Shower Thoughts: Paradoxes That Will Change Your Life

As light travels through space, it behaves like a wave, but light is also made of tiny particles called photons. This is the paradox of wave-particle duality, and it has completely revolutionized modern physics. The universe is filled with intriguing paradoxes like this—statements that challenge our understanding of reality and force us to question our deepest assumptions. These paradoxes have the power to change our lives in profound ways, opening us up to new possibilities and reshaping the very fabric of our existence.

Here are paradoxes that will change your life. Well, the lotto jackpot has grown to over 64 million dollars. It all started with a lottery ticket. If you go out and buy a lottery ticket knowing fully well that your chances of winning are 10 million to one, it'd be logical to assume you didn't win. You'd also be justified in thinking that your friend, your uncle, his sister, their cousin, and their dog all have losing tickets. You're justified in believing that everyone who bought a ticket will lose, even when you know the lottery was fair and there has to be a winner somehow. You're justified in believing something you know to be false.

This demonstrates that truth is relative. It depends on the context, prejudice, and your perspective about the world because the truth is the only thing you can prove with certainty: that nothing is certain. This is why people don't consider Pinocchio saying, "My nose will grow now," to be a paradox. His nose will not grow because he didn't lie; he simply made a false prediction.

If we have a set of all sets that do not contain themselves, does that set contain itself? Imagine there's a barber who shaves all men who don't shave themselves, and only men who don't shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself? This is an example of Russell's Paradox—a paradox that shook the mathematical world. These paradoxes playfully nudge us into realizing that self-reference can often lead to unexpected contradictions.

Contradictions aside, though we all want to be happy, those who seek out happiness directly often don't find it. This is the paradox of hedonism. If we truly want to be happy, we need to stop searching for happiness and pursue other meaningful activities, like nurturing our relationships or serving others, and only then can we be truly happy. The pursuit of pleasure, in its raw form, often leads to disappointment, while a life lived in service can lead to unexpected happiness. Deep down, we all know this.

Endless partying, decadent eating habits, and shopping sprees—we know these activities are never as fulfilling as we think they are. More often than not, we're left with a sense of emptiness after the dust settles. It's called post-indulgence clarity. We see this paradox even in our relationships. Expecting your partner to completely control your happiness often makes them unable to make you happy—at least not in the way you want it.

The reality is that to have good relationships, we need to be somewhat independent of them. People think that to find the right partner, they need all the options in the world to make the perfect person. But in truth, having more options isn't always better. Just look at the fact that we have all these dating apps at our fingertips, and many of us still can't find a healthy relationship. This is the paradox of choice, and contrary to what we think, many options often leave us less satisfied with our final decision.

I once watched a TikTok where this guy said men today see more beautiful women while scrolling through TikTok for five minutes than kings from the past did in their entire lives. Although it was a joke, he was entirely correct. But it's not a good thing. According to biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the human brain isn't built to deal with more than five to nine options for a partner. After that, the brain goes into decision paralysis, where it almost refuses to pick. So, the next time you feel inundated by options, remember that less is sometimes better, and more data may not always be more informative.

Learning is great. Asking questions and figuring out how things work is how our species has gotten to where it is today. But learning is also a paradox because the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. It's an amazing paradox, one that encourages you to never stop learning, which is exactly what our sponsor for today's video, Curiosity Stream, is all about. This platform offers a stream of exclusive, award-winning original documentaries, films, and shows to satisfy your curiosity, with a deep library consisting of science, nature, history, technology, food, music, and more, and new content added every single week. There's something for everyone.

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Paradoxes are everywhere—in mathematics and statistics, like Simpson's paradox. Here, trends that appear in different groups will disappear or even reverse when the groups are combined to form a larger group. In the 1970s, UC Berkeley was accused of gender bias against women in its admissions process. At first glance, the admissions data made it seem like men were more likely to be admitted than women. But when the data was broken down into individual departments, most departments had admission percentages that were significantly in favor of women. The problem was that a higher proportion of women were applying to more competitive departments with lower admission rates.

So when compared to all the men in the school, it seemed like women had lower rates of admission. But when compared to the men in each department, it was clear that the women actually had a higher rate. This is unfortunately how misinformation spreads—typically, it's not with wrong data, but with the correct data expressed without proper context. Because the reality is that often, as paradoxical as it may seem, the whole is different from the sum of its parts.

Change is ever-present in our lives. The human body replaces billions of cells daily, and every seven years or so, you are an entirely different cellular collection. So if we're constantly changing, how do we know the person we are today is the same person we were seven years ago? One might say the essence of who we are remains, but that essence is really just the result of our thoughts, beliefs, and experiences, which are also changing. So who really are you? Maybe you like defining yourself based on your struggles—how hard you pursue something. Do you want to achieve something, but have you ever thought that sometimes trying too hard to get something almost makes it impossible to get?

It's the backwards law, and it's an interesting concept with lots of layers to uncover. If you're interested in a dedicated video about the subject, just let me know in the comments below. In 2016, after his infamous penalty miss against Chile, Lionel Messi hung up his boots with his beloved Argentina in what seemed like the last nail in the coffin. Messi simply had enough.

On the club stage, success seemed to come to him so easily, but where he really wanted it—where he desperately tried to do it all by himself—victory seemed elusive. Consider the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise coined by Zeno, the father of stoicism. In this paradox, Achilles gives the tortoise a head start and races to infinity. Zeno argued that Achilles will never truly overtake the tortoise because when he reaches where the tortoise started, the tortoise will have moved a little further. This pattern will continue to infinity.

The paradox is silly, but it challenges our perception of movement, space, and infinity. The realization it leaves with us, especially with Messi's story, is that sometimes no matter how much you try, some things seem just that little bit out of reach. Messi had to accept that part of his legacy was beyond his control. The Argentine Football Federation was underfinanced and poorly managed, and there was no one around him when he needed support, with criticism pouring down from all sides and embarrassing defeats one after another. The dream would remain just that—a dream.

Yet as soon as he let go, the tide began turning. Messi took almost a metaphorical back seat, dropping deeper than his traditional role, playing farther from the goal than he had ever played. His job now wasn't to shine himself, but to cast light on the others, many of whom were young kids who were fans of him. When he hung up his boots in 2016, but there he was on December 18th, 2022—nearly six years after that missed penalty—lifting the World Cup. Very few stories are as remarkable as Messi's. Most of us live and die without doing or being anything special. Or is that so?

If there's nothing oddly special about us, the Earth and the life it holds, then the universe should be teeming with life. And yet it isn't. You might say maybe that it is, and we just aren't advanced enough to search the galaxy to find it, and you'll be right. But considering how young our galaxy is compared to others out there, and that if given enough time any advanced species should be able to figure out interstellar travel, if there are any aliens, we should have seen them by now. This is Fermi's Paradox, and put simply by a New York Times article, it exclaims: if life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now.

Maybe equally paradoxical is the insignificance of the question: Are we special? When you boil it down to the individual, there's around 20 quintillion animals on Earth—that's 20 billion billion. Yet the value of a single life isn't questioned. So why do we think that the universe teeming with life will make us any less unique? There's something innately valuable about life. What exactly it is, they remain forever elusive.

Speaking of elusive things in life, the coastline paradox is a geographical conundrum that originated in the mind of British scientist Louis Fry Richardson. It's a concept that challenges our understanding of measurement and infinity, revealing a surprising contradiction that's not only mathematical but also physical. Essentially, this paradox states that the length of a coastline depends on the length of the tool used to measure it. The shorter the ruler, the longer the measured length of the coastline.

This is because a smaller ruler can capture more of the intricate twists and turns of the coastline. But here the paradox arises: theoretically, as the ruler gets infinitely small, the length of the coastline becomes infinitely large. Consider the coastline of Britain as an example. If we were to measure it with a 100-kilometer ruler, we would get a significantly shorter length than with a one-kilometer ruler, which would capture more details of the coastline. And if we used a one-centimeter ruler, the coastline would appear even longer. Following this logic to its extreme, the coastline seems to stretch to infinity as the ruler shrinks to zero.

But how can this be? After all, Britain is an island of finite size. The paradox stems from the fractal nature of coastlines; they have a high degree of complexity and self-similarity at all scales. This is a real-world example of a mathematical concept known as fractal geometry. The coastline paradox is not only mind-bending, but it also has practical implications for cartography, geology, and various other disciplines. It teaches us a humbling lesson about the limitations of our measurements and how they can be influenced by the scale at which we look at things.

It's a testament to the unexpected complexities that can emerge from something as simple as measuring a length. The coastline paradox is a stunning illustration of how reality can defy our intuitive assumptions, revealing an infinitely intricate, endlessly fascinating world of surprises. It's a poetic ode to the idea of paradoxes themselves. From being incorporated into movies to revolutionizing reality and the sciences, paradoxes have captured our imagination—intellectual enigmas. That's what they are—beautiful puzzles that tease our intellect to challenge our perceptions and invite us to look beyond the apparent. They hold up a mirror to the complexities of life in the universe, reflecting an intriguing and elusive existence.

Paradoxes gracefully illustrate that our universe isn't a mere collection of absolutes, but a symphony of mysteries, wonders, and unfathomable truths.