cannot be an experience. A song might be an experience, a cup of coffee might be an experience, an expensive car might be an experience—that's really up to the individual to decide.
But people generally overestimate how happy they'll be once they have that one new thing. However, once we have it, the feeling of satisfaction slowly erodes, and we’re back where we started. On some level, it might be a bit troubling to accept that money does indeed buy happiness, or at the very least, buys ways towards happiness. But really, haven't we known this all along?
More importantly though, this realization has to be qualified with the ideas of what's really important: people, experiences, and time—not only can it inform our career choices and how much we want to invest chasing after this thing, but it also tells us why generosity is important, why a more equitable future is one to strive for. Because remember, the only reason any of us want money is to inevitably get rid of it in the end.
If you're watching this right now, you've won. You've won the game of life; you just don't know it yet. As of May 2019, there are approximately 7.7 billion humans on our planet—7.7 billion people just like you and me, living their own lives with their own jobs, relationships, hobbies, and not one is the same as any other.
The number of events, situations, and interactions that happen on a daily basis across everyone on Earth is so high that it's hard to fathom. But something that is even harder to understand is how you're even here in the first place. A lot has happened over the course of history—like a lot of things—there was nothing, and then there was something.
There were a lot of things, and all of this—the entire history of the universe—has led you to this very second, the timeline we live in—the one where you're breathing and using your senses to get all the information from this video. What are the odds of that happening? Everything has led to this moment, but by the numbers, you shouldn't even be here in the first place.
Living a life like you do today, you had to be put here. But even at one time, the Earth wasn't here. The universe had to form in the exact way it did for life to form on Earth. The fundamental forces of nature just so happened to come together in the way that they did. Luckily, gravity is a thing, and it's proved to be useful—so useful that it's pretty much the glue that holds together any star, planet, galaxy, pretty much anything.
The strong and weak nuclear forces are able to keep us as humans held together at the lowest levels imaginable. Luckily, one lost planet roaming the solar system collided with Earth over 4 billion years ago, and that is why we have the Moon. That is why we have seasons. It's why the climate is just perfect; it's why we have liquid water on Earth.
Currently, we remain as the only place in the entire universe known to harbor life forms of any kind. Out of millions, billions—whatever the number is—out of all of those planets, only one has life for certain. But even one out of a billion are better odds than you being alive!
For some reason, that I wish I could tell you, one day a microorganism—one that couldn't be seen to our naked eye—began feeding on the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. This little, almost insignificant organism played the most important role of them all. For all they knew, a world above them didn't exist, but one day it would.
Over millions of years, evolution took place. These microbes began to be able to replicate themselves, and each and every single step of evolution began. The pure numbers of the situation doesn't do it justice. The odds of everything being so perfect that each step brought us progressively closer to becoming modern humans—humans that could realize they're human—that from one microbe spawned an entire species that took over the entire planet over a few thousand years on a universal timescale, that's quite literally nothing.
But now, let's think about humans. What separates us from everyone else? The minds of animals have continuously gotten more advanced over time, but a human mind is something completely different—sentience, consciousness. We are aware of some internal state of being. We don't wake up in the morning because you've thought about it; your brain just did it.
We don't think about breathing; we don't think about blinking. Your brain automatically takes in all of your senses and creates a picture, a view of the world in your head. For all we know, the Earth could be something completely different from what we see day to day, but the way we perceive it all comes down to how a three-pound organ in your head can put together a puzzle with the pieces being all of your senses.
But it isn't perfect; it's easy to trick. For example, listen to this and try to imagine it right now. You're probably thinking of a restaurant. It has multiple tables, all having a little world of their own. You might be imagining waiters moving food around. This little universe of its own was created in your head, all from just your sense of hearing.
Humans have the ability to picture things—to see them from a different perspective, to take our imaginations and make them a reality. This works great! Actually, every invention ever made was due to that spark, that initial burst of creativity. The brain built us as individuals, and we built the world.
Luckily, we're on a planet with hundreds of different elements—some of which work great for shelter or technology, some work greatest food sources to keep us alive, some release certain chemicals in your brain that make you feel a certain way. And these chemicals released form you as a person.
For example, the fight-or-flight response that we get when we're in danger is the result of adrenaline—a hormone in your body. Happiness is the result of having large amounts of serotonin. And the most important one involving your existence today—the love formula.
Sorry to break it to you, but you see, you couldn't have gotten here by yourself, even if you wanted to. You may think you're the result of randomness, but actually everything happened the way it was supposed to. Your parents met, which by itself is an extremely low probability event!
Depending on your age, out of millions or possibly billions of people, these two met at the perfect timing. For example, you watching this video offsets your daily activities by about 10 to 15 minutes. Everything you do after you finish watching this video will alter your life in some way. As weird as it sounds, you're actually changing the course of your life right now!
Some events that should have happened won't, and others that shouldn't have happened will. Every day you stray further down your own personal timeline—one that not any other single person on the planet has lived except you. Your parents are no exception to this. They both lived their own lives, were raised by different parents, hopefully worked different jobs, had different friends—but somehow ended up meeting.
And not only did they meet, but they liked each other enough to stay together to come into the decision to have a child—YOU! Unless you are a mistake, like me—I'm not even kidding! It keeps going! A woman has about 300,000 eggs inside her body. A male can have billions or trillions of different sperm throughout his life, but only specifically one of each could make you—and it did! The odds of that are one in 400 quadrillion!
If the situation hadn't been perfect—if that one stoplight hadn't been green, if that line at the grocery store wasn't so long—there's a pretty high chance that your parents would have never met. These lucky situations don't stop at your parents; they keep going! It extends to their parents and to their parents—all of which somehow ended up living long enough to have kids. This goes back tens of thousands of years—even your ancestors, thousands of years ago, when the life expectancy was literally 30 years!
This continues all the way back to that very