The Universe's Biggest Paradoxes

acting a little self-obsessed is different from feeling like we are truly the only person who exists. What would that be like? Everyone and everything else being a figment of our imagination; actually being the center of the universe. It seems like a fun what-if game to play, but if you think about it long enough, could it make sense? Are you sure the phone you're holding in your hands is even real? Could you be certain that the woman you just bought a coffee from was indeed there? The only thing we can be certain of is our own mind; at least that's what the philosophy of solipsism tells us.

Solipsism is an extreme type of skepticism that anything external from our minds does not exist. The outside world, other people, their thoughts and emotions simply don't exist outside of our perception of them. Solipsism is presented as an explanation for what the external world actually is; it basically says it isn't anything. It's make-believe, imaginary, literally in our heads. The house we live in, the people we love, the car we drive, and the food we eat—they are our perception. The sky, the moon, the whole solar system are merely figments of our own minds. Solipsism equates the existence of anything with one's personal experiences, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors—they are the only things we can be certain of as individuals.

It tells us that we are indeed the center of the universe. Many philosophers have argued similar ideas to solipsism, trying to solve the gap between our perception of things and their actual existence. For example, George Berkeley similarly wanted to know if things we did not see actually existed. He asked the classic question: if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a noise? He answered no; that something like the noise the tree makes only exists if someone can perceive it.

But he didn't go as far as solipsism takes us. He felt that solipsists were actually absurd. He reasoned that if a solipsist thinks their mind is the only thing in existence, then it can't be perceived by anything or anyone else. If it can't be perceived, then it cannot exist. If the only thing that existed was the mind and its perception, then the actual world wouldn't be there, and then we'd be what? Nothing. Maybe we would live in The Matrix, living in an illusion, a figment of someone else's perception that only some know isn't real.

But the thing about the idea of The Matrix or for that matter solipsism in general is that it doesn't really appeal to common sense. We know that our dog exists because we just do. Solipsism is more about logic. We can think to ourselves, I only have direct access to the contents of my own mind: sensory experiences, thoughts, and memories. These contents are completely private. I might share them, but no one really knows them besides me. At the same time, I'm unable to access anyone else's mind, so I can only infer their existence indirectly. Therefore, the only thing of certainty is that my mind exists. We can't logically assert anything else, so we end up sealed in this prison cell of our perception of the world around us.

We experience our own mind in every single moment of our lives but simply assume that other people are having the same lived experience. We will never be sure that they actually possess thoughts and emotions like we do. The universe is filled with mystery. The only way we know how to explain this mystery is through science and technology. If you want to understand more about what goes on in our universe, then I recommend you check out brilliant.org, the best place online to learn science, computer science, and math, and also the sponsor of today's episode.

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Back to our story: natural selection gave us the capacity for empathy and the ability to detect other people's emotions and intentions. It also gave us the ability to deceive one another in fear that we are being deceived. Ironically, wouldn't the ultimate deception be pretending to be conscious when someone is not? Solipsism prevents us from knowing if this deception is actually happening but reminds us that the intentions of other people and things can never truly be known.

We lack what neuroscientist Christoph Koch calls a consciousness meter—a device that would measure consciousness in the same way that a thermometer measures temperature. Without any sort of instrument, we rely on our own preconceptions that other human consciousness is akin to our own because the elusive consciousness meter is an impossibility. Theories of consciousness like solipsism are endless and completely speculative. There are different degrees of solipsism that answer that question. For example, metaphysical solipsism tells us that definitely the self is the only existing reality. But then there's methodological solipsism, which goes even further and says that the brain is actually a part of the external world because it only exists in response to what is on the outside.

In this branch of philosophy, the only thing that is certain are thoughts. Therefore, we can reject solipsism but still understand that the feeling of being estranged from others and perhaps confronting the idea that we are alone—there's no way to know if what we perceive exists outside our minds. Could we fully be dreaming of our world? Solipsism tells us that we might be.

It rejects the idea that we can assume the existence of other people's consciousness and presents something known as the problem of other minds. The problem of other minds is the basis of solipsism; it says that since we can't enter other people's heads and see the world from their point of view, it's impossible to prove that they exist. We can't feel their sadness, anger, or joy. We can, though, understand that our emotions are real. When someone dies, we feel the pit of deep grief inside of us. When we fall in love, it feels like an explosion inside our consciousness. We know that these feelings are real because, well, we feel them.

What about other people's feelings? One of the criticisms of solipsism is its close relation to narcissism. Recently it seems like you can't go on your phone, watch TV, or even have a conversation with a friend without the idea of self-care coming up. For some, this might just mean a weekly yoga class or enjoying a face mask before they go to bed. But the line is thin between extreme self-care and self-worship. Putting ourselves first can be healthy, but valuing only ourselves leads to broken relationships, isolation, and even struggles with mental health.

Unfortunately for those who believe in solipsism, the philosophy supports the rather narcissistic idea that our mind is the only mind that matters. This can therefore be defined as self-centered, putting our worldviews, mental states, and opinions above everyone else. Because if our mind is the only one that is sure to exist, why wouldn't we?

Now, of course, most people can discern between their own thoughts and emotions and those of their friends, family, coworkers, and even strangers. This idea, called mentalization, is the ability to suspend what you know and perceive, so you can acknowledge someone else's experience—basically, to have empathy and put yourself in someone else's shoes.

It can be hard. Our world is more divided than it's ever been. It seems impossible sometimes to accept someone else's point of view, especially if it's contrary to your own. But stepping outside of our experience and accepting different perspectives is one way to avoid the pitfalls of narcissism. Solipsism, however, says we can't do this. It tells us that we can't look beyond ourselves to see these other perspectives because that person, their mind, and their view of the world simply does not exist.

Like anything, solipsism can be taken to the extreme, in what's known unofficially as solipsism syndrome. A person feels that the only reality is the reality of their mind; actual reality isn't real. They might feel plagued by feelings of loneliness, detachment, or indifference to anything outside their own thoughts. Restricted to looking at the world from a single window, solipsism syndrome isn't officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, but disorders like depersonalization or derealization disorder describe similar symptoms.

These issues of mental health can go even further in solipsism OCD. When someone has OCD, they have intrusive thoughts, urges, visions, and fears that preoccupy elements of their life. Solipsism OCD is when those intrusive thoughts all revolve around the idea that you might be all alone in this universe. Imagine that for a moment—feeling trapped in a make-believe world, questioning everything you see, hear, and feel from anyone or anything you encounter over the course of your entire life.

It's a scary thought and a lonely one too. When people suffer from solipsism OCD, they experience never-ending doubt and work day in and day out to find some sort of proof that they aren't alone. Their lives become a cycle of questioning and fear. They'll seek reassurance from other people that their mind isn't the only mind. Of course, the theories behind solipsism tell us that reassurance in the form of someone else can never exist.

Like solipsism syndrome, solipsism OCD tends to be found in people who spend long periods of time alone. Think about astronauts who live in space, sometimes alone. Then here on Earth, there are people who constantly turn inward and lose their connection with others by relying on their own minds. This much they can become convinced that their mind might be alone in this universe.

Because of these potential extremes, there has always been an attempt to refute solipsism. Logical rejection has proven elusive. Solipsism is, after all, squarely based in logic. Instead, people argue against its likelihood rather than trying to provide a reasoned rebuttal.

We might ask the question: how could a single mind conjure up an endless universe of experiences, items, people, and places? This video you're watching right now, the Mona Lisa, the Berlin Wall, your mother, your pet, your job—is everything out there created by some deep inaccessible part of our mind seems unlikely.

Some more specific rejections of solipsism come in religion. If a God exists, then he, she, or it watches over us and knows our thoughts. This means that we can't be isolated in our own experience; we'll always have a higher power than our own mind.

Art also offers a counter to solipsism by striving to tell us how someone else feels. Art presents opportunities for empathy. Art even explores the depths of one's own mind just like solipsism does. In Charlie Kaufman's film "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," other people are just projections of the disturbed protagonist. Kaufman asks us to think about what it might feel like to question the existence of everything but ourselves. Art is a way of venting our own anxiety about the idea that we might be alone in the world, and perhaps that venting is our way of avoiding narcissism or something even worse.

What might be the ultimate rebuttal to solipsism? Maybe love. Love is transcendent between two minds, and it's the feeling of knowing someone else from the inside and feeling like they know you in the same way. This extreme emotional connection breaks the barrier between two consciousnesses.

However, even in love, that barrier can come back up just long enough to remind us that we are indeed separate from the other person. And in that moment of separation, do we come back to your existential question: are they all in our head?

But without descending into existential fear, what can we take away from the ideas behind solipsism? We can understand that we will always face the limitations of our own reasoning. We can't refute an idea like solipsism, so we just have to let it exist as a possibility. We can't escape our own minds; we can't step outside ourselves no matter how hard we try. And we'll only ever experience life with the minds that we have.

But maybe that's reassuring and even motivating— that we only get one mind, so we might as well embrace it and use it to its full capacity. With that one mind, might we diffuse the power of a singular idea like solipsism? Because solipsism demands certainty; it sets unrealistic expectations for knowledge. Maybe we can't rule it out, but we can't rule out a lot of stuff like Bigfoot or aliens.

In fact, we aren't actually certain about most things, but that doesn't mean we don't accept them as true. We embrace our loved ones as full humans with emotions and consciousness that we try to be kind to. We look at beautiful mountains with wonder and think about the millions of years of erosion and weather that went into making them. We are experts at living without certainty; it's what we do every day.

So if the mind is the only thing that is certain, as solipsism tells us, maybe we can enjoy that one bit of fact. But beyond our mind, there's a lot of uncertainty that we can embrace rather than fear.

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When I started this YouTube channel, I became fixated on the day it would succeed. I stopped going out with friends and spent almost every waking moment working towards and dreaming about the future. When I did manage to go out with friends, I spent all my time daydreaming. I was stuck imagining a far-off future—a future that would never come.

Don't get me wrong, objectively, this channel is successful, and all of you who choose to watch these videos have literally changed my whole life. But the future I dreamed of will never come because there's always something more to chase, something bigger and better to look forward to. Many of us live life like this; we spend most of our time preoccupied with things that don't exist and very little time enjoying the things that do. When we're not fixating on the future, we’re being haunted by the past. We spend our nights curled up in bed thinking about the wrong choices we've made in the past and what we wish we'd done instead.

As a culture, we're obsessed with time; we're both haunted by the past and dreading the future. But the truth is that the future and the past don't exist. We might think that the past and the future are as real as the present, but that's the illusion of time. In reality, the present is the only thing that exists or can exist. A clock tracks movement, like the rotation of the Earth in our orbit around the sun, but its measurement of time isn't objective. There is only the present, and its direction is forward. The past can be accessed by our memories or recordings, but even this access is tremendously limited.

Our memory is fallible; we often misremember critical details of events and can be influenced to think we did something we never did. Memory itself is known to get less accurate each time we think or reflect on it, and when video is available, it doesn't give you the first-person experience. It's only a tiny piece of the past that doesn't truly capture what it was like to be there or the full range of emotions you felt at the time. The past is just a previous experience of the present; it doesn't exist.

The future hasn't happened yet. We might prepare for conditions like rain later in the week; many of us will make plans for a satisfying career. But these things don't exist, and there's a fair chance they won't ever exist. The forecast is often wrong, and careers rarely go as planned. If you continue to obsess over the past and the future, you'll never truly live a full life. You'll be too busy thinking about the moments that have either already passed or are yet to come. You'll forget to be present and to take it all in.

Whereas animals live primarily in the present, humans have strong memories. We can tie time together; this can be helpful from a survival standpoint. Our species anticipates the future and prepares for it. Now, this was necessary for humans to successfully survive threats and to develop more complex societies. Early humans carved spears to take down woolly mammoths. They realized that if they made these weapons now, they'd have a better chance of killing a giant beast tomorrow. They also anticipated that a mammoth would provide sustenance for a long time, and by preparing for the future, they significantly increased their odds of survival.

This ability to plan for the future is why we're here today, but we've paid a heavy price for that practical sense of time, and that price is our happiness, our peace of mind. We're too stuck in the future to be at ease now. We make it all seem okay by telling ourselves the big lie. According to the British philosopher Alan Watts, this notorious untruth is that we think we'll be happy in our imagined future, but it never comes. When the future does arrive, according to our current definition of time, we'll be stuck in another imagined future. Our minds will be focused on the future until our bodies no longer have a pulse.

It's like a donkey chasing a carrot on a string; we can never get closer to our meal, and our appetite will never go away. To an observer, the donkey is foolish, but from a first-person perspective, we're convinced of the illusion. We don't see the string or the stick; we only see the carrot and the promise that it holds. Many of us are stuck in a future when we'll be happy, healthy, and have the job of our dreams.

We get so obsessed about what our financial future could be that we don't realize we need to work in the present to create that future. Our memories control our lives, and we make decisions about the present and the future based on what happened in the past. Using our memory, we limit the possibilities of the present. We assume we can't do something because we weren't able to do it in the past. We avoid going places and doing things because we've previously had poor experiences with them. Sometimes we decline offers because they conflict with our sense of who we are based on our past understanding of our identity. You may think of yourself as self-sufficient, but what about those moments when you truly need help?

People have died clinging to their identity as self-sufficient. Why? Because they're tied to a past that doesn't even exist. Our schools train us to always look for the next ladder to climb. The present is mostly considered beneath us, and we criticize those who live in the moment because they're not preparing for the future. They're focused on now, which by our cultural standards is often regarded as antisocial behavior.

We invent gadgets for productivity, thinking they will give us more time. It's like saying you can enjoy more moments if you buy the next piece of tech, but all we end up doing is anticipating the next upgrade or the next big innovation. That's why the most popular question that tech reviewers get is, "Should I buy this now or wait for the next one?" And when we get the new technology, we use it to escape the now, rather than embrace it. For over 15 years, we've had the ultimate tool for fleeing the present: our smartphones.

We turn to our phones whenever we're idle or in any situation without something purposeful to do. We feel a panic from the present and escape it by seeking out the past and future on our mobile. We make plans with text conversations or by opening up the calendar. We browse news about what's already happened or read predictions about what will happen next. Alerts are set in the reminders app, and we accept notifications to warn us about anything and everything that isn't in our present moment.

When's the next ball game? What are the best beach resorts? Where's the price of housing headed? We're constantly searching for answers about the future instead of enjoying the present. On social media, we look at images of the lives of others and project ourselves into a future where we're on vacation like our social media connection, or we look back on the trips we've taken in the past and with regret we wish we'd planned things differently.

It's not so easy to live in the present. Sitting still gives us anxiety. As a survival mechanism, preparing for the future and anxiety are intrinsically connected. We're not planning for the future when we're in the moment; it can feel a bit like closing your eyes when you're driving. You're not looking at what's ahead to avoid disaster, but we've evolved beyond the point where survival needs to occupy our minds always. At least, in fact, many of our jobs are only connected to survival because they provide us with an income to buy food and shelter.

We've got free time outside of our occupations. At the very least, we should enjoy free time by living in it. Our smartphones open a gateway to filling that time with plans for the future. Many of us will prepare our next workday or respond to emails about the past. We ignore the people around us and become more distant from them. Relationships are all about the present, and one of the ways you can tell they’re not going so well is if one or both partners aren't very present. The more we try to escape the present moment, the more we neglect our relationships, and ironically, many of our plans are intended to strengthen our relationships.

We save for retirements and vacations. In other words, we're planning for a time when we can exist in the moment. But when that time comes, we'll be stuck thinking about another future instead of enjoying the one we're in. Of course, global issues make living in the moment particularly challenging. The climate is changing due to humans creating greenhouse gas emissions—a legitimate threat to our survival.

We need to do what we can to prevent catastrophes in the future, but we shouldn't let that steal the present from us. Otherwise, we'll only be saving a future that we won't even be bothered to live in. Alan Watts was a student of Eastern philosophy. He studied Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and more. From his studies, he took away the importance of being present and methods of living in the now.

The ceilings of these religious concepts made him very popular in the West. He wasn't a proper scholar in the strict sense, but he wrote a lot of books on these subjects and gave a lot of entertaining lectures. Some of his teachings are a bit dated now, but his distilled messages are still as relevant as the future continues to haunt us at every turn. Watts had a particular interest in Zen Buddhism; it emphasizes being here and now, but also goes much deeper than that. Unlike the teachings of Buddha, Zen Buddhists believe that achieving a permanent state of enlightenment or Nirvana was impossible.

We can only try for fleeting moments of pure essence called Satori. These are moments when we're so perfectly in the present that we're caught off completely from the past and the future. We experience the present without our ingrained interpretation of the world around us. We don't see chairs as chairs; we see no chairs. Words fail to capture Zen, as do logic and our schematic laws of thought.

In explaining Zen to you, I am failing to demonstrate Zen. That's why Zen masters often respond to questions by raising a finger. Alan Watts would hit a symbol in an attempt to demonstrate Zen. The idea isn't to murder the mind or bring it to nothingness; Zen is an affirmation. It wants to put you in direct contact with your mind in order to give you peace. Zen Buddhists believe in an inner purity inside us and that getting closer to it should be our ultimate goal.

In achieving Zen, the past and the future won't bother you as forms of structured thought. The past and future have no way to enter your mind; they don't exist. When Watts speaks of time as an illusion, he's suggesting that we aren't doomed to live as beings stifled by time. Like the Zen Buddhist, we can live in the present. Even when we aren't striving for moments of Satori, we can still free ourselves from the tyranny of the past and the future.

Carpe diem! To better understand how to live in the present moment, watch this video on hedonism. Imagine living a life filled with happiness and pain, love and grief, ambition and despair. A life with parents, kids, grandkids, and ultimately the death of everyone, including yourself, and then it all happens again in the same way. You make the same choices; the same people die in the same way, and your reaction is the same. I'm describing the existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence.

It's a hypothetical notion he put forward as an exercise in overcoming yourself to affirm all of life. In order to become who you are and realize your full potential, you need to confront the limiting aspects of your character. Eternal recurrence was meant to be an excruciating thought, but many people have interpreted it as the opposite. Some of us find the idea of re-experiencing our lives to be exciting; we cling to our experiences and our consciousness. We hate the idea of letting our lives go or losing our cherished memories.

Similarly, the idea of rebirth in Hinduism and Buddhism gets people excited. We want our consciousness to live on, even if it's in another body. In both of these religions, the idea of rebirth isn't supposed to be positive; you're supposed to work towards ending the cycle of rebirth by embracing the principles and practices of Hindu and Buddhist thought. Until recently, this notion of rebirth had some cosmological relevance in the theory known as the Big Crunch.

The idea is that the expanding cosmos will eventually collapse back into itself and reform into a singularity that could spark another big bang. In this process, instead of the universe expanding forever, it would reach a point where its size would start to decrease. This would eventually cause gravity to become the dominant force; the universe would shrink and eventually collapse onto itself, and the cycle would continue over and over again—a cyclical rebirth of the universe.

It's an idea that sparks hope that life could begin again. We wouldn't be left with a cold, empty universe, and maybe our consciousness would be reborn again somehow in this process. Just like in Nietzsche's hypothetical concept, trillions of years from now we will live on. Sadly, this theory of the universe isn't the most likely according to modern physics.

In the late 1990s, astronomers studied 42 supernovae. These are white dwarf stars that siphon gas from a companion star. The increase in mass causes a runaway nuclear reaction that ultimately leads to a very bright explosion— a supernova. After studying the supernovae, they discovered something that would change how we understand the universe. Distant supernovae were dimmer than they expected.

Why does this matter? Well, if the expansion of the universe was slowing down as we formerly expected, then the supernovae would be brighter. But the fact that they were dimmer meant that the universe's expansion is actually speeding up. This speeding up went against our understanding of gravity in the universe, so either Einstein's theory of gravity is wrong or there's something else at play—some new components in the universe that we hadn't accounted for. That something is a force called dark energy.

Dark energy is believed to be virtual matter that pops in and out of existence; it doesn't interfere with energy conservation and instead of pulling like gravity, it pushes. According to astronomers, the universe is made up of 69% dark energy and 26% dark matter, both of which are invisible. Everything we can see, like the stars, planets, all the trees, places, and people that have ever existed, only make up 4.9% of the universe. The remaining 0.1% are neutrinos and 0.01% are photons.

The force of dark energy is believed to be a constant, expanding the universe continuously without stopping or regressing. The impact of this dark energy is that the expansion of the universe will never slow down. Eventually, the universe will expand so much that no distant galaxy will be visible from our own Milky Way, and by then, our galaxy would have merged with the neighboring galaxies. The end result here is what's known as the big freeze or the heat death of the universe.

Due to the endless expansion, all heat will be distributed evenly across the universe, leaving the cosmos in a final resting state at just above absolute zero. Entropy is the measurement of everything in the universe moving from order to disorder. According to a thermodynamic principle, entropy will increase until it reaches its maximum value, and when entropy has reached this value, all the heat in the universe would have been evenly distributed.

There will be no more room for usable heat energy, and once there's no heat, there is nothing. Star formation will have ended long before this; the universe would be so vast that its gas supplies would be spread too thin for any new stars to be born. Galaxies will be gone and all matter will be locked inside black holes. Eventually, even the black holes will disappear. This dark era will last way longer than any other period of the universe. Time will be almost infinite at this point. Time began with the big bang, and it likely ends with the big freeze. Mechanical motion in the universe will cease altogether; nothing will ever happen again. The universe will effectively be dead.

But is this heat death a sure thing? Just like everything else, not exactly. The assumption the big freeze makes is that the force of dark energy is a constant. But according to our best measurements, there's a bit of uncertainty about whether dark energy is a constant. It's also possible that the force of dark energy will just eventually change. Dark energy could become stronger, and even if it gets just a bit stronger, it could lead to another theory of the universe's end: the big rip.

This is where the pull of the universe's expansion becomes stronger than the gravity it contains. This would effectively tear the visible universe apart, including galaxies, stars, black holes, and planets. The universe will be left with disconnected particles, somewhat reminiscent of the way heat energy is evenly distributed in the big freeze. Dark energy could also become weaker; gravity would then win its struggle with the dark energy, and the universe would collapse. This becomes the big crunch scenario again.

If you were to make a bet right now about how the universe might end, the smart money would be on the big freeze. It's most likely, given what astronomers have observed, that dark energy will remain a constant. Thinking of the universe ending can induce a feeling of panic. We have a hard time imagining our world ending or even our lives. The default way of life is to fight against death.

When someone dies in the hospital, we assume that everything possible was done to prevent death, and are outraged if that wasn't the case. Horror films reaffirm the underlying assumption that death is to be feared. Death is so terrible to so many of us that the genre is called horror. We can't imagine anything worse than death. To cope with death, we imagine a future where our bodies are no longer the end of our consciousness.

Futurists talk about a time when our minds will simply be uploaded to a simulation. But as much as we want to fight it, death is inevitable. And as best as we can determine from our current understanding of the universe, it all comes to an end—motion ends, and if time still exists, it will have no relevance.

Is it possible to accept the inevitable without imagining an afterlife or any kind of escape from nothingness? The Greek philosopher Epicurus had an angle that might help. He asked you to imagine what it's like being dead, but you can't actually imagine being dead. Death is an absence of existence; there is no perspective from a view of nothingness. Death isn't an experience; it's nothing to us. You won't feel the pain of absence or nothingness because that would require a perspective. Pain is rightfully feared because it is an experience, but death is no experience. Fearing it is pointless.

Why should I fear death if I am? Death is not; if death is, I am not. Further reinforcing this idea is the Roman poet Lucretius in the first century B.C. He insisted that your pre-existence is the same as death and just like death, we can't imagine what it's like to not exist before we were born. We don't fear our pre-existence just as we shouldn't fear our post-existence.

I don't expect that intellectualizing away the fear of death will be entirely effective in getting rid of it, but it can potentially calm the mind somewhat when the fear of death overwhelms too often. In truth, we don't want to be completely fearless of our mortality; anyway, that would probably be a reckless life that leads to needless harm to yourself and potentially others. And it doesn't address the fear of losing others. This is a painful experience regardless of your perspective. Life is inevitably painful, and one day the universe will be devoid of it. You, me, and almost everything we know—unless of course, despite our most likely predictions, the cycle continues.

But I'm afraid that might be wishful thinking or require a leap of faith. If you're struggling with the fear of death or you're grieving the loss of a loved one, I suggest you watch this video—it's helped thousands of people, and I hope it'll help you too.

You wake up in the morning and you go to work. You spend eight hours typing away at your desk on a job you once loved but now kind of just tolerate. Once it's 5:00 p.m., you go home, make dinner, and watch TV only to do it all over again the next day. You play sports or catch up with friends at a local bar on the weekend and life's good, but you still feel like something is missing.

You were excited when you got the job you loved, finding new recipes to cook every evening and catching up with friends on the weekend, which used to be your favorite pastime. But over time, these things that used to excite you have become stale, mundane, and boring. You think to yourself, if I can just get a big enough raise to buy a new car and go on this extravagant vacation, then I'll be happy.

Now imagine you get that well-deserved promotion and a healthy raise, and suddenly you're going on those vacations you want, traveling, driving a nicer car, and receiving more status and respect in the workplace. Your quality of life has been significantly upgraded and finally, you feel like you're fulfilling your potential. Fancy restaurants, rubbing elbows with influential people; your life feels new and almost foreign compared to where you came from.

Yet in a year or so, your once brand new Porsche just becomes your daily driver. All the imported sushi starts to taste the same, and while you still frequent white sandy beaches and pristine ski slopes, these places have lost their allure. You've completely changed your life, but you're still in the same position you were before you got the promotion. Those things that used to excite you have become stale, mundane, and boring.

This is hedonic adaptation—the reason why you'll never be happy. Hedonic adaptation is the tendency to return to a base level of happiness even when undergoing profound periods of positive or negative change. Life is like a treadmill; things are always moving. Children are born, loved ones die; you buy a house, you lose a job. Yet despite all these changes, you stay in relatively the same place—never moving significantly forward or backward.

I think we've all heard the phrase, "More money, more problems," and to an extent, this is true. Think about the casualness with which the uber-rich fly private and outsource their domestic labor to a fleet of assistants and personal support workers. While these might seem like luxuries to you and me, they quickly become the norm to someone whose daily life revolves in this sphere.

According to hedonic adaptation theory, we adjust to the changes that happen to us quite quickly, incorporating them seamlessly into our everyday life. And it doesn't matter whether you're rich, poor, healthy, or sick; everyone for the most part has their relatively stable emotional state.

It seems logical to assume that those with more resources and those who lead more adventurous, thrilling lives should be happier. Likewise, those who are disadvantaged in life should be unhappy. But that's not the case—at least not according to psychologists David Brickman and Donald Campbell, who popularized the theory of hedonic adaptation.

These researchers studied a group of lottery winners and asked them to assess their happiness levels. They did a similar survey for people who were recently seriously injured. The lottery winners claimed to have a spike in happiness when they initially won, and not surprisingly, the injured people reported a dip in happiness when they were first hurt.

What was surprising, though, is that both groups had comparable baseline happiness levels over time. These findings suggest that dramatic life changes, good or bad, don't significantly improve or diminish your overall happiness level. Life’s new reality forces you to establish a routine, and your happiness level adjusts accordingly.

Now that's not to say that these peaks and valleys don't affect you. Your baseline of happiness can shift upward or downward, suggesting that your happiness is somewhat in your control. The more your life improves, the higher your baseline becomes. And big positive life changes, like marriage or having children, can make your day-to-day brighter, advancing in your career, committing to volunteer work, or getting a pet can have a similar effect.

The inverse is true for negative experiences—developing a chronic illness, experiencing the death of a loved one, or a divorce can change your life forever and sometimes for the worse. You can see a distinct separation of your life and a significant difference between before and after the event. Trauma and grief color your once happy life in shades of gray.

Though you're not as happy as you once were, things do even out over time; you've adapted to your new circumstance and can make it through your day without wallowing in despair. Even though your overall happiness has diminished, hedonic adaptation teaches us that your baseline happiness will never match those extreme highs and lows. Instead, it might increase or decrease incrementally—just barely.

The shifting of your baseline of happiness suggests that to some degree, your happiness is within your control. While much of your happiness is determined by circumstance, you can make choices that affect your baseline. It requires some self-honesty and evaluation. You must pay close attention to what in life spikes your happiness.

Is it when you spend time with family, or when you travel? The more complicated part is confronting and changing negative patterns that could prevent you from having a higher baseline level of happiness. Maybe you have a toxic friendship, or you're burnt out at work.

Everyone's situation is unique, and I know it's not as simple as snapping your fingers and fixing your life, but you do have some power to raise your happiness levels. You can end bad relationships and work towards changing careers. When stuck on the hedonic treadmill, it can feel like nothing will change, that you're doomed to be running in place forever, and in some ways that is true.

But when you make decisions with your baseline level of happiness in mind, your time on the hedonic treadmill is not such a slog. Also, just because you're generally happy doesn't mean your life won't feel boring. It's not like people with high baselines of happiness always jump out of bed every morning rejoicing in the thrill of being alive.

In fact, the higher your baseline, the more difficult it is to experience those immense periods of happiness. Peaks of joy aren't so steep when you live a relatively privileged and fulfilled life. An income raise might mean little to you if you're already making lots of money. If you travel a lot, seeing a new city might not seem that exciting.

You could be stuck in a cycle in which you're numb to all external stimuli. It's not a bad problem to have, as it's a symptom of a good life, but still, it's surprisingly easy to become bored and unhappy with a perfectly satisfactory life. Melancholy might persist, which leads to persistent pleasure seeking, and unfortunately, our culture facilitates the constant pursuit of ultimate happiness.

Advertising, social media, and video games flood our brains with dopamine, gluing us to the screens. Our attention is devoted to our devices, and our happiness levels are distorted. While scrolling, we experience a constant peak of synthetic happiness, but when the shopping spree or the Netflix binge is over, we crash back down onto our hedonic treadmill, and our everyday lives start to feel lackluster.

Pleasure-seeking isn't a negative impulse; we can't have an enjoyable life without pleasure. It motivates us, boosts our mood, and allows us to enjoy our lives. But often, the joy readily available to us is like candy—overly sweet and lacking substance. Experiencing substantial pleasure is about exercising control. You might have a favorite snack or TV show; dedicating a time and place to indulge makes those sweet things you love about life even more pleasurable.

If you had your favorite snack every day, you might come to take it for granted. It becomes part of your routine and incorporates into your baseline happiness level. This is why ritual and traditions are so important. They’re special pockets of time allotted to enjoying and celebrating life.

When you feel like you're in a rut, thinking back to how you felt when you had that significant life change is a great way to be more appreciative of your current norm. Practicing gratitude is another great way to dampen the effects of hedonic adaptation, and it might seem cliché and cringe to some, mainly because gratitude is wedged in with the sometimes problematic categories of self-care and self-help.

There's a whole video about the complexities of toxic positivity and self-help, which you can check out after this. But I think the trick to doing it well is expressing gratitude in a way that works for you. Maybe that's meditation or journaling; it could be cooking yourself a nice meal or watching a sunrise. It can happen in a small moment while on your commute or waiting for the kettle to boil, where you pause and just reflect on how lucky you are to have the life you have.

You can also do a little thought experiment with yourself every once in a while to check in: Where were you five years ago? Six months ago? Compare your past self to your current self. How has your life changed for the better? Has anything happened that has made life more challenging? By its nature, hedonic adaptation blinds us from reflecting on change. We adapt and move on without significantly noticing how we grow and shift throughout life.

But when you put your past and present in comparison, you can see the patterns. You can feel proud of where you came from and see what you could do better about your current situation. Comparing your past and present is a really great way to step off of the hedonic treadmill for a moment and assess your life for what it really is. You'll quickly see that regular days lead to profound change over time, and a stagnant emotionally stable life can still be one in which you flourish.

Coming to terms with this allows you to accept your life despite its mundaneness. The very normalcy of your life is what makes it livable. Think about how exhausted you would be if you were constantly experiencing the peaks and valleys of human emotion. It's a kind of blessing that nothing happens most days.

Hedonic adaptation helps us confront and accept the fleeting nature of life. Appreciating our adaptability is essential in reassuring us—even when life feels tumultuous. While you might not always feel your absolute happiness, you can build a life where you enjoy living day in and day out. Our lives weren't meant to feel like roller coasters; the traumas of highs and lows are unsustainable. Maybe life was meant to feel like a slow-moving train, peacefully chugging along in a loop.

At this pace, it's easy to appreciate the scenery around you and where you are in life, even if you're not moving anywhere significant. Hedonic adaptation gives us this gift amid melancholy or boredom. It can be challenging to see it as such, but in those quiet moments, indulging in life's mundanity is important. Find beauty in stagnancy and consistency so that when a peak of happiness comes, you can enjoy it to the fullest extent.

Hedonic adaptation teaches us to embrace boredom, but today's society seems to overindulge in over-stimulation. Watch this video to find out why that's dangerous. Imagine you're going blind; the world slowly becomes a blur. You can no longer see your family or your friends; you can't see the beauty of a mountain landscape or the ripples in the ocean. Then a YouTuber comes around offering to give you the gift of sight.

This is exactly what happened in January of 2023 when Mr. Beast found a thousand people suffering from cataracts and then offered them a simple surgery to regain their eyesight—a surgery which takes 10 minutes that cured them forever. Was Mr. Beast playing God in reversing the course of nature? Science and technology have given people new limbs with prosthetic advancement; it's cured people of immeasurable pain, like Victoria Gray, a 37-year-old mother from Mississippi who was born with the blood disorder sickle cell disease.

She endured lengthy hospital stays and debilitating fatigue. In 2019, the controversial gene-editing technology CRISPR cured her of her pain and transformed her life. Was that playing God? Or how about this: in 2018, a doctor in China used CRISPR to genetically engineer two baby girls to be resistant to HIV. The context since the beginning of its epidemic: between 65 million and 113 million people have been infected with HIV, and of those people, around 40 million have lost their lives.

Yet when this doctor genetically engineered these baby girls to be resistant to this life-threatening disease, he was arrested, with many accusing him of trying to play God. Our attempts to make scientific and technological advances often leave us confronting the harm they can do. Genetically modified food can make food more accessible but threatens economies and environments in places like the Congo. Lab-grown meat reduces the emissions of greenhouse gases but puts farmers out of business.

These are the unintended consequences of trying to play God. Humans have always tried to overcome nature, whether it was ancient Chinese blowing ground-up smallpox scabs into people's noses like an early vaccine, or building wooden prosthetic limbs that operated with pulleys and strings. We've persistently worked to make life easier and safer. In the year 1800, global life expectancy was only 29 years old, and until the late 1800s, people thought that infectious diseases could be caught by breathing smelly air, so they would reduce their chances of getting sick by breathing through bunches of flowers.

Seriously.

But the medical advancements that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries made us drastically healthier. After a cholera outbreak in 1854, British doctor John Snow drew a map and discovered that all of the victims lived near the same water pump. The government removed the pump, and the cholera outbreak stopped. This was the beginning of germ theory, which helps us understand diseases like COVID and how they spread from one person to another.

Modern surgical techniques and simple hand-washing protocols make hospitals safe for us all. While generally the outcomes of medical advances like these are positive, there can be unintended consequences that we aren't prepared for—like an aging global population. 200 years ago, global life expectancy was only 29 years; today, it's 73. The reality of these advancements is that while some get to enjoy the fruits of innovation, others are left behind.

Clean drinking water limits the spread of harmful bacteria and chemicals, yet around 26% of the world's population doesn't have access to safe drinking water. Worse, around 46% lack access to basic sanitation. Even how long we get to live isn't equal; people in high-income countries, like Japan, are expected to live three decades longer than people in low-income nations, like the Central African Republic.

But life expectancy differences due to imbalances in income can exist even in the same city. In 2015, in Baltimore, a city in Maryland, USA, life expectancy in one wealthy neighborhood was 19 years higher than in poor communities just three miles away. What would our world become when some people become gods living long, healthy lives, while others remain mere mortals barely able to live long enough to see their grandchildren?

But that's not all. Over the years, birth rates have slowed due to advancements in contraception, family planning, and more gender equality in the workplace. Not only are our life expectancies increasing, but without the infusion of babies, the population, on average, is getting older. This means that the labor force, economic growth, and social support systems are under a lot more stress, and more people are at risk of age-related diseases like dementia, vision loss, and cardiovascular disease.

A longer life doesn't always mean a healthier life. Thanks to medical advancements, people can live longer while still being chronically sick or disabled. In fact, with a drastic increase in life expectancy, disability rates have remained constant. The question of why life persists even in the most difficult circumstances is one I can't answer. Philosophers for millennia have tried and failed.

But the reality is if we want to keep enjoying the benefits of living longer, these things need to improve. We need to improve public healthcare and elder care. With an older population, there's more need for social support since more people are retired. And even though there's been leaps in gender equality, and it's put more women in the workforce, as the population ages, women are often expected to leave work and become caregivers. Though strides for women's rights and independence could be reversed, the United Nations wants countries to adopt policies to reduce the negative impacts of an aging population—like reforming pension systems, raising the retirement age, eliminating barriers for older people in the workforce, and developing long-term care strategies for caregivers.

Now while none of us would ever argue that we should get rid of sterile surgical instruments or functioning sanitation systems, the people who develop them probably weren't thinking about how thin our healthcare and social systems would be stretched a century later. On the other hand, our current technological and scientific advances are so fast-paced that we don't have to wait 100 years to be hit in the face with their unintended consequences—like GMOs or genetically modified organisms.

For example, in their relatively short life, they've already caused so much controversy. In the simplest terms, GMOs are animals or plants whose DNA has been altered with the goal of improving the genetic makeup of the organism or getting rid of unwanted characteristics. Scientists mainly study genetically modified animals to learn more about health and disease, but a few of them, like GMO salmon, end up in our food supply.

Whether or not we should be eating genetically modified animals can be a conversation for another day, but that's not even the main controversy surrounding GMOs, and for that, we have to look at the global fruit and vegetable supply. The first genetically engineered plants produced for consumption showed up in the 1990s, but today 90% of corn, soybeans, and sugar beets are genetically modified.

But there's a good reason for this. Farming GMOs produces higher yields, longer shelf life, and crops that are resistant to disease and pests. On top of all of this, they usually taste better. Also, because they're resistant to pests, farmers use fewer pesticides, which we can assume is better for the environment—so good for consumers, the farmer, and the environment. What could go wrong?

A lot, actually. Yes, eliminating pesticides is good, but GMOs cause controversy not only because they change a plant in a way that wouldn't happen naturally, but also because they can impact the biodiversity of the area where the crop is grown. For example, bees rely on plants for survival, and if the natural properties of the plants they live near change, the bees are affected. Once these are affected, the whole natural pollination of the area gets thrown out of whack, and the landscape and the natural resources change forever.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, the second largest country in Africa, has the most significant biodiversity in Africa and is governed by various laws to protect it. GMOs directly conflict with these laws because they potentially threaten the natural environment. The European Union has banned GMO products, not only for environmental preservation purposes but also due to the lack of research on how they affect our health.

However, many African countries are weighing GMO's potential ability to curb hunger crises against their potential for unintended health consequences. In Zambia, many people believe that GMOs cause resistance to antibiotics and weaken the body's immunity to disease. The truth is that GMOs just haven't been around long enough for us to know their true long-term effects.

There's a chain reaction once an organism is genetically modified. How threatening that reaction is to the environment and our health has yet to be seen. You can see this kind of controversy sprouting up in other scientific advancements and what we put in our bodies. Lab-grown meat may have seemed like a sci-fi plotline until recently, but in June 2023, the US Department of Agriculture granted the first-ever approval for cell-cultured chicken meat.

Ninety percent of the US population eats meat regularly, but a growing number of people around the globe are concerned about the current meat industry, which accounts for about 15% of global carbon emissions. Big livestock operations are also breeding grounds for harmful bacteria; they generate tons of waste, and the animals often live short lives under harsh conditions. But we still love our meat; most of us, at least. Meat is rich in protein; it's part of traditions and holidays, and for many, it holds cultural significance—not to mention it tastes pretty good.

So maybe instead of cutting it off altogether, lab-grown meat can be a solution for conflicted carnivores out there. Lab-grown meat starts with a sample of stem cells from a fertilized chicken egg, the best of which are submerged in a bat of nutrient-rich broth with ingredients that help the cells grow and divide. As they grow and divide, they adhere to one another and eventually produce enough proteins to harvest. This new meat is textured either by heating or shearing it, and then it’s pressed into a nugget or cutlet shape.

At this point, lab-grown chicken is still a novelty, only available at a handful of US restaurants, and until the industry scales much larger, it's hard to argue and gauge its environmental benefits. What is certain is that cultured meat facilities will use far less water and land and emit fewer greenhouse gases.

But as we create meat out of almost nothing and disrupt the natural state of things, what are the unintended consequences? Italy can answer that one for us. The Italian parliament just banned lab-grown meat after being lobbied by several farming groups. The ban cites lab-grown meat as ruining the cherished relationship between food, land, and human labor. This gives a sneak peek into some of the unintended consequences of cultured meat.

Sure, it can help the environment and potentially improve animal welfare, but what about the farmers who rely on the meat industry to survive? What do they do? It begs the question: Just because we can do something, does that mean that we should?

These rat species, the extinct one and the relative they were trying to engineer, split evolutionarily 2.6 million years ago, and that's considered a close relative. Mammoths and Asian elephants split 6 million years ago, and we can't even compare the complexities of raising a lab-grown mammoth with a rat. So it's safe to say that we won't see mammoths wandering around anytime soon. But even if we could bring back these extinct animals, should we? Because for the cost of bringing back one species from extinction, we could save eight species currently still in existence.

NASA has spent over $100 million a year on research to get to Mars, to say nothing of what private companies like SpaceX are spending. People say that learning about Mars can answer questions about Earth's history and get kids interested in science. And sure, that is valid. But there's also a lot of pressing issues here on Earth that could use $100 million a year.

We could instead focus our energy on preserving the world we've been given. At the end of the day, the grass is only greener where you water it. Speaking of Mars, martians might still be a thing of science fiction, but genetically engineered humans have moved far beyond Frankenstein and into our current reality. Gene editing is perhaps the ultimate frontier in the debate around playing God. The gene editing technology CRISPR allows doctors to make precise changes to someone's DNA, even before they're born.

In 2020, the creators of CRISPR won the Nobel Prize because this science can help treat and cure disease. Who wouldn't want that? Currently, testing is being done on the safety of gene editing for conditions like blindness, blood disorders, blood cancers, diabetes, and HIV or AIDS. It can help people like the Mississippi woman with sickle cell disease from living a life of suffering. The benefits could be world-altering, but so could the drawbacks.

Because like any delicate technology, there's a concern that rogue companies or rogue scientists might use genome editing for full-blown eugenics, engineering a type of person that one misguided or evil leader believes to be the right type of person. The beauty of our world is that we're all different. Unfortunately, those differences are sometimes in the form of pain or sickness. Do we cure one type of difference and risk losing all the others? There are complex ethical trade-offs, and advancements like gene editing should only be done on living humans who can consent to alleviate a disease, or should we allow embryos to be edited to be resistant to those same diseases in the first place?

Right now, it's not really a debate that most of us can engage in because the treatments that will be approved soon cost more than $2 million a person. And that's the reality of new technologies; only some of us get to play God. If the Earth fails, we're not all going to new state-of-the-art colonies on Mars. If embryos can be resistant to cancer, not every embryo will get to be. We don't even have clean drinking water for everyone or vaccines or prosthetics, or any of the advancements that so many people take for granted.

Mr. Beast showed in the video how easy it is to help thousands of people see again, which only makes it more painful knowing that so many still struggle to get that treatment. Why do only some people get access to life-changing treatment while others are left to suffer? There aren't just the unintended consequences of playing God; there are the very real and known consequences for those who never even get the chance.

God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off of us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement? What sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

This passage written by Friedrich Nietzsche poses a fascinating question: what do we do when we no longer find meaning in our religions and long-standing traditions? What do we do when the very foundations of society have been broken? How do we overcome the void that nihilism leaves behind?

Nihilism is the belief that life has no meaning, that morals and values don't exist, and that all of the structures and institutions we seem destined to live by aren't real. You don't have to care about anything because nothing matters. At first, the idea of nihilism is liberating; some might even say it's comforting. Imagine waking up without that feeling of the weight of the world being on your shoulders or going to bed without feeling like you've let everyone around you down.

You're no longer bound by religion, moral codes, or sacred traditions. You're free to live life on your own terms because at the end of the day, nothing matters. The philosophy of nihilism was popularized by 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, but contrary to what people think, he didn't want a nihilistic society but instead believed nihilism was necessary to break down the institutions and morality of the time and to allow something new to take place.

In a sense, to allow us to become gods. His philosophy was that we need to overcome nihilism, not get stuck in it. He believed that the world has no order or structure except what we give to it. Essentially, what we think about the world is what is. So if we believe that nothing matters and that life has no meaning, then we're destined to live in a world void of meaning.

Community, relationships, or anything else we might value; he felt that the effects of this philosophical approach would destroy any conviction society had, and we would see a full-blown crisis of humanity. Some of that came to pass in the 20th century after he died when themes of nihilism were resonating with artists, social critics, and philosophers. The second half of the 20th century was defined, in part, by anti-foundationalism—an attitude of indifference to social structures, business, and what some might have called the man.

By the 2000s, a mood of gloom, anxiety, anger, and despair had taken hold and has in many ways had a grip on a severe sense. Still, people turn to nihilism not to feel despair but to try and find an answer to the question we all have: Why? Why do I have to wake up every day and work eight hours at a job I hate? Why do I have to follow religious traditions that I don't even believe in?

Why do I have to live my life according to the rules of others? These questions have become even more prevalent in our post-pandemic society, where it feels like the world is crumbling. Every day we hear of a new war in a different part of the world, and there's a cost-of-living crisis everywhere you look, AI is taking some of our jobs, and flowers are blooming in Antarctica.

When faced with this horrifying reality, the concept of nothing matters can be freeing. By taking the meaning out of things, they stop being so bleak. Instead of worrying about the future, you have an escape—an opportunity to not deal with the questions that you might not have the answers to.

The world, its problems, and our questions and worries about it can feel infinite; it's overwhelming. But nihilism offers an opportunity to feel insignificant within it all, to feel like you don't matter because none of it matters. There's endless freedom in that. It allows us to feel indifferent about things that would otherwise occupy our attention 24/7. The world doesn't affect us, and therefore we don't affect the world.

Politics doesn't matter; hardship doesn't matter. But the challenge with nihilism, and the problem that Nietzsche was unable to solve, is that at the same time, that means friendships don't matter, family doesn't matter, love, happiness—none of it matters. If we fall too far down the nihilism rabbit hole, we start to feel a sense of loss: loss of the things that bring us joy in a world that's already hard to live in, and loss of our own selves.

Embracing nihilism is understandable and sometimes helpful, but it can create a loss of purpose and motivation in our lives. That sense of indifference about the world means we're also indifferent about our lives and the path we want to take. This makes us feel emptiness and despair about who and what we are. It can lead to destructive behavior. If nothing has meaning, then our actions don't have consequences.

We end up not feeling any sort of personal responsibility for what we do, even if we do bad things. Nihilism also makes it very hard to establish an ethical framework. I mean, it questions the very existence of morals, values, and ethics, and without these, there aren't really any universal principles to bond us all. Sure, we don't have to agree on everything, but if we stop trying to be good people and caring about others, society will fall apart.

It means we become disconnected from not just strangers but also the people closest to us. Nihilism questions the mere existence of relationships and institutions; essentially, it challenges community. It fosters a feeling of detachment. Sure, not all institutions are good, but many are important to how we build our lives.

We go to school to learn, but also to socialize. We play pickup basketball at the local park to exercise, but also to socialize. We go to places of worship to perform our religious practices, but also—you guessed it—to socialize. Because at the end of the day, we're social animals and community is one of the most important things in living a long and healthy life.

These actions that we use to bond with others are also teaching us empathy. Humans are the only species that are able to understand and experience without living it. We have empathy for others. If nihilism asks us to get rid of that empathy, it is not only asking us to let go of a vital part of ourselves, but it's also creating cracks in our social cohesion.

This is the destruction that Nietzsche was worried about. He dedicated his life to understanding nihilism. He saw it as the result of people's frustrations while searching for meaning and purpose in religion. Nietzsche was writing about this after the enlightenment, when people started questioning the religious principles that had guided society for so long. Suddenly, the age-old purpose of living for God didn't hold meaning anymore because people stopped believing in God.

The collapse in meaning also meant a collapse in purpose. Whether we like it or not, purpose in our life often comes from suffering and pain—things Nietzsche felt were essential to experience to live a profound life. He told us it was out of the deepest depths that the highest must come to its height.

Nietzsche wanted to turn nihilism around. He believed that if we survived a takeover of nihilistic principles, we could discover the correct course for humankind. In this sense, nihilism is a transitional stage of life that needs to be overcome to find meaning in why we suffer. However, Nietzsche also believed that not everyone has it in them to overcome nihilism.

Passive nihilists, as he called them, would never find meaning in the world. Their approach to life embraces a feeling of nothingness and despair. This, unfortunately, often leads people towards mass movements that like to tell them what to believe. Cults, political parties, and religious groups give passive nihilists an easy way out.

On the other hand, active nihilists might recognize their purposeless existence and strive to work their way out of it. This can look like destroying old values and constructing new ones that are meaningful. How you see the world in your own personal evolution: think of a piece of stone, meaningless when it is just plopped in front of you, but if you start chiseling away at it day after day, you can create a spear, a statue, or jewelry and give it purpose and meaning.

Of course, we don't always get the stone plopped in front of us. It can be hard to figure out where to start looking for that meaning. We might not be born with a single passion or life purpose, but if we allow ourselves to feel our suffering, difficulty, and pain, we can get an idea of what we want from life.

If we envy a friend who's been practicing tennis day after day and finally wins the competition, maybe that’s a sign we should try tennis, or even just pick up a new hobby. If we see people suffering in our community, we can turn our sadness into action by volunteering at a local soup kitchen. When we study our emotions, we find meaning and we can overcome the despair that nihilism might cause us.

But how do we know when we've overcome it? Well, imagine you were told you had to live your exact life repeatedly. If you're okay with that, despite the hardship, you're not viewing your life or the world in a nihilistic way; you've learned to celebrate life as a miracle and embrace every piece of it, even when it doesn't seem great.

Nietzsche has a metaphor of a shepherd and a snake. The snake had crawled into the shepherd’s throat and at first, he's choking on the snake. Then he bites its head off to save his own life; he spits out the head and allows the pain to be a part of him so that he can continue living. He takes control of the despair and the pain.

When we allow others to dictate things for us, it doesn't feel good. We want to be in touch with our feelings and tackle our problems from a place of purpose. Nihilism doesn't let us do that; it leaves us instead susceptible to being controlled by others. The good news is that although Nietzsche thought that once the Enlightenment happened and God became less relevant, people would spiral into a catatonic nihilistic state—they didn't!

So now, even if nihilism feels like an enticing philosophy to embrace, it won't be the end of society as we know it. In fact, if we play our cards right, it might help us by removing something like God or government from being a central figure in our existence. We take attention off the sole meaning of our life and put it on something bigger.

Maybe our one life doesn't hold all the meaning we thought it would, and maybe that's okay. The author Wendy SE wrote a book arguing that a meaningless life could make us happy. Some principles of nihilism can be a savior for the current state of hyper-individualism—a cure for our obsession to find meaning in everything from what job you have to what you eat for dinner.

She coined the term sunny nihilism, which suggests a chance to enjoy the moment, even if it's chaotic and even if it doesn't feel meaningful. The odds of us just being alive are worth making the most of it.

Imagine you're flying, feeling the cold air on your skin, flooded by light. You look down and see a sandy beach peppered with palm trees, and you decide to go there. Suddenly, you're on the beach, drinking a pina colada. But you're alone. Wouldn't it be nice if somebody was there with you? And then suddenly, your best friend appears. It's comforting and warm, a feeling you know you've been craving because you've been struggling at work recently. You're grateful for their encouragement and for the pina colada; it's your favorite drink, after all.

You take a deep breath and enjoy the beauty of the moment. But it isn't a vacation; it isn't a game or a VR headset. It's a dream—a dream that you know you're in, a dream that you can control. The beach, the drink, the friend—you made it all happen because you're lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreaming occurs when a sleeper is aware they're in a dream and can exercise some control over the environment of the dream. In a regular dream, we're aware of objects and events within the dream itself, but we're not aware that we're dreaming. We can't distinguish between being asleep and being awake.

Lucid dreaming isn't anything new; it's a phenomenon that's been reported throughout history but only scientifically documented since 1975, and a lot is still unknown about it—why it happens, how to induce it, and what effects it might have on us individually and as a species. Some scientists believe that lucid dreaming comes from increasing activity in the prefrontal cortex, and unlike non-lucid dreams that can take place anytime while we're sleeping, lucid dreaming happens during our rapid eye movement or REM sleep cycle—our fourth and final deepest stage of normal sleep.

But the biggest thing that those of us who haven't had the pleasure of lucid dreaming are wondering is, what's it like? Lucid dreamers have described feeling like they're playing a virtual reality game where they have some control over aspects of their scene and setting. These dreams can also leave lasting impressions; they might be stronger than those we experience when we're awake.

Most of us have had the experience of waking up from a dream—even one we can't fully remember—and feeling somehow changed from it. With lucid dreaming, that change or impact we might feel is much more visceral. Some lucid dreamers have talked about their dreams in religious terms, like an out-of-body experience. Some even say it feels like being temporarily abducted by aliens and transported to a different planet, like you're in your own personal video game.

But one of the most interesting aspects of lucid dreaming is the emotional revelations that can happen in them. In a lucid dream, you might be introduced to elements of yourself you might not see otherwise. You might see yourself more sympathetically, kinder, braver, or more sensitive than you'd like to admit or take credit for in reality. In this sense, lucid dreams might offer some introspection that many of us hesitate to ponder in our waking lives.

Now, it all might sound pretty amazing, and you might be envious if you've never experienced a lucid dream, because I know I am. And we're not alone in that envy; there's a subreddit with more than 400,000 members dedicated to the subject of lucid dreaming. However, only 23% of the population experience lucid dreams on a monthly basis, and less than 1% of people are what scientists call proficient lucid dreamers—people who can easily sink into and manipulate their lucid dreams.

But the good news is that a majority of adults—55%—claim to have experienced at least one lucid dream in their lifetime. So if you haven't had one yet, the odds are in your favor. If you want to up the odds, here are some things you can do to pave the way for your lucid dream journey.

First is to optimize your bedroom for sleeping. Good sleep hygiene is key to lucid dreams; 65°F (18°C) is considered the ideal sleep temperature. It's important to keep your room relatively quiet and dark. Invest in some blackout curtains, sleep masks, or other accessories to reduce light, and consider using earplugs or a sound machine to block out disruptive noise.

Another critical element to lucid dreaming is what researchers call reality testing. This consists of checking in with your environment and confirming whether you're asleep or awake. We all know that our dream environments can look familiar to our waking reality, but there's always some minor inconsistencies compared to reality. Performing these reality checks while we're awake can give us the skills to determine when we're in a dream.

Reality testing is specifically helpful when something odd happens in your waking life. If you see a strange animal cross the street in front of your car, take a moment to think about the fact that you're awake and that the animal is real and that this odd moment is happening in your life.

Developing that critical frame of mind when you're awake will ideally carry over into your dream state. Reality checks can also be quite simple, like pressing your fingers against your palm and feeling the resistance of your hand. In a dream, you might notice that your fingers go through your hand. And at that point, you'll know you're not in reality, where scientific laws apply.

Or take note of being in your waking reality when you're reading, because in dreams, written words often appear jumbled. It can also be helpful to wake yourself up after five hours of sleeping and simply tell yourself to remember you're dreaming when you go back to sleep. Research has found that this technique is most effective if you can stay awake for 30 to 120 minutes before sleeping again.

Another tactic you may already be doing is keeping a dream journal. Recording our dreams helps us recognize dreams more easily since many of our dreams or elements of them repeat. You might want to write down what you remember the moment you wake up or even record a voice note on your phone to rattle off bits and pieces that come to mind.

As interest in lucid dreaming has grown and these kinds of tips have proliferated on the internet, a whole industry has grown around the goal of lucid dreaming. There are now sleep masks and headbands you can buy that produce noises, flash lights, or vibrate to inject stimulation into your dreams. These are methods used by researchers on lucid dreaming subjects. There are online tutorials, some helpful and some from people simply looking to capitalize on the craze around lucid dreaming. There are even supplements that have been shown to induce lucid dreaming. The drug alkaloid galantamine has been used in research and home settings to encourage lucid dreams.

One study showed that participants who took the drug after being woken up and practicing visualization were more likely to lose a dream than participants who received a placebo. Galantamine is already available over the counter as a supplement, and many lucid dreamers say that it helps them stay in the dream longer and have more control over elements of their dreams. Of course, some view using drugs as cheating, just as you would with any performance-enhancing substance in sports.

But proficient lucid dreamers rightly stress that whether you use a supplement or not, you need to practice lucid dreaming using other methods. Simply popping pills won't get you there. But if you do manage to get there, into a lucid dream, what do you do?

Once we're lucid dreaming, we want to use that moment to control where the dream goes and try to assert influence over what happens. This works better if instead of willing something to happen, we simply expect it to happen. Imagine you're back on the beach