The Biggest Ideas in Philosophy

In the city of Cyprus in 300 BC, there lived a very wealthy traitor called Zeno. While on a voyage from Phenicia to Perez, his boat sank along with all of his cargo. Because of that single event, an event that was entirely out of Xeno'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, this would be all 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. 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 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 believed that the stoic principles could greatly benefit anyone and everyone. It didn't make sense for them to hide that knowledge behind the four walls of a school or 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 Epictetus, 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. This exercise helps 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 fortitude 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 leads 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 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.

Seneca once wrote that 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 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 Stoic's 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 has been working hard at their job for the past six months. He now feels he deserves a promotion and walks up to his boss with his performance report. The boss says thanks, 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, that 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 Viktor Frankel said, "between stimulus and response there is a space, and that space is our power to choose a response." Courage is two words—persist and resist. Temperance, or moderation, is 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 and 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 in prison, 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 simply by 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. We all know how it goes: one day we're born, and 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? Three-lettered monosyllabic word 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 "nile," 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. 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 nihilists, 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 were 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 like 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.

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 on 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 waste—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 it, 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." You believe 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 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 could 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 is 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 nihilistic outbreak. Religion no longer holds any say in what is 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, and 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. 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 could 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 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 of 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. The 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, 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 which brings these massive forces 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—LSD, shrooms, 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's 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 said: 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 won't last forever, but objectively, we will. For now, just enjoy the ride.

In the year 165 CE, a black wave of death rose from the East and quickly spurred across the globe faster than anyone could have ever imagined. They called it the Antonine plague after the reigning Roman Emperor at the time, Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. Lasting throughout the time of his rule, this plague claimed upwards of 18 million lives and nearly destroyed the Roman Empire that entire armies could barely scathe.

But it didn't. Under Marcus Aurelius's rule, the Empire thrived despite the economic crises, the numerous invasions, and the grueling pandemic. It is precisely during times of distress that true leaders are tested, and the Caesar rose to the occasion every single time. Aurelius was a philosopher before anything else, regarded as the last of the five good emperors of ancient Rome—a term coined by Nicolo Machiavelli in the 15th century.

It was his Stoic philosophy that differentiated him from his predecessors. During the plague, he set his ego aside and broke the mold, surrounding himself with talented and experienced public servants instead of aristocrats and nobles. He listened to advice and empowered those around him to make decisions. He hired the best physicians to lead the battle against the disease decimating Roman populations and to give him the opportunity to focus on the growing economic crisis.

He canceled debts, sold imperial effects and possessions, and confiscated capital from Rome's upper class to keep the economy afloat. At a time when fear infiltrated the Empire, Marcus practiced self-control and inspired his people to remain calm. As if things couldn't get any worse, late in his reign, Marcus received news that an old friend and former general, Avidius Cassius, had staged a rebellion and declared himself Caesar in an attempt to overthrow him.

Marcus's response was unusual considering the circumstances, but as disciplined and Stoic as he was ever known to be. Instead of getting angry and immediately setting out to destroy the man that threatened the Empire, his family, and his legacy, Marcus waited to give the defector a chance to come to his senses. When he did not, Marcus demanded that Cassius be captured but not killed.

In true Stoic fashion, he said concerning the matter: "Forgive a man who has wronged one to remain a friend to one who has transgressed friendship." The last of the five good emperors was a student of Stoic philosophy. He was greatly influenced by the writings of Seneca and Epictetus, as evident from his personal reflections during campaigning and administration.

He didn't get angry; he didn't allow his emotions to guide his judgments; and he didn't despise his enemy. He acted firmly and justly, a posture that calmed an already nervous Empire in times of extreme tensions. Stoicism provided Marcus Aurelius with a guideline to use when facing this dress of life, and as the leader of the most powerful Empire in history, you know that his stressors were plenty.

This guideline was compiled into "Meditations," Marcus Aurelius's personal diaries, the private thoughts of the world's most powerful man, giving advice on how to be wise in our decisions, just in our judgments, brave in our actions, temperate in all of our doings—to practice self-control, discipline, and modesty. In short, "Meditations" is a timeless piece of Stoic philosophy that is as relevant today as it was in the ancient days of Rome.

It is a guide to the key principles of Stoicism from the philosopher king himself. One of the most prominent principles of Stoicism that Marcus Aurelius continually reiterates in this piece of literature revolves around the dichotomy of control. Despite all of his power, the Caesar of Rome constantly reminded himself that he couldn't control all that happened around him, but he could always control how he responded to those things.

Flowing from this concept, there are five key and profound lessons we can learn from Marcus's "Meditations" that are a testament to the practicality of Stoicism as a philosophy. By understanding these lessons, we can lead healthier and more fulfilling lives, even millennia after Aurelius reigned.

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. It's all in how you perceive it. You're in control; you can dispense with misperception at will, like rounding the point of serenity—total calm, safe anchorage. Before Marcus, the release of this time, Epictetus and Seneca both wrote vast amounts on the power of perception. It's no wonder, then, that Aurelius echoed these thoughts, as it is one of the most essential tenets of Stoicism.

Our perceptions influence all that we experience. Your car may not start before your important meeting or your boss may not give you the promotion you think you deserve. Just like Marcus had a choice when the plague hit, you also have a choice to make whenever you are facing a troubling situation.

You can choose to feel angry, scorned, depressed, or defeated— which will accomplish nothing—or you can train your perception to not be influenced by what is outside your control. It's a form of self-discipline that places the quality of your life in your hands instead of in the hands of other people or situations. Marcus's entire reign rested on this guiding principle.

As a formidable leader, he understood the power he had and always separated his perceptions from his emotions. He faced invasions from Germanic tribes and internal uprisings within his kingdom, but he knew he could not alter these situations to his favor. His true power came from within, from how he perceived these grievous situations. So instead of reacting rashly, he didn't allow these horrible negative effects to affect him; rather, he seized his own mind and was able to make just decisions that were devoid of any emotional attachment, even in the face of the most troubling situations.

To refrain from imitation is the best revenge. When someone despises us, the easy thing to do is to despise them back. But what would that accomplish? When dealing with Cassius's rebellion, it would have been easy for Marcus to order his troops to seize and brutally murder him for his insurgents, to use him as a message to all who dare attempt to take his crown. Instead, he was compassionate and chose to forgive him.

People will never meet our expectations, so instead of letting their behavior evoke our emotions, it's more prudent to resort back to what is in our control, which is being virtuous—a better Stoic and a better human. Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it, turns it to its purpose, incorporates it into itself, so too can a rational being turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.

Before anything, the Stoics were realists. They understood life's challenges, but instead of shying away from them, they embraced them. The truth is that struggle is an essential part of life; it builds character, develops resilience, and ultimately leads to success. Again, this principle is centered around perception.

We can either perceive an obstacle as a hindrance to our progress—a knockout punch that we will never be able to recover from—or virtue—a test of our ability to respond to adversity. It would be foolish to go through life avoiding struggle and conflict; instead, we should welcome them as an opportunity to strengthen our character. The obstacle is never in the way; the obstacle is the way.

Accept the things to which fate binds you and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart. Marcus Aurelius believed that the formula for human greatness is to accept our fate, no matter what it is. This notion is deeply rooted in Stoic philosophy. Whatever happens to you, you must love it, for it is your fate.

Epictetus faced countless adversities throughout his life but still embraced his destiny without complaining. He was tortured by a master who twisted his leg and broke it, permanently crippling him. Instead of spending the rest of his life feeling remorseful for himself, Epictetus took control of his mind instead and said, "Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather wish that what happens happens the way it happens. Then you will be happy."

The true testament to being a Stoic is wanting nothing to be different—not better or worse. Strength of a person is in accepting what the universe has in store for you and not resisting it. You could leave life right now; let that determine what you do and say and think. No one understood their destiny and loved their fate more than Seneca.

In 59 CE, Rome was ruled by an insecure and unjust Emperor Nero. He was an uncaring dictator who spared no one from his wrath, including his own mother and sister. After a failed attempt on his life, Nero gathered all the suspected conspirators and either banished or executed them. Seneca was wrongly accused as being one of those plotting against Nero's life, and even though he had served as his leading advisor, Nero did not spare him and ordered him to take his own life.

Instead of finding the hand that fate dealt him, Seneca not only accepted his fate, but he was stoic to the final moment of his existence, as he famously said, "Wouldn't you deserve to weep over parts of life when the whole of it calls for tears?" Seneca then cut the veins in his arms and bled to death.

Despite being one of the most powerful men in the world, Marcus Aurelius reflected on the fleetingness of his life. Anyone in his position could easily get drunk on power, but he reminded himself all the time of those who have come and gone, who have left behind nothing of the power they ever severely accumulated throughout their lives.

In "Meditations," Marcus thinks of mortality as an inspiration to live his best life and let go of trivial things. He did not see death as morbid but rather as a motivator to live a life of virtue and gratitude for the time we have. Marcus Aurelius led a Roman Empire that went through both hardship and prosperity. He was criticized and praised, and loved and hated, but through it all, he always reminded himself of the teachings of Stoicism and the dichotomy of control.

There are things in our control and others that are not. Which ones will you focus on? If we can learn to emulate Marcus's lessons by mastering our perceptions, accepting others for who they are, embracing the inevitable challenges as an opportunity for growth, loving our fate, and finally accepting our mortality, then we can truly live a virtuous life just like that of the philosopher king himself.

Waste no time arguing what a good man should be; be one. 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 the 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 would 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 nine to five for many years, live modestly, and save as much as possible, so we can enjoy our retirement 50 years later. There are Stoics who didn't believe in any of that. They didn't believe in the idea of delayed gratification, and they 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 one hand, you can see him 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 to 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 present pleasures.

But on the other hand, there's some wisdom to the school of thought. It is true: tomorrow isn't promised to any one of us. What's the point in working hard at a nine to five 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. 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 was considered the father of modern-day hedonism, redefined what hedonism was. To do that, he had to start by redefining a certain word: pleasure. For Aristippus, pleasure was a state of ecstasy and excitement—the 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 that 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 time out, 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?

Judith might try to argue that all of those things do not hold any value of 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 will 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—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, not worrying about trying to change it for someone else. Another huge stumbling block that hedonism faces 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. He asked people 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. 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 am 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.

And 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, because 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. In 1993, Michael Jordan led the Chicago Bulls to victory over the Phoenix Suns in what is widely known as his greatest NBA Finals ever. He averaged 41 points per game—the highest ever in NBA finals history—cementing his place as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all time.

Of course, Jordan's raw talent and extensive training were key drivers in his success, but there was something else at play here—a state of mind that those at the top of their game seem to be able to access. You see it in the surfer of the 100-foot wave, the concert violinist leading an orchestra, even in your co-worker whose productivity seems superhuman.

What all of these top performers have mastered is flow—a state where the outside world fades away, time stops, and you become completely immersed in what you're doing. Research has shown that we all have the ability to find the flow state, but how we do it is not as clear-cut. The idea of deep concentration and rapid tension has been around for much of modern human history. Transcendent spiritual experiences, like flow states, have been reported for centuries in different religious texts around the globe.

But the official flow theory was created by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s. Csikszentmihalyi began surveying people about times in their lives when they felt and performed their best. He spoke to rock climbers, musicians, painters, and scientists curious to figure out what made them continue to perform and create at a high level despite the challenges.

He concluded that when respondents enjoyed certain experiences so much, they were willing to go to great lengths to experience them again. They all described a kind of current that carried them through these activities and experiences. Today, there are researchers and companies that devote their resources to unlocking the power of flow.

Stephen Kotler, one of the leading researchers on flow, became interested in the topic after watching action sports athletes like snowboarders, skateboarders, or BMX bikers. How did they achieve seemingly impossible aerial tricks and death-defying moves with such grace over and over again? Kotler, like Csikszentmihalyi before him, identified factors such as risk and challenge to be key to achieving a state of flow.

Eventually, he founded the Flow Collective, a group that both researches flow and trains people and companies in the group to create a happier, more productive world. Challenging your mind means not getting caught in an echo chamber where the only opinions you hear reflect the ones you already own. A balanced view of the world allows you to make well-informed decisions and helps you pick out what's true and what isn't.

When you're in flow, your brain shuts off all non-critical processes. You care solely about the task at hand and embody a mindset that is focused on the journey, not the destination; the game, not the medal; the climb, not the view from the top. You get it? We are able to find this focus because in a flow state, boredom and fatigue are not a thing.

You don't get antsy or achy; your mind chatter fades away, and you become completely free of distraction. But don't mistake this for relaxation. When you're in flow, you're not relaxed. According to research over the past several decades, the most important component of finding flow is a task or experience that meets a particular challenge-skill balance.

Think of it this way: if you're really good at drawing but don't find a particular piece very challenging, you'll probably get relaxed and eventually bored. Alternatively, if you're a beginner skier and you're insisting on going down the steepest runs, you'll grow frustrated and angry with yourself and the possibility for enjoyment is pretty low.

To unlock flow, you need to find tasks that allow you to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. You need to be put in situations where your brain needs to work, but not so much that it gets frustrated by poor results. Think of an activity that you enjoy or are skilled at, but just find challenging enough that it'll hold your interest— that might be a great place to find your flow.

But finding flow isn't quite that simple, though. Much of the internet might want you to believe that it is. There are tons of videos on how to enter a flow state on command and even playlists called "Flow State music" that promise you the deepest concentration at the snap of a finger. But in reality, going into the flow state requires practice, and there's no one-size-fits-all formula.

But there are definitely some things you can try. You can start by creating a ritual every time you're faced with a task, letting your brain know that you're about to begin. This is one of the reasons many athletes have a pre-game ritual, where they eat the same thing and do the same thing before every single game. These seemingly small acts help to condition the brain, letting it know beforehand that it's time to get serious.

Other things that can help trigger flow include meditation and other mindfulness activities, since they help to eliminate distraction and promote focus. Novelty or risk can also trigger the flow state. If you're used to working at home, try going to a coffee shop to experience a new environment. If you've been lifting the same weights for months, try something a few pounds heavier; that added risk of failing might be just what you need to tune out the noise and focus on what you're doing.

Think of all the essays or assignments you did in record time back in school when the risk of failing was imminent. Pattern recognition is another great way to get into the flow state. Ask any writer you know and they'll tell you that there's nothing worse than staring at a blank page. Well, instead of doing that, you can start your workday by editing what you wrote yesterday.

This process will trigger the pattern recognition in your brain, telling it that it's time to focus. Then, when you get to the blank page, it becomes much easier to create since your brain is already in the flow state. It's also helpful to find out what your peak creative and productivity times are. Are you an early bird, a night owl? Maybe you really are superhuman and you do your best work on Wednesdays at 3 PM when the rest of the world has hit its crash.

Once you find your time, try your best to schedule your calendar so that you're doing your most meaningful and challenging work at this time. You can also turn to your emotions for help. If you've ever fallen in love, you've experienced the tunnel-like attention you give your partner. To use a cliché, it's like nothing else in the world matters. Similarly, feelings like love, passion, and curiosity for the task you're taking on or the experience you're about to embark on can help achieve a flow state.

Once the parameters are set, it's time to turn your attention inward. Focus on your body, your breath, and let your concentration and creativity take over. Now, so far, we've been talking about the flow in relation to an individual, but ask Michael Jordan himself, and he'll tell you there's no greatest player of all time, only the greatest team of all time.

We see this every time we watch an amazing game or see a talented cast of actors navigate the story of a play. In group flow, there is no domineering ego or negativity. Members of the team, cast, or group merge together as one. The challenge-skill balance is important here, too. If you put Meryl Streep in a high school drama production, the students would probably feel intimidated and might not be able to stay present in the work.

Or if you see fans holding their breath when the third-string quarterback enters the game, it's because they're unsure that the rookie can handle the pressure and lead the team back into its collective flow. Whether you're on your own or in a group, flow will come when you not only concentrate but truly love the thing you're doing.

If you don't love music, it's very unlikely you'll find any flow trying to teach yourself to play the piano. But if you're obsessed with coding and are constantly challenging your skills, you're probably very familiar with how good the flow state makes you feel. Why does it make us feel so good, though?

Because the brain in a flow state is getting constant hits of dopamine—the neurotransmitter associated with a reward system. Once the dopamine starts releasing, it reduces fatigue and discomfort and allows us to be immersed in the task at hand. While dopamine tends to be the star of the show when it comes to studies on the flow state, the brain's locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system has also been researched as a key component of the flow state.

The LCNE system is involved in regulating how engaged we are with a task. If the LCNE system wants us to disengage from a task, it can trigger boredom, inattentiveness, stress, and distraction—none of which are part of a healthy recipe for flow. Many of us struggle to stay focused for long periods on things we dislike.

If you have ADHD, this feeling can become chronic in any instance of struggling to stay engaged. Our LCNE system is signaling us to disengage from the task at hand, maybe because we're not receiving enough dopamine to keep the brain interested. But if a reward system keeps firing and the LCNE system doesn't tell us to disengage, we find ourselves in control, feeling clear and having a sense of direction, and the benefits of being in this mental state are endless.

One study by the Flow Collective found that motivation and creativity can increase 400 to 700 percent, while the Department of Defense conducted a study which found that learning spikes 200% when you're in flow. Now, medical researchers are starting to use this concept to help patients with certain medical issues. Helping older patients experience flow later in life has proven helpful for cognitive optimization.

Similarly, video games and virtual reality applications are being developed as therapeutic training for people with neurological diseases and people who are rehabilitating from neurological damage. By gamifying certain exercises and therapies, some doctors find that patients stay motivated to engage and therefore heal. Not only does flow provide us with focus and enhanced intellectual capacity, but it's also a positive happy experience where people describe feeling ecstatic.

Stephen Kotler, the founder of the Flow Collective, said that if people want to enjoy their life, learning how to find flow is the best pathway. But what if we can't find that little voice that seamlessly guides us through a challenging task? What if flow doesn't always feel like it's in reach? Most of us dread doing our income tax or answering emails, so any attempt to find flow in these activities is probably futile.

Yet as with so many buzzy ideas, it can feel like we're expected to find flow in everything we do, or we're just wasting valuable productivity stored elsewhere, somewhere in our brains. But the reality is that we can't find flow in every task, and we shouldn't feel like we have to.

It's not just dreaded tasks that can feel difficult to jump into. Even the idea of an accomplished artist or athlete constantly locking into their flow state is a myth. Take writing for example: what's one feeling we don't get when we're in a flow state? Boredom. If you've ever sat down to write anything creative, you know that a large part of writing is boredom. The quiet, wandering mind is where we conjure up ideas; it's easy to go down Internet rabbit holes.

How to find your flow state? You might even be in one right now. As valuable as learning how to find your flow can be, obsessing over finding it will most likely have the opposite impact. Like anything else, finding flow is a skill, and learning new skills can be tough and frustrating to learn.

Not being able to find flow, even in a task that meets all the parameters of enjoyment, challenge, and timing that we've talked about, doesn't mean the task isn't worth doing. If we start using flow as a precondition to get things done, we'll most likely get a lot less done.

If flow doesn't come, it's all on us and all the other mechanisms we've built inside ourselves to deal with the internal triggers, like self-doubt, and external triggers, like that dirty laundry waiting to be folded, and get the work done. Close the tool where you can seek out to improve our lives. It's a mindset to help boost productivity, conquer challenging tasks, and lean into our creativity.

The promise of being able to turn off the outside world and turn on the most positive parts of our inner world is alluring, something to strive for. But as soon as we get too fixated on achieving these things, we might lose what flow is really about.

Suppose there is a couple, the Joneses, who just gave birth to a baby boy named Sammy. As they stand together in the hospital gazing down at their newborn, they share an awareness that the life ahead of Sammy will be filled with an indeterminable amount of both pleasure and suffering, happiness and heartbreak, miracle and tragedy.

Then, in an instant, the harsh reality of their baby's future hits them, and for a fleeting second, they look into each other's eyes and think: if we hadn't given birth to him in the first place, he wouldn't suffer anything, right? There, they both make the decision to give Sammy the best life they can and to prevent him from experiencing as much suffering as is humanly possible.

The Joneses are great parents for thinking this, but in the words of David Benatar, "It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one and only guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is to not bring those children into existence in the first place." This is the philosophy of antenatalism.

It's the thought that human procreation is unethical. The belief that any action with suffering as its byproduct should not be encouraged, no matter how much pleasure will follow as well. Although the roots of antenatalism can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece, the philosophy has experienced a particular spike in popularity over the last decade or so.

This recent resurgence can be accredited, by and large, to South African philosopher David Benatar, who authored what may be the most widely-known literature on the subject. In his book "Better Never to Have Been," Benatar argues that his anti-natalist views come from a place of compassion, stating that the only way to truly prevent the suffering that comes with existence is to not exist in the first place.

And he isn't the first person to have this thought. The Greek dramatist Sophocles once said, "Never to have been born is best." Heinrich, the 19th-century German poet, wrote, "Sleep is good; death is better. But of course, the best thing would have been to never have been born at all." And the preacher in Ecclesiastes said, "Praised are the dead who are already dead more than the living that are yet alive. But better than both of them is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun."

So, as you can see, the school of thought that non-existence is inherently better than existence isn't a new one. In recent years, though, these ideas have given rise to the anti-natalist belief that seeks to end human procreation. There are two different schools of thought under the antenatalistic argument.

The first is the one David Benatar makes when he says we should spare the unborn from the suffering that is life. This argument centers around the harm in which existence poses on the baby being born. On the other hand of the spectrum, the misanthropic arguments for antenatalism center more around the harm that babies being born will go on to afflict upon one another, other animals, and the environment as a whole.

To put it into context, consider this: the average carbon footprint for a single person in the United States has been estimated to be around 16 to 20 tons per year, meaning that just fulfilling daily necessities, such as driving, showering, eating, and using electricity, has unimaginably damaging consequences towards the environment we live in. So to anti-natalists, the most ethical way to solve this problem is to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Both antenatalist arguments, whether philanthropic or misanthropic, are centered around one core problem: suffering. And one proposed solution: to stop giving birth. You might say, "Well, what about all the good things in life? Why would you not want a child to experience all of that?"

Well, anti-natalists believe that in human life, there is an inherent imbalance or asymmetry between pleasure and suffering. Let's take Sammy, for instance: because Sammy has been born, he would experience pain, which is bad, and pleasure, which is good. However, if Sammy was never born, then he would never experience pain, which is good, and he also wouldn't experience pleasure, which is not bad.

The argument, therefore, is that the presence of pain will always be objectively more harmful than the absence of pleasure; thus, it makes sense to preserve the absence of pleasure rather than introduce the presence of pain. Everyone suffers from being human, but no one suffers from not existing in the first place.

A second argument that the followers of anti-natalism bring forward is the hypothetical consent argument. This states that no one can consent to being born. Consent is simply defined as the act of giving permission for something to happen, and according to the anti-natalist hypothetical consent argument, the unborn cannot give permission to be born into the world.

And so, as a result, the act of procreation should be seen as non-consensual and therefore unethical. If we're focusing solely on the information we have about pre-birth that is scientifically provable, then the hypothetical consent argument is pretty difficult to argue against. But of course, as we know, the full extent of our pre-birth experience isn't yet known by scientists or anyone for that matter.

I am a psychologist, and I know that there are depths of the mind that have remained untapped for most of us in our normal business of going about our affairs. This uncertainty opens up the door for a wide array of pseudoscientists who seek to explore the nature of our pre-birth experience using methods which, although can't be definitively proven by science, still adds some thought-provoking counterclaims that are worth considering.

One of those pseudoscientists is Helen Wambach, who hypnotized 750 subjects in the 1970s and asked the question: did you choose to be born? The responses she aggregated were quite staggering. 81% of Wambach's subjects reported that they did choose to be born, while 19% reported that they were either unaware of the choice or they got no clear answer to that question.

Of course, again, research and findings gathered from hypnosis can't be scientifically proven, but in the face of the seemingly unknowable, studies like this pose at least some perspective that should not be disregarded entirely. However, focusing back on the data that we do have definitive answers to, consider the story of Goldmana, written by Sian Schifrin, which is used by anti-natalists as an example for the hypothetical consent argument.

Goldmana is a wealthy man who lives on an island and decides one day, for reasons unknown, that he wants to donate some of his wealth to his neighbors on an adjacent island. These neighbors are comfortably off but would still objectively benefit from his donation. Unfortunately, though, due to historical tension between the governments of these neighboring islands, Goldmana and his agents aren't able to physically go to the adjacent island nor are they permitted by law to even communicate with the people living there.

But still determined to donate, he handcrafts several heavy cubes of gold, each worth five million dollars. Then he flies his plane over the neighboring island and drops the cubes down to the civilians underneath. He tries to avoid hitting people with the cubes, knowing that it could cause injury. But eventually, after gifting several people with the wealth, he hits one person, whom the story