The 8 Greatest Philosophical Theories You Need to Know

You are a chicken. Yes, you. You look around and sometimes wonder why your owner takes such good care of you. At first, you're not sure; you're skeptical. What if he sends you to the slaughterhouse? You've never been there, but you know very well none of your friends have ever come out of that place. You remain on high alert for when that fateful day might arrive, but it never does.

Days go by, and then weeks, months, even years. You are now convinced your owner loves you more than any of these other chickens, and he would never do anything bad to you. Each passing day is additional evidence to say that you will live for the next one thousand days. Days go by like this, one thousand beautiful days, until, of course, the one thousand and first day when the illusion of safety breaks, and you end up on someone's dinner plate. You should have never crossed the road.

Now imagine how betrayed the chicken must have felt when it was being taken to that terrifying part of the farm. Given the thousand days' worth of evidence, the chicken's trust in its owner was ironically at its highest level when it was eventually slaughtered. Perhaps if it wasn't so foolish to believe that it was special or unique, maybe it would have at least been spared the feelings of betrayal. That one final day completely changed the outlook of the chicken's life. That one piece of evidence outweighed the previous thousand days, and it's not even a contest.

This is something known as a Black Swan, a single event or observation that comes as a surprise, with disproportionate consequences, radically changing our outlook about something. People used to think that swans could only be white until they saw a Black Swan, which basically reshaped the way people thought about what is out there. Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a book called "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" to study this very phenomenon and shine light on how vulnerable we are to black swans and how we are only becoming increasingly more vulnerable with each passing day.

In his book, he talks about some fundamentals of epistemology that limit our ability to understand the black swans before they happen. But first, let's talk about why our modern society, as technologically advanced as it is, is the perfect nesting place for a Black Swan event. Let's say we're going to weigh a few thousand people, and at the extreme end of that sample contains the heaviest person in the world. So long as that person is subject to biological constraints like the rest of us, it doesn't really matter how much he or she weighs. Let's say 2,000 lb.

Now how much do you think that accounts for in the total weight of all the people we weighed? The answer is probably less than half a percent. It shows that even a crazy outlier like a 2,000 lb person doesn't really overwhelm the average. Taleb calls this ecosystem "mediocristan" to refer to how the mediocre measurements of the average person do mostly represent all measurements quite well.

Now let's conduct the same experiment but with wealth. Let's gather a few people and include just one of the 3,000 or so billionaires in that list. How much do you think that billionaire accounts for in the total wealth of all the people in that sample? An overwhelming majority, almost always close to 99%. Contrary to the first scenario, here the outlier overwhelms everything else. Taleb calls this world "extremistan" as it rewards a few people extremely well but leaves basically nothing for the others.

Taleb says that the modern world is composed of circumstances that are geared towards extremistan, not mediocristan, because money for all intents and purposes is just a number in someone's book. The vast majority of money is completely digital. It's not subject to physics laws or biology to constrain it to minimal variance. Sure, most people don't make that much money, but a few people can make a lot of money. Similarly, if you want to consider musicians, most musicians don't sell that many albums, but a few artists sell quite a few. You can conduct the same thought experiment with book sales, scientific publications, shoe brands, and so on.

The point is the modern economy is very much a win-or-take-all system that rewards a very small number of people with a disproportionately large portion of the pie. If it was more like the weight example we just talked about, you wouldn't expect the outliers to be so wild, but the fact that they really are indeed so wild just goes to show how unpredictable the environment we're living in really is.

The forecasts we take for granted today often fail to take into account the true nature of this unpredictability, these Black Swan events. You might be inclined to say that, "No, these billionaires put in the work day in and day out, and therefore they can enjoy the fruits of their labor." Indeed, most of them probably worked really hard. Some of their innovations might later pave the way for a better future for all of us. I'm not discounting that. However, the system is not rewarding them proportionately. More importantly, it's hard to say how much of their efforts are the fruits of their labor and how much it is due to pure chance.

If you were to run a few simulations with extremistan-type circumstances, you would inevitably have a few Jeff Bezos-like outliers. We may be biased into thinking that we understand what causes Bezos-like outliers in our society: you know, the usual think-out-of-the-box, start a revolutionary company, work extremely hard for a few years, and then smell the roses, happily ever after. We've all read the autobiographies, we've all watched the documentaries.

However, when was the last time you read about a person who did all of those things and failed? When was the last time you saw shelves of books about people who failed? Chances are, probably never. These stories just never really quite make it there is an epistemic bias in all of this.

Taleb says now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail don't seem to write memoirs. And if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call. This is despite the fact that often advice about what not to do is more useful than what to do. But that's just the economy; that's just one facet of society.

We also don't understand the sociopolitical aspects. Take 9/11 for example, which is certainly a Black Swan event. After it happened, you had tons of experts come out and say that they had known for years that it was about to happen. Well, why didn't they say anything? This retrospective distortion of the understanding of a problem is one of the hallmarks of a Black Swan event. None of them really knew. If they did, cockpit doors would have been bulletproof long ago, pocket knives would have never been allowed into cabins, and the TSA would have been invented much earlier.

But these things were only instituted after 9/11. If you were to suggest such policies in 1991 for example, you would probably not be taken too seriously or would have been shown a spreadsheet that suggested airlines don't have the money for bulletproof doors. But inevitably, they did. Thankfully, the likelihood of a 9/11 style event is much lower now than it used to be. Countries around the world are more prepared, more vigilant. However, that also makes these precautions somewhat lose their relevance.

You all know Yuval Noah Harari. In his book "Homo Deus," he cites a paradox about knowledge. He says knowledge that does not change behavior is useless, but knowledge that changes behavior loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated. Despite the measures we have taken for a Black Swan event like 9/11, that does nothing to improve our odds against a future Black Swan.

If anything, it might lure us into a false sense of security and, in fact worsen our chances of coping with the impacts of the next highly improbable event. We tend to convince ourselves that we understand risks once we have understood a game of dice or blackjack. However, trying to approximate the risks in real life with the same methods used in a closed-loop artificial game is simply oversimplification, a mistake that we commit daily. Taleb calls this the ludic fallacy.

We learn simple games and immediately conclude that the stock market works in the same way, even though one of these things lives in mediocristan and the other lives in extremistan. If the markets were well understood, do you think something like GameStop or AMC would have ever been allowed to happen? Sure, short squeezing is not a particularly new phenomenon, and yet even a non-Black Swan event such as this one left even the smartest hedge fund managers scratching their heads and practically chasing bankruptcy. This false sense of understanding makes black swans that much more dangerous.

There are other reasons why we are increasingly more vulnerable to black swans, Taleb said. Whereas in the past people might have been studying different kinds of literature and diving deep into a locally developed set of ideas, today arguably the most read book is "Harry Potter." That's of course not to say "Harry Potter" is a bad book or anything, but it goes to show that we are much less in tune with each other's ideas, for better or for worse. For the most part, everyone is dealing with generally the same ideas.

That, coupled with the rising complexity and reach of technology, means when something fails, it fails for more people than ever before. The Pakistani government tried to shut down YouTube in Pakistan; it ended up shutting down YouTube worldwide too. We don't understand these things. That's just one way for technology to fail, but it goes to show how interconnected things are. And while that is often touted as a plus, given sufficiently poor luck, that can really spell doom for us all.

Take coronal mass ejections as an example. These are regular bursts of radiation from the Sun that scientists on Earth know and expect. The largest coronal mass ejection ever on record is the Carrington event in 1859. Its effects were mostly felt by telegraph operators, who had some of their equipment burnt from the sudden surge. Most of the world went on without a hitch.

On the other hand, if a Carrington-class event were to occur today, with all the grids, electric cars, and equipment that we now have, the damages would be in the trillions of dollars, and repair could take decades, if at all possible. With each passing day, with each little transition into an electric future, we're becoming more and more vulnerable to such an event. The thing is, this isn't even a Black Swan event. In 2012, the likelihood of a Carrington event in the next decade was calculated to be around 12%.

And yet, despite that high probability, we're not particularly prepared for such an event, given the esoteric nature of its risk – seemingly low probability but high impact. Despite all the mounting evidence, you'll have a very hard time convincing governments to make modifications to power grids to avoid catastrophic failures. So if that's how little we care about an event that we know is bound to occur eventually, imagine how unaware we are of a true Black Swan.

The chicken on the farm, were it to somehow be spared by some miracle, would never trust another human being ever after the betrayal it endured. However, few are ever so lucky. Meanwhile, for the owner, the chicken's death comes as no surprise; it is a routine event and therefore no Black Swan. The idea of a Black Swan is therefore relative to the knowledge one possesses. Hence, our objective is to try and be in the position of the butcher, not the butchered.

Taleb says, "I worry less about advertised and sensational risks, more about the vicious hidden ones." Of course, the idea of a Black Swan also incorporates good things, such as wildly unlikely positive outcomes of chance, otherwise known as life. The odds of being born are 1 in 400 trillion; but to be fair, I just unfollowed my own advice. Such a thing can't really be predicted, can it? For all we know and for all we don't, being born is an unimaginably unlikely event that nobody really predicted.

So if you are alive, whatever that means, in the end, we're actually all the Black Swans we've been trying to avoid the entire time. Ironic, isn't it? In the year 1925, Einstein shared with a student his burning desire to understand the universe. "I want to know how God created this world," he said as they strolled along. "I'm not interested in this or that phenomenon in the spectrum of this or that element; I want to know his thoughts. The rest are just details."

This one conversation expresses the core of Einstein's guiding principle, one that has driven humanity to inquire, discover, experiment, and most importantly, learn about this universe we call home. But what was Einstein really talking about, and can human knowledge ever reach a point where we understand everything? Since the discovery of the world of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, scientists have been racking their brains trying to understand how it works. Even a century later, we're still not sure how and why subatomic particles behave the way they do.

But that's just half the problem. The discovery of quantum theory posed a more serious issue that Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and other world-renowned physicists have been working tirelessly to solve. That challenge can be summarized in one word: unification. You see, modern physics is split into two pillars: classical physics, the physics of Newton, Einstein, and Galileo, which predicts gravity and describes the motion of massive things in our cosmos, like stars and planets; and quantum physics, which governs the world of subatomic particles according to its own set of laws and rules.

Both pillars describe their respective worlds accurately but fail when applied to each other's subject matter. Einstein's preoccupation was that there must be a way that these two worlds could reconcile. There has to be a theory that unifies the world of the subatomic with the world of the massive, a theory that can predict, well, everything. Now you might be thinking, so why should we care? Well, a unified theory that can bridge both of these worlds could potentially unlock many of our universe's secrets and answer some of the deepest philosophical and theological questions that we've been asking since the days of Galileo.

What are we truly made of? What happened before the Big Bang? Are we living in a multiverse? The unified theory, or the theory of everything, might just have the answers to all of these questions. The universe and everything in it is glued together by four fundamental forces. I made an entire video on these four forces, so if you really want to fully understand all of them, I suggest you check it out.

But for the sake of this video, here is the gist of what they do: big objects like stars, planets, humans, and cats are all governed by the force of gravity, and thanks to Einstein and his general theory of relativity, we now know that gravity isn't a force that magically pulls objects together. Instead, it's the curving and warping of the fabric of our universe, spacetime.

While all these big objects are governed by just one fundamental force, subatomic particles, on the other hand, are governed by three fundamental forces. As if they weren't already confusing enough! These three fundamental forces are electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear. Electromagnetism holds atoms together, the strong force holds nuclei together, and the weak force is responsible for some type of nuclear decay.

These particles, along with their respective forces, make up what we call the Standard Model. The Standard Model describes the world of the very small. We know that everything in the universe is made of subatomic particles, from planets and stars to humans and dogs. We know that all of these things are made of atoms, and atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

In the 1960s, we discovered that even protons and neutrons are made of even smaller particles called quarks, and electrons are leptons. Using different combinations of these particles and the respective forces, we can build atoms, molecules, humans, planets, and even stars. So it seems that the Standard Model is a comprehensive interpretation of our universe, but it doesn't include everything.

The truth is finding the smallest subatomic particles is only the first step to getting to a theory of everything. The second step would be finding a place for gravity in this model. There are two reasons why gravity isn't included. The first is that when it comes to small particles, the force of gravity is so weak that it doesn't have any effect on a quantum system.

The second reason is that we don't really know how to incorporate general relativity, which describes the motion of large objects, into the world of quantum that governs subatomic particles. Many great minds, including Einstein, tried tirelessly. It’s said that even on his deathbed, Einstein revisited his notes on the theory of everything and tried one last time to find an elegant solution to explain the fundamental differences between the world of the small and that of the large. But unfortunately, he ran out of time.

So that's that, right? While we still haven't found a theory that can explain everything, we have made significant progress. And maybe the most groundbreaking was that of another brilliant mind, Stephen Hawking. In 2014, a movie was made on the impactful life of Stephen Hawking. As a result, Hawking became one of the most revered physicists in the world and one of the most admired by pop culture.

Away from the limelight, however, Hawking, like Einstein, had an obsessive yearning to understand the universe and never ceased to challenge our knowledge of it. One of his greatest contributions was the discovery of what is now known as Hawking radiation. In 1974, Hawking discovered one of the biggest breakthroughs of the 20th century: a groundbreaking interpretation of black holes, as well as an unprecedented interaction between the world of quantum and gravity.

Hawking's discovery was so ingenious that it gave us hope that the theory of everything, the Holy Grail of physics, is still a human possibility. Black holes are densely packed regions of space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. Einstein predicted the presence of black holes through his general theory of relativity in 1916, and we confirmed his predictions in 1974 when we observed our first black hole in the Milky Way.

In the same year, Hawking discovered that black holes are like a vitamin tablet placed in water; they can dissipate in time and release energy. This is what we know as Hawking radiation today. But how can energy escape a black hole when nothing else can? Hawking used a quantum understanding to explain this. When we think of space, we imagine large, cold, empty places. But in reality, space is alive with the act of creation and destruction of energy at the subatomic stage.

Particles are created in pairs, matter, and antimatter, and they are constantly created and destroyed in a concept known as annihilation. Hawking imagined a pair of particles created very close to the event horizon of a black hole. This is the boundary around a black hole from which nothing can escape. He then showed that these particles don't need to annihilate each other, since one of them can be sucked into the black hole.

If the black hole is receiving negative energy, then it has to release energy in order for the law of conservation of energy to hold. Hawking also proved that black holes lose mass with time and they don't last forever. But more importantly, he was able to arrive at this discovery by merging a quantum principle with the concept of gravity. This is by far the closest we've come to a theory of everything: a unified field theory or quantum gravity.

But as with most things in science, the fact that we haven't found that one elegant equation does not mean that we have failed. In fact, maybe the real treasure was the discoveries we made along the way, many of which have paved the way for a brighter future for humankind. String theory is one of the most prominent ones. It suggests that subatomic particles such as electrons and quarks are made of tiny vibrating strings or filaments that twist and fold, creating everything in our universe. Just like the strings of a violin, they can vibrate in various patterns, creating different kinds of particles, including the graviton, a hypothetical particle that, according to quantum mechanics, should carry the force of gravity.

On paper, string theory could unite gravity and quantum mechanics under one framework once and for all. The theory was popularized in the 60s and 70s, and its mathematics predicts small bundled-up extra dimensions that give rise to a network of universes, or a multiverse. While this theory is prominent, it's highly untestable. String theory, though, is only the beginning.

After almost two decades of tireless research, we've discovered the Higgs boson. This proved that electrons and quarks inside the atom get their mass from an invisible field that spreads throughout space. The discovery took an effort from a group of 3,000 scientists that dedicated endless hours to the cause that would surely bring our species one step closer to understanding our universe.

We've also discovered that all the atoms and light in the universe only make up less than 5% of the total content of the cosmos. The remaining 95% is composed of dark matter and dark energy, which are invisible but whose effects dominate the evolution of our universe. Dark matter provides the gravitational pull that keeps galaxies together, while dark energy is responsible for the ever-accelerating expansion of our universe.

For thousands of years, we've looked to the heavens and wondered what mysteries are hiding beyond the clouds. Since 1970, there have been more than 90 telescopes placed in orbit by NASA and the ESA to bring the universe closer to us. And with the James Webb Telescope that launched on December 25th, 2021, we entered a new era of discovery. This telescope is the largest and most powerful one ever built, and its daunting task is to find the first galaxies that formed in the early universe, and peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming, planetary systems.

We may not have found the theory that unites quantum with gravity yet, but every discovery brings us one step closer to that ultimate goal of unification. Throughout our time on this planet, we've pushed the boundaries of existence by asking tough questions and working tirelessly to find the answers. Our species has been defined by its incessant thirst for knowledge and unwavering hope in a unified universe.

350 years have elapsed since our first big successful step in this journey when Newton unified the heavens with the earth, revealing that planets, stars, and apples are guided by the same set of laws. 200 years later, James Clerk Maxwell coupled electricity with magnetism, and then Einstein linked space and time and warped them into one fabric that we now know as spacetime.

Looking at the timeline of these events, it shouldn't be surprising that the road ahead could be much longer. Einstein died dreaming of a physical world governed by one set of laws: a unified framework that can unlock the mysteries of our universe. And Hawking never ceased to look up at the stars and wonder what mysteries lie ahead waiting to be found. Whether the theory of everything is a realistic quest or a delusional attempt to make sense of the absurdity of the universe, one thing is certain: our unwavering hope in the search for unification will only lead to humanity's advancement as a species.

If you feel you're in a black hole, don't give up; there's a way out. If a tree falls down in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? How do you know? Taking it one step further, if you hear the tree hit the ground but don't see it, why do you trust your sense of hearing? This might seem like a ridiculous question, but the truth is that despite our total reliance on them, our senses deceive us all the time.

You hear this audio, and some of us hear "yanny," while others hear "laurel." Laurel. You think you hear your friend laughing in the other room, only to come out and see it's just the TV. A stick that looks bent in the water turns out to be straight when you pull it out. You spend what seems like hours walking through a dark and creepy forest but then wake up and realize you were just dreaming. The world is a strange place, and for all the knowledge we managed to gather as a species, there's still a lot more that we don't.

Here is everything we don't know too. "I think, therefore I am." You've likely heard this phrase before, coined by 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes. The simple declaration serves as the foundation of all modern philosophy. It's a statement of knowledge, an assertion that if I know nothing else, I at least know I exist.

While this may not seem like a revolutionary idea at first glance, it's actually quite significant. Philosophers since the time of Socrates have wondered whether or not it's possible to know anything, because it always seems that the more questions we ask, the fewer answers we're left with. Descartes himself was renowned for his astonishing ability to doubt everything, no matter how trivial, no matter how seemingly obvious. He treated all of his ideas with a radical level of skepticism, believing that doing so would eventually lead him to the truth.

This skepticism led him to ask a question that science still hasn't been able to answer: How do I know I'm not dreaming right now? Or, even more frightening, how do I know that my mind isn't being deliberately misled by some evil genius? Think of it like the movie "The Matrix." It's possible that at this very moment, you're hooked up to a giant machine that is feeding you all the sensory data you're currently experiencing. You aren't really watching this video; it's just the machine making you think that you are. While unlikely, technically it is possible, and there's no way we can disprove it.

This is why some people argue that we live in a simulation. Do we or don't we? We just don't know. Descartes argues that our inability to rule out this scenario forces us to doubt everything we think we know, a state of radical skepticism in which we can't trust anything we experience or think. Fortunately, Descartes offers us a way out. Even if we are forced to doubt everything, the one thing we cannot doubt is the fact that we're doubting. If we can doubt, then we can think, and if we can think, then there must be a mind doing the thinking.

So while we may never know whether or not the world around us is an illusion or if we even have physical bodies, we can rest easy in the knowledge that we have minds, that we exist. Right? Well, not so much. Later philosophers from Kant to Hegel criticized Descartes' claim, arguing that the existence of thoughts does not necessarily imply the existence of a thinker. Frederick Nietzsche went so far as to say that the idea that there is something called thinking is itself an assumption.

All we can really say then is that something is happening. What that thing is, we just don't know. If you're rolling your eyes at this point, it's understandable. To most people, this all sounds like a bunch of over-intellectualized nonsense with no bearing on the actual world. Even if we do live in "The Matrix," I still know that 2 + 2 = 4, that the sun is going to rise tomorrow, and that the Earth beneath my feet is solid.

Well, hold up on the last point. Part of the reason why it's so difficult to say whether we truly know anything is because we live in a dynamic universe where nothing is ever stable. Everything in existence is always moving and always changing, including the Earth itself. Even as you watch this video, the very face of the planet is evolving. Plate tectonic theory is a relative newcomer to science; first pioneered in the 1960s, our understanding of how the Earth shifts and moves is still fairly limited.

We've discovered certain things, like the fact that the Earth's rocky crust is in the form of plates that sit on top of a mantle of liquid magma. As this magma circulates and heats it, it pushes the plates around, knocking them into each other and creating earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountains. What this means is that, contrary to what we think, the ground beneath our feet isn't solid; it's constantly changing. And if it is, how can we say we know it? Tomorrow an earthquake could reshape our continents, and so the best we can ever have is a rough approximation of what we think it used to be, not what it actually is.

Maybe I'm just trying to strongarm a metaphor here, but it seems like whenever we investigate what we think we know, our ideas start to crumble. It's an interesting quirk of reality, really. The simpler a question is, the harder it can be to answer. It's for this reason that many people fear death, because we simply don't know anything about what happens after it. Yet, I cannot help but think that the fear that we don't know anything about death presupposes that we know what life is.

Because in reality, we don't know either. While it's easy for us to tell the difference between living and non-living materials, say like an apple versus a rock, but when we try to pin down a precise definition of life, things get complicated. All life forms, whether a plant or animal, bacteria or fungus, are composed of cells and are able to meet certain basic fundamental conditions. These include responsiveness, metabolism, energy transformation, growth, and reproduction.

For instance, when you smell food, you respond by feeling hungry. Eating a sandwich then starts your metabolic process, which allows you to convert calories into energy. This energy is then used to do things like grow muscles or attract a mate. But this is what life does, not what life is. The main problem is that the primary feature of life is that it's always changing, and definitions, by their nature, are meant to be static.

Perhaps if we knew where life came from, we'd have a better sense of what exactly it is. Unfortunately, we don't know this either. Of course one day science will figure this stuff out; the secrets to life, the Earth, and everything else will be unlocked. All it takes is more advanced technology, more sophisticated methods, and we'll be able to know the answers for certain, won't we?

Here's the thing, though: Science isn't ever 100% certain. When researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, otherwise known as CERN, announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, they did so by stating that their observations had passed the crucial threshold of five sigma certainty. To most people, this term is nothing more than academic jargon, but sigma in this context is the statistical unit of measurement used to determine how probable it is that a given result is correct. The higher the value, the more likely a particular finding is true, with five sigma being the gold standard, representing a one in a million chance that a given observation is inaccurate.

Though there's still a chance. You may think I'm splitting hairs here. After all, one in a million is as good as true, isn't it? Well, no! A 2011 experiment conducted by CERN reportedly found that a series of nearly massless ghost particles called neutrinos had traveled faster than the speed of light. This was, of course, impossible, as the finding violated Einstein's principle of relativity. Yet the experiment passed with a six sigma confidence, meaning that it had a staggering one in a half billion chance of being false.

And yet it was. Later experiments all failed to replicate the original results, and the first experiment was written up as a fluke. Science is very good at explaining what is happening and how it happens, but not really why it's happening. Pass any scientific revelation through a series of why questions, and you'll always get to a point where we just don't know. Take gravity for instance. When an apple falls from a tree and hits Isaac Newton on his head, we know it's gravity. We can even measure it as 9.8 m/s², but when it comes to explaining why this happens, almost 350 years later, we're still clueless.

Every other physical force in the universe—electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces—has a corresponding subatomic particle. Yet we still don't know what the particle responsible for gravity is. Physicists have theorized the existence of something called a graviton that, similar to the Higgs boson, requires massive amounts of energy to detect. In fact, it's predicted that it would take a mass spectrometer the size of Jupiter operating at 100% capacity to identify one. But why is a graviton so hard to find? Why is it that physics behaves like this?

And is it possible that it could work differently? The notion of alternate physics is most commonly associated with the multiverse theory, the idea that there isn't a single universe but an infinite array of different universes. We don't know if this is true, of course, but if it is, then it's possible that among these countless variations, there exist other types of physics.

Maybe in another universe, gravity isn't so difficult to measure; maybe instead, electromagnetism is the rogue force confounding their scientists. But it isn't just other universes that may operate under alternative sets of physical laws. Even our own universe may be subject to alternate forms of physics that we've yet to discover. In 2022, researchers at Columbia University programmed an AI to study video footage of different physical phenomena and then search for the minimal set of variables that described its observations. The footage included things like a pendulum, a lava lamp, and a fireplace.

When the AI returned its results, the researchers found that they could identify some of the variables that the artificial intelligence had defined, but not others. The belief is that the AI was applying novel sets of physical laws currently unknown to humans. Unfortunately, since the program can't communicate what it's thinking, the exact variables remain a mystery. However, it does raise an interesting question: If we were to meet an alien species, is it possible that they might use alternate laws of physics?

Ted Chang's "Story of Your Life," the inspiration for the 2016 film "Arrival," explores this idea. Fair warning, there's spoilers ahead. In the story, humans make first contact with aliens after dozens of spaceships suddenly appear in orbit. But rather than wanting to take over the planet, it seems that the extraterrestrial visitors just want to talk. To get the conversation going, both humans and the aliens work together to slowly decipher one another's language, as well as their respective approaches to physics.

It quickly becomes apparent that the scientific and mathematical concepts that are advanced to us, like calculus, are elementary to them. Surprisingly, though, the reverse is also true. The aliens deploy strange, seemingly convoluted methods to describe basic principles, like velocity. While both methods provide accurate results, each is highly specific to the species that developed them. Eventually, it's explained that the aliens don't perceive our universe as causal. Instead, they witness all events as happening simultaneously. This accounts for their weird set of physics.

Chang's "Story of Your Life" raises interesting questions surrounding concepts like time, perception, free will, and subjectivity, forcing us, readers, to wonder if there's such a thing as objective reality. How do we know that the reality we experience is independent of our own consciousness? This problem has plagued philosophers since antiquity. Plato, in particular, is known for having proposed the idea of the realm of forms, a non-physical, immaterial plane from which the physical world manifests.

Science actually functions on a similar principle, assuming that there is an objective reality that exists beyond our senses, which can be observed and measured. Despite our best efforts, though, no one has ever confirmed the existence of an objective reality. In fact, given that everything we know has to come first to us through our senses and therefore our own subjective perception, it's impossible to prove an objective reality.

We'll just never know. In his book "The Spell of the Sensuous," philosopher David Abram argues that the very idea of an objective reality isn't representative of the universe we live in. In actuality, Abram says we exist in the realm of inner subjectivity, a term he borrows from the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. This form of reality, rather than being a separate and isolated phenomenon, is created by the collective experience of all its participants. The universe doesn't exist as an object of our subjective perceptions; instead, it arises out of our very interaction with it.

If this idea sounds a little out there, consider quantum mechanics, where our mere observations literally affect the state of matter. Just by measuring a photon of light, we're able to change it from a wave to a particle. So maybe there's no such thing as objective reality. Maybe all that exists is our collective inner subjective experience. There's simply no way of knowing.

Plunging into the depths of uncertainty is never pleasant. That's why humans came up with reason and science in the first place. We want to feel as though we know things. It gives us a sense of control in an otherwise chaotic, unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous universe. For the majority of my life, I was agnostic about most things. If there wasn't what I deemed to be rational, scientific proof to support an idea, I just didn't believe it.

But the more I learn, the more I realize how limited my own experience is and just how much we as a species don't know. Ordinary matter accounts for just 5% of the entire universe. The rest of it, 95% of everything that exists, is a complete and total mystery. We just don't know. It seems naive, if not outright arrogant, to close myself off to new ideas just because they don't fit within my current understanding of how things work.

Tomorrow, the Earth could shift. Life as we know it could completely change, and everything that science has taught us could turn out to just be a fluke. But rather than meeting this dilemma with fear or outright rejection of scientific principles, we should take it as an opportunity to learn, embracing uncertainty as a means of transforming our perception.

To me, this seems like the only rational path forward. Because, as it turns out, everything we don't know is, well, everything. We've all experienced it. You're sitting around at the table for a family dinner. Across the table from you is that cousin you haven't seen since the last family get-together. In the most confident fashion, he opens his mouth and starts talking passionately on a subject he clearly knows very little about. You look down at your phone, and in one quick Google search, you find out everything he's saying is completely wrong. But he doesn't seem to know it.

Everyone else at the table doesn't seem to know it either. His confidence is so strong and unwavering that you start to wonder: Does this guy know how wrong he really is? This is the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who know very little about a subject tend to overestimate how much they know because they just don't know how much they don't know. As a result, the people who are most confident in their ability are not usually the ones who should be.

The term "Dunning-Kruger" is named after the two scientists who first discovered the psychological phenomenon: David Dunning and Justin Kruger. In 1999, they carried out research titled "Unskilled and Unaware of It," where they tested a group of people on grammar, humor, and logic. In the first experiment, the 65 participants were asked to rate jokes they thought people would find funny. The people who personally felt they were excellent judges of humor were the ones who did the worst on the test.

Dunning and Kruger then put the same participants through varying degrees of grammar and logic tests, and the results always came out the same. For the most part, the people who scored the least were the most confident going into the test and overestimated how well they did afterwards, while those who scored the most overestimated how well everyone else did.

Now you might think, how does this really happen? Surely you should just know when you fail a test, right? You have that gut feeling, and after all, you're the one who wrote it yourself. But that only happens when you know nothing about the subject at all. When we learn just a little bit about that subject, we start overestimating how much we actually know.

We are aware that we know about the subject; however, we don't know enough to know that there is still so much more to learn. We are not yet skilled enough to accurately assess our knowledge and abilities, so we think we know much more than we actually do. Imagine you're given a test about the culture of extraterrestrial life. You just watched a 30-minute YouTube documentary, and you're feeling pretty good about your knowledge of things that haven't been proven to exist.

But apart from this documentary, you haven't done any other research about extraterrestrial life. You haven't been to space, and you certainly don't have any alien friends. You're handed the test, and in it, you're asked to answer 20 questions about life as an extraterrestrial. I know what you're thinking: you're not entirely ignorant; you just watched a 30-minute documentary about aliens, so you'll certainly ace this test, or at least do better than the average, right?

Well, that is the Dunning-Kruger effect at work, because the truth is just one documentary is not nearly enough. You've only just discovered the tip of the iceberg, but because you don't know how big the ice under the water is, you'll keep living in the illusion that you've explored all of it. And we see this every day, from your cousin sitting across the room to that one coworker that gets really annoyed when someone else gets the promotion they feel they so desperately deserve.

Performance reports at work give us an unbiased view on how well we've done. However, when people truly don't know all that much get these results, they aren't satisfied with it because in their minds they've done a lot better than what the report says. So they make up excuses like "the boss didn't like me" or look down on the coworker that got the promotion over them, not stopping for once to think that maybe they still have a lot to learn.

All the engineers in the company were once asked to rate their work and determine how well they were doing compared to the rest of their colleagues. 42% of the engineers believed that they were among the top 5% in the company. In another scenario, professors were asked whether they did average, below average, or above average work. 94% of all the professors in the survey believed that they did above average work, a figure that defies mathematical plausibility.

You would think that professors, who are always grading people, would be able to come up with a more accurate self-assessment. But the reality is we are all victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect, both as professors and students. Some scientists argue that the Dunning-Kruger effect might not be because of poor self-assessment but rather just the poor performers wanting to paint a fluffed-up report of their performance. And while you can get where this argument is coming from, it doesn't make sense.

There are a lot of places where we observe the Dunning-Kruger effect even when there's no reason for the person to want to look good. The truth is we can't give an accurate judgment of skills we know only very little about because we simply don't know what is good and what is not. We haven't seen both ends of the spectrum. Metacognition is the awareness of your own thought processes. It's being able to plan, monitor, and assess your own performance and understanding.

It's like your brain's way of grading itself. In their research, Dunning and Kruger discovered that the lesser people know about a subject, the lesser their metacognitive ability around that subject. This is what makes them unaware of their own incompetence. This is a very strange thing because it means that oftentimes the loudest person in the room is usually the one who knows the least.

Bertrand Russell said this in 1951, and it still rings true today. Even now, more than ever, because although he thought it was just a thing of his time, it wasn't; it was simply the Dunning-Kruger effect at work. The sad thing is that people who know the least are also the least likely to take up a learning opportunity. Think about the 42% of engineers who believe that they were in the top 5%. They'll most likely ignore any opportunities to learn from their colleagues because they already believe that they're the best.

On the other hand, the people who are the best don't realize that they're so special, so they don't try to teach others, even when they're the ones that should be doing that. In the end, the company remains stagnant. Life is very much like this company. Go on the internet today, and the loudest voices are the ones who know the least. Everywhere you turn, there's a fake guru trying to teach you how to become a billionaire overnight. They have very little knowledge, but that doesn't stop them from selling thousand courses with the same basic information that you can get just by Googling the right things.

The sad thing is that most people buy under their confidence and certainty, only to realize too late that it was all bravado and no substance. Now, more than ever, misinformation is a bigger problem than ignorance. People briefly glance through a topic, and they instantly want to start teaching others. They don't take their time to actually read past the first page of the instruction manual before screaming at the rooftops about how much they know or how much they think they know.

So more often than not, we're listening to the most confident people and not the most reputable. We accept information from the person who speaks the loudest rather than the person who is the most knowledgeable. From 5G death scares to anti-vaccine campaigns, people are constantly satisfied with knowing the bare minimum. Not only are they satisfied, they are confident that they know it all, and they waste no time in sharing that information with others.

If the loudest voices are ignorant, why aren't the knowledgeable speaking up? Again, it's the Dunning-Kruger effect. When the 65 participants were given the three tests by Dunning and Kruger, people who scored the best often knew they did pretty well on the test. However, they felt everyone else did too. They overestimated the scores of the other people in the test and didn't think anything special of their own results.

When asked to place themselves in a percentile, more often than not, the people who did the best placed themselves lower than they actually were. Because of this, the people who have any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. The people who are most knowledgeable don't realize that they are, so they find it difficult to speak up. It's easy for us to think that because something comes so easily and naturally to us, it does to others as well.

It's easy to think that we're not special and that everyone can do as well as we've done. But in reality, that's not true. In fact, if you think your work is not good enough, then it's already probably better than most, because unlike the people at the bottom of the percentile, you know what you don't know, so you are more willing to improve.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is not entirely a bad thing. In fact, it's the reason most of us can take a leap of faith. I started this channel without knowing how difficult running a YouTube channel is, how badly an algorithm can beat you down, how the numbers on the screen affect the value you placed on your work. I didn't know all of that at first. All I knew was to make a video and upload it.

I feel like if I had known how difficult it would be in the long run, I might have never even started. So in a way, the Dunning-Kruger effect helps us to make the first move, without worrying too much about everything we don't know yet. It gives us the confidence to start. Once we take that first step, though, it's up to us to not get comfortable and confident in the little that we know. We must fight the cognitive biases and realize that we've only scratched the surface and there's still a long way to go.

We're often taught not to compare ourselves with others, and most of the time, that's excellent advice. Constantly pitting yourself against others can leave you unhappy and unmotivated. But the truth is comparison isn't always a bad thing. When we compare ourselves with others, we're able to better assess how well we're doing. Think about the participants of Dunning and Kruger's experiment. If the people who had scored the lowest were shown the scores of all the participants afterward, they would have been able to understand that they weren't as knowledgeable as they thought they were.

If you're very confident about how much you know, pause for a minute. Take your time before sharing that information with others. Question your long-standing views and opinions, because there might just be new information that has come to light to disprove what you hold so dearly to your heart. Be open to feedback and criticism. While it's true that people shouldn't discourage your dreams, you need to understand that sometimes you may be overestimating your skills.

So take the criticism and consider it carefully. If you do, you're most likely going to learn a thing or two that you didn't already know. When you're fully aware of the metacognitive bias, that is the Dunning-Kruger effect, you'll know when to ask for objective criticism and feedback, and when to trust your own abilities and realize that you might just be special after all. Don't be satisfied with the little knowledge you have. Keep improving; continue learning. Always ask questions and be curious. Your curiosity will be rewarded, whether you realize it or not.

I made my first video on this channel in July 2017 after months of going back and forth on whether or not I actually wanted to create a YouTube channel. What would people think? What if people hate the videos and tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about? Who am I to talk about these topics? These were the thoughts that flooded my head.

If you've ever been in a situation where you have to start something or give a presentation in front of a group of people, then I'm sure you've had a similar emotion. It's the fear of being judged; the fear that keeps us in chains and holds us bound from achieving our true potential. To understand why we care so much about what others think about us, we have to go back to the beginning of human history. Man, like many other animals, evolved to be social. Our survival was dependent on close-knit communities, tribes, and clans.

We would hunt together, make shelter, and protect one another from predators should they dare strike. Being together made us thrive. So at the time, being cast out of the clan almost always meant death. Without the technologies we have today, making shelter, hunting, and protecting yourself from wildlife was almost impossible for one person to do alone. Sadly, even now that our society has evolved to a point where we no longer have to worry about predators and we have the tools and resources to provide food, clothing, and shelter for ourselves, the need to be part of a group still has been maladapted to our current reality.

Then we were scared of being left out in the cold; today we're scared of getting canceled on Twitter because of something we said, or getting insulted for repeating clothes on Instagram, or getting hate comments on your YouTube video of people telling you your voice is becoming redundant and boring. You see, this feeling of being ostracized has worsened woefully because of social media. By creating likes and dislikes, we brought to light this need to feel validated, and in an instant, you can see just how many people support you, and that number can be addicting.

It gets to the point to where we stop saying what we really want to say and instead start saying the things we know will get us the most likes. Before you know it, you're posting certain thoughts, photos, and writing specific statements to get that attention and validation from others. How many times have you seen your favorite influencers and creators online suddenly sell out, where it feels like they're no longer authentic, only doing or saying the things they know will please the algorithm?

I made a video about Unit 731 and the despicable things the Japanese government did in the Second World War. However, because it was not advertiser-friendly content according to YouTube, the video didn't perform extremely well. And that's fine. This is the kind of airbrushing and social conditioning that makes people fall in line and stop saying anything that might offend the people with money. It's like they tell you there's freedom of speech, but only when your microphone is turned off.

Growing up, I always felt different. Of course, I had friends and wanted to be part of the social group, but I had questions about the universe that people just didn't like to discuss. Who wants to talk about death and the afterlife on the school playground after all? Because of that, I felt different from everyone else, like a piece of a puzzle but from another set.

So I grew up worried that everyone would look at me as weird and different, so I tried my best to hide my existential dread, to fit in like everyone else. If you're watching this video right now, there's a high chance that you were also once a kid like me, who was so worried about being disliked that you shield the real you, just so you wouldn't be thought of as different.

If you're still in that position, listen: stop caring so much about what other people think and start living your life authentically. Yes, caring what others think is healthy. However, it becomes harmful when we try to change ourselves just to be liked by others. You would enjoy your time on this floating rock far more if you choose to live your authentic self. And if someone rejects you because of it, you'll know that they were never meant for you in the first place.

Now, if that sounds like a lofty dream and not really grounded in reality, I understand. Because the sad truth of this entire thing is that we do need to be judged fairly by others. At its core, that's what makes our society work. We agree that something is law, and whoever breaks it gets judged. We agree on certain moral principles, and whoever breaks them gets socially ostracized. We're judged at our places of work, in school, in our society as a whole.

As sad as it sounds, gossip and ostracism helped the greater good of the group. In 2014, Stanford Professor Rob Willer led a study that explored the relation of gossip and ostracism to the harmony and functionality of experimental groups. In this study, Rob found out that groups that allowed their members to gossip and vote out underperforming members were able to sustain cooperation and prevent selfishness much better than groups that weren't allowed to do so.

When we think of ostracism, we almost always see it in a bad light. However, the study proved that it does have a much more important role in preventing the weak and vulnerable from being bullied and ridden upon. Have you ever been in a group for a school project, only to quickly realize that there's one person who just wouldn't do anything because they know the group will pick up their slack? How's that make you feel?

Now imagine you could remove these people from the group and then gossip to other groups about how bad of a team player they are. It might seem harsh at first, but because of our innate fear of being ostracized, more often than not, these people would see the reality of what they're doing and actually act better when reinvited into the group. It also prevents these selfish people from exploiting the more vulnerable people in the group and allows them to reach their full potential without fear of being taken advantage of.

The researchers concluded that exclusion compelled participants to conform to the more cooperative behavior of the rest of the group. So yes, we need to be good team players for the proper functioning of society. However, being part of a group should never be at the expense of our own individuality. We should never get so scared of being ostracized that we do not say the things that matter to us for the fear of being judged.

We need to realize that we will get to a point in our lives where we'll begin to assess everything that we've been taught as children. When you start to outgrow old beliefs and walk into new ones, do not be held back by the fear of what everyone who you grew up with would think. Caring about what other people think is necessary for the proper functioning of society, but when caring what other people think affects our abilities to make decisions for ourselves, that's when you need to pause and reconsider.

You're a person with your own thoughts, ideas, dreams, and goals. Don't let the fear of being disliked hold you back from expressing that you want to drop out of school to become a comedian. What would people think? You want to start a YouTube channel? What would people think? You want to be with someone from a different culture or religion? What would people think?

This one question holds so many people back from doing what they love. It's like a chain that binds our neck and leaves us no room to breathe. We're like circus elephants held back by a rope that might only exist in our imagination. Ultimate freedom is having the courage to be disliked, the boldness to stand firm in what you believe in, even when the crowd is saying something else. The courage to stand when everyone else is sitting and run when everyone else is standing.

The courage to be your authentic self, regardless of what everyone around you tells you to be. Instead, developing the courage to be disliked is not easy. Remember that it's in our nature to care what other people think, so to stray from that, even minutely, would mean going against our very own biology, and that's never very easy. But the good news is we can actually do it.

The first and most important thing to realize is that everyone, just like you, is worried about their own insecurities. When we go out into the world, we're often so consumed with our own insecurities that we feel like everyone else is thinking about us and condemning us. But the reality is, more often than not, just like you, people are so worried about themselves that they aren't really thinking about anyone else.

And when they do speak out against us, they're often projecting their insecurities on us, trying to bring us down to feel better about themselves. Don't let them do that. The difference between ostracism in early humans and what we have today is that, with the early humans, it was only your closest relatives and members of your clan that could cast you out. However, today, because of social media, anyone and everyone can have an opinion about us, share that opinion, and we're forced to take notice of it.

The problem with this is that we're taking criticism from people we wouldn't take advice from. Think about it: if you wouldn't let this stranger into your house for fear of invading your privacy, why would you let them into your head, the most private place of all? Sometimes the people judging you and not letting you live your true potential aren't strangers; they're childhood friends and relatives. When that's the case, we need to remind ourselves that the consequences of living outside the group are not as sinister as it used to be.

You have the tools and resources to thrive away from your primary group, and in fact, you can find another group to join—one that would accept you for who you are and not try to force you into being something you're not. I know I've said some negative things about social media in this video and many others, but there are some positives as well. In this scenario, where you no longer feel part of the group you were born into or grew up in, the internet offers you a community of people who are willing to accept you from all over the world. You just have to take the time to find them.

Lao Tzu wrote, "Care about people's approval, and you will be their prisoner." The courage to be disliked is the key that opens the prison doors and sets you free to be the person you've always wanted to be. You look out the window into the empty streets. No sounds of kids running around. No noise of busy streets littered with both cars and pedestrians. The city is silent. The pigeons don't even group up anymore because there's no one to feed them. You ask yourself, "Where am I?"

Your alarm rings; it's 9:00 a.m. Time to resume work at the office for the day. With a sad face, you walk to your desk, open up your computer, and sigh. "I miss the old days," you say to yourself. This is nostalgia. It's the burning desire to go back to the past, to live the life we once had—or perhaps only a romanticized version of it.

We want experiences, places, things, people, and even ourselves to go back to being what they once were. We remember our childhood memories without all the awkwardness; our first love, without the reason we're no longer with them; our first kiss, without the terrible acne we had. We remember a romanticized version of our past, one without the flaws, one where we know what's going to happen next, and one where we can tell what consequences our actions will have before we take them.

It often happens when we see, hear, or even smell something that reminds us of the past and the life we once had. The best example of this is in relationships. People often leave relationships because it wasn't a good experience for them, but a few months down the line, and they begin to start missing the connection. They feel like maybe it wasn't as bad as they remember. Their memories begin to filter out all the bad that happened, and they're left with feelings of nostalgia about a romanticized version of what the relationship was.

Oftentimes, they go back only to get hurt all over again. Nostalgia can be pleasant, but as we've seen, it can also often cause us a lot of emotional distress. The 17th-century Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who came up with this name, classified nostalgia as a mental disorder. No one could understand why anyone would want to dwell in the past. Without that being the case, and for a long, long time, that's what nostalgia was, until one lunch in 1999.

In Southampton, England, Constantine Saus had just recently moved to the University of Southampton and was having lunch with a colleague. He explained to this colleague that he was generally doing well, but a few times a week, he was hit with nostalgia from his former home at the University of North Carolina. He longed for the time with his friends, the basketball games. He longed for his old life.

His colleague, who was a clinical psychologist, made an immediate diagnosis: “depression,” he said just like the 17th-century Swiss physician. This psychologist couldn't fathom why anyone would want a time that was already gone. However, Constantine denied being depressed, explaining to his colleague that he didn't feel any pain. He said, "I told him I did live my life forward, but sometimes I couldn't help thinking about the past, and it was rewarding."

Nostalgia made me feel that my life had roots and continuity. It made me feel good about myself and my relationships. It provided a texture to my life and gave me strength to move forward. This was the start of a drastic change. Everything we knew about nostalgia was about to take on a new form.

Perhaps it was not as bad as we thought; it might not even be bad at all. Through Constantine's research, the word nostalgia has slowly lost its negative reputation, but not entirely. You see, nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion. On one hand, it brings us comfort and makes us feel loved and connected when we remember all the times our loved ones cared for us, or of a time in our life where everything was going right.

On the other hand, it makes us feel sad that those things are gone and scared that we might never experience them again. A great example of this is when Abraham Lincoln visited his childhood home after 20 years. He arrived and found the place in ruin. Saddened by what he saw, he wrote this poem: “My childhood home I see again, and saddened with the view, as still as memory clouds my brain.”

There’s pleasure in it too, because although it saddened him to see that he would never be able to experience those emotions again, remembering the times he spent in the house and the happiness it brought when he was younger brought happy thoughts to his memory. Positive feelings of nostalgia make you thankful for what you've had and give you the desire to keep moving forward.

Perhaps you might even be able to recreate that amazing feeling or even experience something better in the future. Negative feelings of nostalgia, however, make you feel like your life was better in the past. You might even start to beat yourself up for choices you made in the past because you think whatever decisions you made are negatively affecting your life today. You get stuck in a cycle of thoughts about the past that basically leaves you frustrated, defeated, and stuck.

When things like that happen, it's often because you haven't taken the time out to process that experience. It has happened, but you didn't give your brain enough time to mourn it and move on from it. You put up a wall; you seal it away as many of us do. However, once you can truly process the experience and come to terms with what came from it, you'll stop experiencing the negative nostalgic feeling that's associated with that particular memory.

One of the best things about the feeling of nostalgia is that it's all about you, and people love themselves more than anything else. Most human emotions we feel are felt as a result of external forces. We get sad when something doesn't go our way; we get disappointed in people when they do something unexpected that we rather they didn't; we get angry at people when they do something to agitate us.

But nostalgia—nobody does anything to us. In fact, oftentimes we can't pinpoint the trigger for our nostalgia. All we know is that a few times a week, we remember our old life with friends, family, and times we shared with loved ones, and as memories cloud our brain, there's pleasure in it too.

Now, this does not mean that outside forces can't trigger nostalgia. As we all know, advertisers have discovered the power of nostalgia, and they use it to their advantage all the time. That's why you have Disney remaking all of their best cartoons. They're trying to make people nostalgic so they flock to the cinemas, trying to recapture a moment of their previous lives.

But unlike trying to make someone feel happy or sad for a character, a movie trying to make someone feel nostalgic is very tricky and can often backfire. Just look at the Lion King live-action movie, the first Sonic the Hedgehog trailer, and more recently, Tom and Jerry. All three of these movies tried to make people nostalgic, but they failed completely in their goal. Why? Because nostalgia is a very complex emotion.

The question "who am I" has plagued humanity for millennia. Every five years, every single atom in your body will have been replaced by a different atom. Your thoughts, opinions, and feelings about things will have also changed. Sometimes where you live and your friends may have even changed. So who are you? Is there one true aspect to your being that stamps you as being one of one?

What part of us acts as the random seed that is tied to our existence? The best philosophers, scientists, and psychologists have had a go at this question, but all to no avail. And while nostalgia certainly doesn't answer the question, it helps us calm the anxiety it causes. We can say that what makes you, you, are your specific memories about the past, all of which tell you about how you've changed and become the person you are today. They tell you that you are a continuous being, one whose existence grows linearly with time.

When we're feeling like a failure, like we don't have any purpose in life, like we have no value or any meaning, we can often tap into our nostalgic memories for comfort, to calm our worrying minds and to remind us that we do have intrinsic value, that we are not failures with no purpose. We have friends, family, and healthy experiences we can cling on to.

Nostalgia usually happens when there's a major life transition, like when you're going off to college, moving to a new city, traveling across the world, or getting married. It's like our brains are trying to grab hold of who we were, even as we're still learning who we are and discovering who we want to be. Right now, people are feeling nostalgic more than ever, and honestly, that’s exactly what a year in lockdown will do to you.

We begin to feel nostalgic when we see live performances we went to in the past, large family gatherings we used to detest, and even little things like the noise of a busy grocery store or kids screaming on airplanes. Maybe not the last one, because we're limited in our ability to go out and create new experiences. Our brain is rerunning the old ones again and again, to give us that sense of warmth and connection that many of us are missing in our daily lives right now.

The internet has modified everything we used to do as a society. Mobs have morphed into cancel culture. We no longer have to be physically present at work or school, and we now even have a dedicated day to feel nostalgic. Social media calls it TBT, or Throwback Thursday. Every Thursday, people post nostalgic photos of both themselves and of a time period to sit back and reflect on what once was. We also have things like Snapchat, Facebook, and Google Photos bringing us memories of pictures we've taken from a few years ago.

Having all of these memories flood not just our minds but also our phone screens, without having the ability to make new ones, you can see why people are feeling nostalgic now more than ever before. We also see nostalgia in sports. For years, there's been the very heated debate of who’s the GOAT—who is the greatest athlete of all time in the NBA. You often hear of LeBron versus Jordan, but in reality, even if LeBron James ends his career with more titles than Michael Jordan, MJ will always still have the nostalgia factor on his side.

He's many people's childhood, and no one will ever argue that their sports idol, the one who they watched while they were growing up, isn't the GOAT. However, with enough time, the modern-day GOATs turn into old legends, and slowly but surely get outshined by new and rising talent. The arguments we have today will be the same arguments we have in the future, only with different people and different nostalgic factors.

Nostalgia is a very interesting emotion because we all, in some way, want to feel it, even if it brings us both happiness and pain. Often times, the best memories are the ones we remember with both happiness and sadness. On days when we feel our worst, it makes us feel sad, angry, and even scared that we might never get those feelings again. But even on those days, nostalgia has the power to bring us hope and make us realize that we all have a story that is still being written.

Why do we remember the past and not the future? Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us? What does it really mean to say time passes? Wonder is the source of our desire for knowledge, and nostalgia helps us remember how far our curiosity can take us from where we were, to where we are, to where we will be. Nostalgia will be there all along the way.

You were on your way home when you died. It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered that you were better off, trust me. And that's when you met me.

"Wait, what happened?" you asked. "Where am I?"

"You died," I said matter-of-factly. "No point in mincing words."

"There was a truck, and it was skidding."

"Yep," I said.

"I died?"

"Yep, but don't feel bad about it. Everyone dies," I said.

You looked around; there was nothingness, just you and me.

"What is this place?" you asked.

"Is this the afterlife?"

"More or less," I said.

"Are you God?" you asked.

"Yep," I replied.

Few things capture our imagination quite like death. It's going to happen to us; we know it's going to happen to us, and yet we live our lives pretending that it's not going to happen—not to us, at least. We think not right now. We run away from it every chance we get, and yet somehow we are preoccupied with it almost simultaneously.

We ignore death and worship its possibility. We write books about how life is short, but we never really live like it is. Who are we? What do you think happens after death?

"My kids, my wife," you said. "What about them? Will they be all right?"

"That's what I like to see," I said. "You just died, and your main concern is for your family. That's good stuff right there."

You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn't look like God. I just looked like some man or possibly a woman, some vague authority figure—maybe more of a grammar school teacher than the Almighty.

"Don't worry," I said. "They'll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn't have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it's any consolation, she'll feel very guilty for feeling relieved."