The Best Video Essays of 2022 | Aperture

The useless information.

The things that we think about when we want to escape. Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. I mean, fruit flies don't fly like a banana. Even bananas probably don't fly like bananas. Not like I've seen a banana fly. Have you seen? I'm just saying that fruit flies like a banana. Okay, I'm sorry.

The other day I slipped and hit my head. I still feel a bit woozy, and well, sorry if I don't make much sense. Jason Padgett also didn't make much sense after he was hit in the head in 2002. He was an ordinary adolescent. He didn't do that well in school and considered math useless. One September night, he was out on one of the many night outs he had, and after singing karaoke at a pub, Jason was just about to call it a night. Before he knew it, he'd been hit in the back of his head by two men, beaten profusely, and left there with his injuries.

People at the hospital sent him home after diagnosing a concussion and a bleeding kidney, thinking nothing more of it. In Jason's head, however, things were far worse. He almost overnight developed an intense germaphobia and a general OCD with things. He would wash his hands over and over again and completely locked himself into his home. It was during one of those many, many hand washes that he noticed the water streaming down the sink. Instead of seeing the droplets slowly recede into the sink like usual, he noticed an almost fragmented reality.

It was like a video. He says that he watched frame by individual frame. He would spend hours trying to draw what he saw in the form of fractal diagrams. One day, he was drawing them while he was at a mall, and a person walking by him took keen interest. He happened to be a mathematician who, for once, could appreciate what Jason was seeing in all its mathematical glory. He explained to Jason that the things he was describing were discoveries that were Nobel Prize worthy and that he should really consider focusing on it full time.

At this time, Jason thought he was going insane. He even contacted psychologists about his symptoms. They eventually diagnosed him with acquired Savant syndrome and placed him in a synesthesia group study. Synesthesia is a phenomenon of sensory hyper-connectivity, where one can experience multimodal sensations, like seeing sound or tasting a memory. Some of our favorite musicians, like Lorde and Pharrell Williams, have it, and Jason was diagnosed with some version of it. Although, in his case, it's expressed in math rather than music.

Jason has now become a numbered theorist. Scientists say the regions of the brain that allow savants to do what they do exist in all of us; it just so happens that most of us don't have access to them. So, there could be a number theorist in all of us. Anybody could be anything; anything could be in anything. But wait, maybe I'm just losing my mind again. Everything cannot be in everything; a country, for example, cannot be in another country, can it?

Um, presenting to you Dahala Khagrabari. It's a part of India within a part of Bangladesh within a part of India. Let me explain. An enclave is a part of a country that is surrounded by foreign territory. The Vatican City is one such enclave. But contrary to the Vatican, where people speak Italian, people living in places like Dahala Khagrabari speak a different language, are part of a different culture, and quite simply live a different life.

Dahala Khagrabari was one of only three third-order enclaves, meaning it is an enclave within another enclave within another enclave. How did this all come to be? Well, this bizarre geographic anomaly seems to have been caused by an equally bizarre pastime—chess. Yes, when kings of the 18th century weren't executing people at will, they were playing chess with them. It seems to be a result of this chess playing that entire groups of people were just moved around at a time when the borders were yet to be drawn.

Fast forward 300 years; the borders are here, but their situation was largely unresolved. These people had no legal existence or a way to get into their homeland. They were not granted basic necessities by the government or the territory in which they resided. After the independence wars in the 20th century in the Indian subcontinent, these enclaves persisted for an additional 80 years before finally, in 2015, it was ceded to Bangladesh by India. Up until then, of course, Dahala Khagrabari was in India, or was it Bangladesh? I don't know.

Now, there are more bizarre things in this world, of course. For example, the group of people that wear sunglasses at night. I mean, what are you doing? Where is the sun? Sunglasses were clearly invented to protect your eyes against the sun, right? Well, not exactly. Turns out sunglasses were invented for justice. No, not that kind of justice. Sunglasses were most likely popularized by the Chinese in the 1200s. Their purpose? So that the judges can impartially interrogate witnesses without giving away their facial expressions. The eyes can do a lot of the talking, and judges at the time had to dissociate themselves from the people they were about to question.

Anyone who has tried to lie or has been lied to knows that the eyes can do a lot of talking in tense situations. Speaking of tense situations, you know the time when man traveled 310,000 kilometers on a journey never before done to walk on the surface of the moon? Well, Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew made that journey and came back to tell the tale. Of course, they didn't know whether they were going to come back or not. In fact, a lot of the trial runs resulted in the loss of life even before anything left the ground.

They were all military servicemen, and so the thought of not coming back wasn't unforeseen. But at least they wanted to ensure the well-being of their loved ones if they couldn't make it. Now, insurance companies know a risky bet when they see one, and to say that going to the moon was risky would be an understatement. So, of course, the crew had to improvise.

The crew ended up signing hundreds of autographs with the hope that if they failed to return, the value of their signatures alone would see out the families for the rest of their lives. Of course, those autographs were never needed in the end, but it's interesting to wonder what a Neil Armstrong NFT could be worth in today's money. But willing to spend so much money on NFTs is kind of strange, even sinful, some might say.

This is not the only sinful desire we have in our day-to-day ruminations. Of course, it's remarkable how little has changed in that respect. Promiscuity was perhaps harder to get away with back then, but that didn't stop people from trying. One devout Christian, however—Lamarcus Thompson—wanted people to use their time for less sinful endeavors. He wanted to build something that would take people's minds away from the pubs, the saloons, and the brothels that they used to go to.

He got inspiration from a coal-carrying train in Pennsylvania. The train would slowly carry coal over a mountain before dropping 60 feet under the force of gravity. Now, that may not sound like much of a thrill ride compared to the things we do today, but in the 1800s, the 60 miles per hour speed of this train was enough to accelerate passengers. Thompson sold his hosiery business and devoted all his time to build what would be the world's first amusement-themed roller coaster.

After months and months of designs, Thompson eventually built a 50-foot high, 600-foot switchback roller coaster in a place known for being promiscuous—Coney Island. At just 6 miles per hour, this was far slower than anything you and I would consider exciting, but it was such a novelty at the time that when the business took off, Thompson was making well over fifteen thousand dollars per day from making underwear to thrilling people into needing more.

Thompson died a very rich man. Speaking of underwear, Norway is now calling its military conscripts to return underwear worn during conscription. The obligation seems to have arisen from pandemic-related shortages in the past years. But then again, this is not the first time Norway's resources were spread thin. In 2011, Norway went through a butter crisis that led to more than just dry toast.

The regularity with which people in Norwegian cultures consume butter means that when the news of the shortage reached people's ears, butter stocks ran off the shelves in minutes, and there was market-wide inflation. It all started when heavy rainfall on the prior season led to poor grazing, which in turn reduced milk production from the cows. The butter panic eventually affected foreign policy, whereby Norway had to reduce tariffs to make importing butter easier.

On an individual level, the effect was just as apparent, as people were literally caught smuggling butter through the borders. Empathize with the Norwegian people; it is indeed quite infuriating when a system is in place and it doesn't work when you need it most. It's a lot like lab equipment. It always fails—always fails—when you need it.

Anyone who has even spent a brief moment in a lab would know the tension inside that place simply because very simple things cannot be accomplished when lab equipment is not working. Well, it turns out that happens to the best of us. Wolfgang Pauli, the Austrian theoretical physicist, is known for significant contributions to the field of quantum mechanics, most notably by his exclusion principle. He was a remarkable theoretical physicist and spent most of his time with pen and paper rather than with experimental equipment.

Hence, it follows that occasionally, whenever Pauli would have to deal with equipment, he would break it. It turns out the faulty equipment became such a regularity that merely his presence was sufficient to convince his peers about why certain equipment failed. They ended up dubbing this phenomenon as the "Pauli effect," essentially the tendency of lab equipment to fail for seemingly no material reason other than the presence of a theoretician.

The phenomenon had gained so much traction after its inception that Pauli's friend Otto Stern had literally banned Pauli from entering his laboratory, despite them being good friends. Pauli even attempted to write an article about physics to try and explain things inexplicably breaking as soon as he entered a room. Anecdotes followed that Pauli's car broke down during his honeymoon, a chair broke down at a Zurich festival for no reason whatsoever, the train station ran into a failure as soon as Pauli switched stations, a cyclotron burned right before his eyes, and so much more.

The effect was so eerie that Pauli eventually lamented to himself that such mischief had to have been the Pauli effect. I guess none of us have destroyed particle accelerators or cyclotrons in our lives yet, but we've all messed up things on paper, like using the wrong units when doing calculations. I'm sure it stings, but my teachers always told me that these mistakes are okay and that as long as I have the concepts down pat, I'm gonna be all right, right?

Well, not for the pilots of Air Canada flight 143. On a nice July day, a brand new 767—state-of-the-art at the time—took to the skies to fly from Montreal to Edmonton. Less than halfway through the flight, the pilots noticed a fuel pressure warning on one of the engines. The warnings persisted and eventually rang up for both of the plane's engines. A few minutes later, the engines ran out of fuel entirely, and the plane was essentially turned into a very large and heavy glider.

Thanks to the exceptional skill, the plane was eventually able to land at a nearby runway turned drag strip with no loss of life and only minor injuries that took place during the evacuation. The heroics of the pilots were truly highlighted when months after the incident, different crews across Canada had tried to land a 767 in the simulator under similar conditions. Nobody was able to pull it off.

But why did this happen in the first place? After all, it was a brand new plane. Well, it turned out one of the fuel gauges wasn't functioning properly when the plane was being refueled. As a result, the fuel amount had to be manually verified before the plane was given the all-clear from Montreal. It turned out everyone involved in the process was trained in the metric system, but the 767 was one of the first jets where the instruments were reported in imperial units.

Essentially, the person who was doing the refueling thought they were loading up the plane with around 22,000 kilograms of fuel when, in truth, they were really filling it up with 12,000 kilograms of fuel, which conveniently comes up to be around 22,000 in pounds. So, the plane took off with less than half the fuel it needed to complete the trip.

So many problems in our lives come from simple miscommunication. It really makes you wonder what the world would be like if, say, we all used the same measurement systems or spoke the same language. But humans, ironically, what makes us strongest also makes us the weakest. It's our ability to work together or the lack thereof. The fate of our entire species comes down to what we should be able to do best, but instead, we do the exact opposite.

Life has a certain irony to it, and I think it's this irony that not only makes life painful, it also makes life worth living. As Thanos said best, life is perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

As I was getting ready to go out the other day, I realized I couldn't button my pants up all the way. I realized I was gravitationally challenged and that I had been growing in all the wrong directions. So I started doing what any reasonable person would do with my situation—jogged my way to work every morning, checked the gluten content in my rice I was about to eat, intermittent fasted daily, and ate celery like it was my cheat meal. You know, the usual.

It didn't quite work out, but now that I was back from the hospital and the therapist, I actually found the smart way to lose weight—play chess. Yes, chess grandmasters actually lose an astonishing amount of weight over competitions. Over a tournament, they have been known to burn over 6,000 calories per day. To put that into perspective, at the peak of his training, this is about as many calories as you say Usain Bolt. Even the obesity-inclined population of the United States only manages to eat about 3,000 calories per day.

As any dietitian would tell you, the concept of weight loss can be simplified down to the ideas of calories in, calories out. If you are eating more than you're burning, you gain weight, but if you are burning more than you're eating, you lose weight. If these chess grandmasters were on the typical American diet, they would still be operating on an astonishing calorie deficit of 2,200 calories. Even bodybuilders who are cutting their calories don't cut more than 300 to 400 per day.

Of course, these chess let's say athletes know this and eat more to compensate, but it takes quite a bit of eating to do that, and so most grandmasters end up losing a remarkable amount of weight over tournaments. Some of them burn as many calories over a two-hour game as Roger Federer playing an hour of singles tennis. There was also a championship that was called off simply because the players lost too much weight.

It's also baffling considering sedentary games like chess are usually not associated with anything physically intense that could cause such extreme weight loss. Of course, that is until you realize that our brain consumes about 20% of all the calories that we eat. Chess, being one of the more cognitively demanding games out there, ramps up that caloric demand drastically, which would explain this bizarre phenomenon.

Put anything to lose some weight and look good, right? But if you're in the mood for some delicious calories anyways, why don't you drive to a Michelin-star restaurant in a car with Michelin tires? But wait, do the two have anything to do with each other?

The tire company was founded in 1889 and certainly predates the restaurant rating franchise, so they certainly weren't founded at the same time. But are they connected, is the question. As it turns out, Michelin realized that they needed people to buy more cars and drive farther for there to be a profitable demand for their tires. Driving far was something that people at the time were not in the habit of doing, at least not back then.

This was partly down to the fact that the transportation revolution had only recently started, and people were accustomed to traveling only as far as a horse carriage would go. To get people going farther to make use of their tires, Michelin came up with the idea of a list that would rank restaurants based on how much travel they warranted. For example, a one-star restaurant would simply be a good restaurant in its category— not much else to say. A two-star restaurant would be worth a small detour and a three-star restaurant would deserve a trip of its own.

The first edition of the guide was given out for free, with nearly 35,000 copies distributed. It mostly contained routes, gas stations, hotels, and so on. With time, the guide eventually known as the Michelin guide gained legitimacy in the food industry to slowly become the hallmark of fine cuisine that we know it to be today.

So, yes, Michelin tires and Michelin stars are actually related to each other. You know, it's unbelievable how far some companies will go to promote their products. But if what Michelin did wasn't enough for you, let me tell you what Red Bull did to ramp up demand for their energy drink. As energy drinks gained popularity, Red Bull realized they needed to do something to grab people's attention—something a bit unusual—to give people the illusion that Red Bull was in hot demand.

The company started filling trash bins around London with empty cans of the drink. They also gave free samples to DJs and intentionally left cans lying around pubs—all to give people the illusion that they couldn't get enough of this drink. And once that gets people thinking, half the job is done. Then they started wondering what about the drink makes it so seemingly popular and they went ahead and tried it themselves.

And that's the story of how the advertising of Red Bull gave it wings. Oh wait, about that. So you know how Red Bull's slogan used to be that it gave me wings? Well, Red Bull does not in fact give you wings. Of course, you and I know that probably, but the fact that they claim it does was considered deceptive advertising by some customers of the drink. The company tried to defend itself by claiming that while it does not give you wings in a physical sense, it does boost cognitive and athletic performance by way of increased reaction speeds and concentration.

However, even these claims were somewhat murky and ultimately did not deter a class-action lawsuit against Red Bull. The company paid over 13 million US dollars to settle the case and allegedly offered $10 checks to people who were disappointed that the drink did not literally give them wings. I'm not sure whether to be disappointed that people expected an energy drink to actually give them wings or to be kind of impressed that they actually went on with a case like this and actually got some money out of it.

Speaking of energy and concentration, some of us are, well, getting old. And while all that wisdom on Reddit has made us all sages in our own right, our newfound wisdom is showing itself in more than just the memes we share—we're getting wrinkles. Now, I know what you're going to say: self-love is the one true answer—love your imperfections, love your wrinkles, and so on and so forth. But if those wrinkles are indeed bothering you, I have the perfect fix for you. Just do what Anatoly Bugorski did and stick your head into a synchrotron beam.

Yes, Anatoly Bugorski, a Russian particle physicist, was taking the stairs on June 3rd, 1978. On his way down to the U70 particle accelerator in Protvino, south of Moscow, it was the largest particle accelerator in the world at the time, and he was heading down there to fix a simple engineering flaw in the device. As with any such device, there were multiple safety mechanisms—multiple redundancies—to prevent exactly what was about to happen. A series of safety failures led to an unlocked door—one which Anatoly walked through to a live particle accelerator.

Anatoly had trained to rely on the numerous safeties, and since none of them actually turned on, he carried on with his work. As he bent down towards the beam of the particle accelerator to fix it, Anatoly was hit in the head first with nearly 70 million electron volts. Particles were thought to have deposited 200,000 RADs upon entrance into his head. This hyper-stimulated the optic nerve, which created a sensation of the brightest light ever, as reported by Anatoly. It takes 10,000 millisieverts to join the Living Dead Club. Anatoly had received 3 million that day.

Remarkably, however, he did not feel any pain. He tried going on with his day, but as a particle physicist, he knew all too well what awaited him. His fate was not very pleasant, and in just the next day, his face would swell up, show burn marks, and he would lose the region where the beam entered. As symptoms worsened, Anatoly was soon admitted to an ICU with little hope of surviving. But upon further analysis, it was seen that Anatoly had accidentally received a proton therapy—a form of cancer treatment.

That may have been positive news if Anatoly indeed had some form of cancer, but that was not the case. Regardless, the conclusion from the analysis was that despite the tremendous energy of the beam, most of it was never deposited within Anatoly's brain. That is, of course, not to say that it did no damage—far from it. Even after recovering from the initial radiation poisoning, he kept having occasional seizures and even lost hearing on the side. Oh yeah, and half of his face stopped aging. Even at the time of writing, Anatoly Bugorski, at the age of 79, is very much alive.

So next time you're at the dermatologist for a lift, go ahead and save yourself some money by simply sticking your head into the nearest particle accelerator instead. But don't let Anatoly's symptoms fool you—radiation can sometimes be good for you. Just ask the people of Chernobyl. Well, some of them, anyway.

There's a concept in mammalian physiology known as hormesis. Basically, it's the biological equivalent of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Now, don't take that statement like gospel just yet— for us humans, it applies to things in small doses. Perhaps the most commonly known example is that of microfractures. If you do high-impact training of some sort, you might cause microfractures on some bones in your body.

The fractures are enough to initiate healing and repair, but they are usually not debilitating like an actual fracture. Over time, these fractures heal. They heal back stronger. This process is known as hormesis, and this type of response is known as a harmonic response. Hormesis occurs in many other facets of our lives as well. Some biologists hypothesize that hormesis is exactly the reason why people should eat their vegetables, since vegetables engage a stress response in our body that causes it to fight back stronger. Cold showers are also another type of formatic stress.

These stress responses are so beneficial over the course of a lifetime that hormesis is now being studied more deeply solely for its anti-aging properties. Now, keep in mind I said in small doses. If you run a marathon without any training, your body won't be in a position to build back stronger, even if you manage to slug your way through all 26.2 miles. If you punch a hole so hard that you break your hand into pieces, don't expect some hormetic response to grow you an extra limb. Not that you should be punching walls, but you get the point.

Now, hormesis is so extensive within our physiology that even low doses of radiation—the poisons, deadly radiation—have been shown to induce hormesis. People around the world who live near higher but not extreme levels of ionizing background radiation, either due to geography or their profession, have contributed to over 3,000 research papers that have failed to find any evidence for the harmful effects of radiation under 10 centigrade. To reference, 100 centigrade per year for seven years would lead to symptoms of chronic radiation exposure. So we're not talking about that much exposure here—just a small dose of potentially lethal radiation. No biggie.

The 9,000 or so cleanup workers at Chernobyl were exposed to around 5 centigrade. The rate of cancer deaths among these workers was actually 12 percent lower than the general Russian population. Twin pregnancies also received twice as many radio-biological examinations, which is something people are afraid to do due to the radiation involved. But there are studies that show that there’s a considerably reduced risk of cancer for twins. Breast cancer rates were also 29% lower for the mothers of twins after being adjusted for age and financial circumstances.

So there you have it—in a literal sense, what doesn't kill you really does make you stronger, or gives you radiation sickness, I guess. It's really just a coin flip. So here are shower thoughts that everyone asked for, right? Well, at least some people asked for it. But you know what? No one has probably ever asked, “Where are you?” in sign language before.

Actually, the phrase "where are you?" was probably rarely used until relatively recently. You couldn't really talk to someone unless you were in the same vicinity as them. But wait! Don't get too close—six feet. Remember, we wash our clothes pretty often. Usually, we only wear things a few times before we throw them in the wash and get them cleaned up. But you know how often we sit on couches and furniture and touch other things that we just never wash?

On a similar note, isn't it crazy how we essentially had to have a global pandemic that affected millions of people with a never-before-seen disease just to get everyone to start washing their hands? To grasp the most basic form of hygiene there is: if washing your hands is a new thing to you, then how disgusting has the rest of the world been before this? I miss going out to restaurants, but then I realized the utensils we use have been in the mouths of thousands of other people. And now realizing that so many people weren't washing their hands, I don't know if I miss it anymore.

The virus has really changed the world if you think about it. Since we're all wearing masks, we're all probably yawning a lot less since we can't see other people yawning. Actually, a lot less people are probably wearing lipstick too, huh? But the idea of makeup made me think—when an identical twin gets plastic surgery, does the other twin get offended?

They're kind of saying you're ugly. They might even get pretty sad. But I just tell them, "Go to bed; you'll feel better in the morning." That's basically the human version of "Did you turn it off and back on again?" Right? Honestly, I just tell them that because when people get sad around me, I don't really know what to do. It's awkward.

And speaking of awkward situations, why is it so awkward walking back after you bowl? Just watch! Oh yeah, these are shower thoughts. I actually just bought a cat like last week. This is him. But while I was thinking of names, I realized that since we name our pets, your pet may have named you too.

Actually, if your animal or whatever makes a specific noise whenever you come around them, that's pretty much naming you, right? Your senses are kind of crazy. Your eyes can detect nuclear fusion happening trillions of miles away. We can detect the air pressure changes caused by a paper clip hitting the floor from across the room, and my nose can detect the smallest cat hairs making me sneeze all day long. But you know, it's fine. I'll just think about something else and move on with my day.

But I was wondering—can you really think of nothing? Like actually sit there and try to think of nothing? Thinking of an empty black room? Well, that's still something. You usually can close your eyes and see nothing, but you're actually just looking at the back of your eyelids, and that's still something. So how do you think of something that, by definition, is the lack of anything?

Space, though, is full of mostly nothing. And since we're talking about space, the International Space Station is about 220 miles above the surface of the Earth. But isn't the Earth itself an International Space Station—or a universal space station, if you will? Or maybe you're one of those people that believe space doesn't exist or something? I don't know, something stupid. You know, the same conspiracy theorists that believe low-quality footage of UFOs are the same people who don't believe HD footage of rocket landings.

But there's still so much fake stuff that happens that’s still entertaining, though, right? So what's the point in calling it reality TV if almost everyone in the world knows it's fake? We should probably get this fixed ASAP. Now, most people use ASAP to mean as soon as possible, but it could also definitely be as slow as possible, right?

That's definitely an unpopular opinion, though. But a lot of times, unpopular opinions aren't really unpopular opinions. They're just the least frequently openly talked about ones. I have a popular opinion, though—for sure—and it's that I don't think anyone in the world likes being sung "Happy Birthday," and no one really likes singing "Happy Birthday." So why do we even do it? Also, I hate captchas. They're actually so annoying.

Why is the robot asking me if I'm not a robot? The great thing about artificial intelligence is that it does exactly what you wanted it to do. But the bad thing about artificial intelligence is that it does exactly what you want it to do. Technology can be frustrating, especially when it doesn't work the way you want it to. You know, even if phones and other electronics became waterproof, most of us will still probably subconsciously avoid getting anything wet just out of habit. Water isn't scary, but you know what is? The ocean.

All Things Considered, being scared of deep water is just like being scared of heights. But in water, if you're scared of heights, you probably don't want to live in a high-rise. If elevators haven't been invented, all the CEOs and important people would probably have their offices on the first floor as a sign of status instead of the highest floor. It's kind of funny. The most massive glass towers in the world are in a way the world's tallest sandcastles.

They're mostly owned by big businesses. It's weird if a small business is family-owned. People see it as friendly, but if a large company is owned by a family, it smells like corruption. Speaking of family, if you have brothers and sisters, they're just alternate versions of what could have been you.

Fun fact: no Amish person has ever been cyberbullied. Alright, anyway, has anyone ever seen a taxi at a gas station before? Because I swear I've never seen one. Maybe I'll see it one day when I'm older. They say life is short, but that phrase usually encourages people to do things that'll probably make their life shorter. Life is confusing, even your birthday itself can be confusing.

Like, if you say you're born on the last day of February, it doesn't actually reveal your birthday, if you think about it. Speaking of confusing things, math time! I like math for some reason, so let me give you a tip that you might not know—percentages are reversible. For example, 80% of 30 is equal to 30% of 80. 16% of 25 is the same as 25% of 16, or 4%.

Seriously, just try it out. When you were in school, though, you probably wrote with a pencil on paper on a wooden desk. Or in other terms, you used the dead tree to hold a dead tree that you then used another dead tree to write on. Oh, and when you mess up, your erasers sacrifice their lives for your mistakes.

Since we're all at home, at least you don't have to wake up early for school anymore. Alarm clocks are one of the only devices that make you angry in both scenarios—whether they work or not. A ton of inventions are only created to increase or prevent laziness.

Speaking of laziness, most times we want to go to bed to end the day, but at the same time, we don't want tomorrow to come any quicker. Dying in your sleep sounds preferred by many people, but to me, it's kind of scary. Imagine just slipping away from existence without even knowing it. Sleeping can be kind of hard sometimes, though.

Some nights I lay there staring at the clock for hours on end. I wonder if there's any time in a clock I haven't seen before. By the way, is blinking the plural of winking? I also have really stupid thoughts before I go to sleep, like if animals saw us taking off our clothes, would they think we're shedding our skin?

What even are our body parts? Teeth are such a scary and weird concept. There are dozens of bones sticking outside or inside of your body, and in order to prevent these bones from decaying, we have to scrub them every day. Your eyeballs won't fall out, though, but they also will never actually see each other directly.

Hopefully, even your fingers are weird. Your nails are a window into the flesh of your finger. If you happen to lose a finger, I have some good news for you—cutting your fingernails becomes ten times easier. I hope you still have your index finger, though. Clicking a computer mouse is literally sending a signal from your brain to your finger to the computer's finger to the computer's brain.

Roughly a third of all marriages now result from online dating, so in a way, that means that computers and algorithms are breeding humans. But hey, shout out to computers—you gave me a job! It can be stressful sometimes, like most jobs, but monitoring incoming nuclear strikes has to be the only job in the world where you're glad it's boring.

Oh, and by the way, on May 30th, two guys rode a dragon into space on the back of a falcon. I guess that job sounds like a little bit more fun, but you need to be smart to be an astronaut. Something I've noticed is that smart people have poor eyesight.

Probably because lower graphics makes your brain run faster. IQ is just FPS. Quick question—do any of these shower thoughts even make sense? Comment your shower thoughts, and maybe I'll put them in a video, or maybe make an entire video with your comments.

I don't know, but what I do know is that if you cut the corner off a piece of paper, it gains a corner. A pizza shape is round, it's delivered in a box, and you cut it into triangles. And the phrase "a part" and "apart" are apart. But when "a" and "part" are no longer apart, they become a part.

Ah yes, the English language comes in again. If you live to be 70 years old, you've spent 10 years on each day of the week. You might die soon, but that's okay, because each person who has ever lived is still on this planet in some form, and that's pretty cool. Since we're on the topic of death, I was thinking about the butterfly effect the other day.

And I realized you could have potentially caused a string of events that has led to someone, or multiple people’s deaths. So does that make most people accessories to murderers? Murders are legal; it's a crime, obviously. Ticking a dog from its owner is a crime, but taking a dog from his family is fine.

You've also never actually experienced the present; by the time your brain processes it, it's gone. And as every second goes on, your risk of dying increases. Now, if you think about it, most sea animals probably don't know that humans exist, so as the risk of dying increases, we could wipe each other out eventually. And the majority of ocean life probably wouldn't even care with the rate at which we're going, and it looks like it could be pretty soon.

Wow, another shower thoughts video? Who would have guessed? Not like the last two got a million views or anything. Look, I'm just trying to make people smile or something, you know? People say that a child's laughter can light up your home—unless it's 3 AM and you don't have a kid.

But you can't escape reality sometimes, even in your dreams. For some reason, while we're asleep, our brain makes up stories, only to get scared of them and then wake us up, which seems really counterintuitive in nightmares. How does your body replicate the feeling of falling from a building when you've never actually fallen like that before?

I talk about dreams a lot and how much weird stuff happens in them, but have you ever really considered the thought that you've probably done some really weird stuff in somebody else's dream at some point? They probably don't remember it, though. I mean, I really don't remember any of my dreams.

How many dreams can you actually remember right now? You've lost thousands of days of your memory, and that information will most likely never return to your mind. So is what you actually remember about your life the true story? It all boils down to information, data, numbers.

Speaking of numbers, 11 is both one percent and ten percent more than ten percent. The 60s were now 60 years ago. We're also as close to the 70s in the past as we are to the 70s in the future. Why does saying "I'll be there in 18 minutes" sound super specific, but saying "I'll be there in 15 minutes" sounds super generic?

Your parents are more closely related to monkeys than you are. Something cooler, though, is that every single one of us has ancestors who are alive at the same time as every other human that has ever existed. We've fallen off a bit, though. You know, us being attracted to people that wear glasses is kind of backward when you consider natural selection.

But you know, it doesn't really matter. Humans aren't immortal. The heart is basically a timer counting downwards until your death. Someone somewhere is listening to the last song they'll ever hear, or watching the last movie they'll ever watch, or getting the last haircut they'll ever receive, and there's really no way of knowing.

There's a chance that the last picture of yourself you took could also end up being the one that is used for your obituary. Your life could end at any moment. It's not super often that you publicly hear about hitmen, so this either means that there aren't many of them or that they're really, really good at their jobs.

You know how famous you have to be to actually be assassinated as opposed to just being murdered? Like, am I not important enough? But if you are murdered, don't worry; someone thought you were important enough to not exist anymore, so you really did mean something to someone. You lived a great life, or maybe you didn't.

Some people are optimists; others are pessimists. You know, they usually ask, "Are you a glass half empty or a glass half full person?" Well, the easiest way to answer it is this: did you pour water in or out of it? Or maybe it wasn't even filled with water to begin with.

If things are going bad, a drink always helps. When you're drinking any alcoholic drink, both you and the drink get drunk. No matter how many failures you have in life, you're still on track to become the world's oldest person. And once you claim that title, you keep it for life. If you want to stay in the running to become the world's oldest person, you need to be healthy.

But isn't being healthy technically just the slowest possible way of dying? You know, you spend your entire life collecting people for your funeral. You have no idea if you lived 20% of your life or 90% of your life. It's weird to think about if you're closer to your birth or your death right now. Life isn't really a journey; it's more of a mission.

Birthday cakes explain life pretty well. You start off not knowing what a birthday cake is, and then you figure it out, so you start getting excited for the days where you get birthday cakes. But then eventually, you realize you can go out and buy your own birthday cake whenever you want. But then you realize you should probably stop eating so much cake because it's pretty unhealthy for you until one day you forget when your own birthday is, and cake is the last thing on your mind.

You know, birthdays seem pretty simple, but they can get kind of confusing. Your first birthday is technically your second birthday, and since a baby's age is only counted after being born, is a fetus that is still inside the womb technically a negative age? Anyway, you know 3D printers? You know, you have to model what you want on a computer screen, make sure everything looks good, and then eventually you go and print it out.

Well, when someone’s pregnant, you go from being viewed on an ultrasound monitor to being printed in the operating room. Pretty much, humans are literally 3D printers. Humans are much different from the technology that we use. I mean, we made it. Your bed is just a wireless charger that takes anywhere from 5 to 10 hours to fully recharge.

The specific model of human, a lot of people have the same alarm set that you do, so there's tons of people that have the same exact reaction as you do every single morning at the same time. Your alarm is technically your life's theme song because it starts every new episode every day, but not gonna lie, how often do you actually wake up fully recharged?

Phones and computers work perfectly fine when they're on like 30% battery. It would be really nice if humans worked the same way, but we don't. We're different. Humans are the only species that decided that water was too boring of a beverage to keep us alive. We need food to survive just like so many other animals.

By the way, when you bite down on something, you're actually biting up. Have you ever thought about the fact that your belly button is technically your old mouth? Maybe you have, but I bet you've never thought about the fact that you can go the rest of your life without eating, or you could just eat something you're extremely allergic to—a lethal dose, if you will. A lethal dose of something is also technically a lifetime supply, if you think about it. Like, if you're allergic to peanut butter, just eat a bunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

But wait, the definition of a sandwich is just an item of food consisting of two pieces of bread with some filling in between. So, by definition, loaves of bread that you buy are really just massive bread sandwiches. We literally have to do it, but somehow we've turned liking to eat into a personality trait. Just like everything else.

The most obvious example is hair. Hair is annoying, though. You've probably never thought about the fact that we can't hear our hair growing. We can't hear music, though. Sheet music is just a sound recipe. Music remixes are kind of like sound photoshops, if that makes sense. Just like turning up the volume on something is kind of like zooming in, but with sound.

Our senses have turned out to be pretty useful. You can shut your eyes, close your mouth, cover your ears, pinch your nose, but you can't block out your sense of touch. Your senses are meant to protect you, and your sense of touch helps prevent you from doing things that cause harm to your body, like cutting off your limbs. No one will ever be able to chop off both of their hands with a knife. Please don't try it!

Here, try this instead. Okay, how would you pronounce this? You probably said 0.6, but in reality, it's 0.60. But no one ever says that. You know, we take the easy way out a lot. We put in the least amount of effort needed into things, especially talking—texting specifically. If "yours" is commonly written as a year, then shouldn't "your" be written as "your"?

Has communication gotten better or worse? We're more connected than ever, but for some reason, we put the least amount of effort into communicating with each other. You know, we can't communicate with our future selves in many ways—notes, videos, and so on—except we can't actually see ourselves. However, we can see our past selves, except we can't communicate with them in any way. It's kind of frustrating.

Speaking of the past, remember Flappy Bird? That was seven years ago! God, I'm old. Anyway, since we're talking about the past, you’re still it from a game of tag like ten years ago. But let's go back even further than that—like really far. Since a meteor killed off a dominant species on Earth millions of years ago, aren't we technically living in a post-apocalyptic world right now? The same thing could actually happen again.

NASA is tracking tens of thousands of near-Earth asteroids that could cause harm to the entire planet, but you're more likely to die from your cat than an asteroid. But I'm sure you'll still think they're super cute. If cats go meow and dogs go woof, and ducks go quack, what's the generalized sound that humans make?

Dogs are able to legally pee in more places than we are, which is funny. But here's the most depressing thing in the entire video: most dogs have siblings they'll never see again. There's a lot that we humans don't see, though. There are probably areas of Google Earth that no one has ever really zoomed into.

Also, if you look at yourself in a mirror from five feet away, aren't you technically seeing yourself from ten feet away since light takes time to travel? You're also technically looking at yourself slightly in the past. Being able to see the future would be great, actually. Do caterpillars know they're going to become butterflies, or do they just put themselves in a cocoon while having zero clue what they're doing?

Most of us really don't even know what we're doing. We're just out here trying to survive. Your survival in today's world depends on whether or not you can convince people to give you money. Saying "I sold an hour of my life for 15" sounds a lot worse than "I make 15 an hour."

But that's the reality of the situation. Everything in life just depends on how you look at it. Like, yeah, smoking can be pretty bad, but if cigarette companies cured cancer, cigarette sales would probably increase, which makes everyone happy in the end.

You could view stealing as bad, but torrenting things is the most socially acceptable form of stealing, and people do that all the time. Anyway, here's something that blew my mind: you know when people have an audition for something and their friends tell them to break a leg? I just realized they say that because they hope you end up in the cast. It all makes sense now.

It's crazy how things can be interpreted differently just based off of how you say it. Saying "Have a nice day" to someone sounds super friendly and is pretty normal, but saying "Enjoy your next 24 hours" sounds threatening and will probably have them on edge for the rest of the day. Just a few words can cause a person to go from being completely calm to driving them insane.

Like this: the entropy of the universe is always increasing. This means that things tend to go from being ordered to being disordered. Once you clean your room, it's basically guaranteed that it's going to eventually end up dirty again. So even though there's chaos on earth, like almost having another world war, or the Amazon burning down that everyone just forgot about, or the fact that there was an entire continent on fire, the fact that there's a new plague again, it actually all makes sense because nothing was supposed to stay orderly to begin with.

Alright, maybe I'm thinking too much at this point and I forgot to bring a towel. What if your entire life is flashing in front of your eyes but you're already dead? If you're not dead but alive, everything is trying to kill you constantly. Your stomach is constantly trying to kill you; feeding it makes it stop. You need to drink as well; being hydrated is a necessity.

Drink your water! Normally you empty your drink from the top, but when you use a straw, you empty it from the bottom. Your lungs are also constantly trying to kill you. Breathing resets that timer too. We really take for granted the fact that most of our body's processes are automated. Aging is a disease with a 100% mortality rate. Maybe that's why aliens aren't visiting us; maybe they should visit Antarctica, though, because Antarctica is statistically the best place to have a baby.

All 11 babies born there lived, making it have a zero percent infant mortality rate. It's pretty cool to think about that there are only 365 different birthdays for nearly 8 billion people. You live to be around 80, and you spend a third of your life sleeping, but when you sleep, you're just looking at the back of your eyelids for eight hours straight. And to be honest, sleep is just a free trial of death, so we're all dead.

Here's some more shower thoughts. A lot of TV shows have those fake laugh tracks in the background, so you know when to laugh at the really bad jokes. But what you don't really think about is, for the really really old shows, while you're sitting and watching and listening to it, you're also at the same time probably listening to a bunch of dead people laughing.

Related: one day, there're going to be more dead people on social media than there are living people. If they still exist, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube even, will be a graveyard of content and information from people who lived hundreds of years ago. It will become the biggest source of information for any event. You'll be able to see how people reacted to presidential elections, to the death of their idols, to the spread of new diseases, to everything there is. You won't be able to see how the world reacted to sliced bread, though.

Bread is just a loaf of dough, so by that logic, cheese is just a loaf of milk, and an ice cube is just a loaf of water. Speaking of ice, something I find kind of interesting is that there have been entire civilizations who never knew that water had a solid form. The money you earn is never actually yours; it's just your turn with it. Everyone works to survive, and all of the money that you've earned actually belongs to someone else.

There's a lot of jobs and businesses that bank off of the fact that things in your life can go wrong. Doctors only make money because you get sick. Mechanics make money because your car breaks down. Lawyers make money because you messed up really, really bad. Like maybe you robbed a bank, but if you do try and rob a bank, you shouldn't have any problems with rent or food bills for the next 10 years, regardless of whether or not you're successful.

A jail and a prison are basically the same thing, but a jailer and a prisoner are completely different. The company Bic is known for making lighters and pens. Both of these happen to be things that are frequently stolen, which is kind of a pretty good business model if you think about it. Teachers make money off of the fact that you don't know how to like add numbers together or speak a language properly.

And speaking of language, you ever just take time to think about letters and words? They're weird and confusing, but kind of cool. It takes more letters to spell the word "short" than it does to spell "long." Also, all the e's in the word "Mercedes" are pronounced differently. When you say the word "forward," your lips move forward. When you say the word "back," your lips move back.

When hurricanes form, the most dangerous part is the eye. It destroys everything in its path; it's right in the middle, which also happens to be where the letter "I" is—in the middle of the word "hurricane." It's kind of cool. Hurricanes are deadly. Everyone tends to talk about and consider the question that is where do we go when we die, and it's a pretty good question, but no one ever asks where we are before we were born.

The world hasn't changed much over the past 700 years. Today, we take pictures of food and put it on Instagram, and a lot of people get super frustrated by this, but during the Renaissance, people would sit around for weeks on end painting a table full of food. You know you've probably walked past someone that you've played video games with online before and just didn't realize. Similarly, you see people every single day that you will never see again in your entire life. Out of every event that has happened, everything led you both to the same place at the same time, only to veer off path and never meet again.

On a similar note, you've probably seen someone on the last day of their life and you could have never known. To make this more fun, though, your future wife is probably telling her boyfriend that they'll be together forever. How cute! You often hear that life is a roller coaster, and I get it; it feels like it. But when you're on a roller coaster, aren't the downhill parts the most fun?

You also often hear things that are so easy a caveman could do it. The problem is that cavemen were able to start fires without lighters or matches and were able to kill animals that were three to four times their size, so is it really that easy? If you've been using technology like computers or cell phones for years, as most of us have, you've probably scrolled for hundreds or thousands of miles.

But honestly, scrolling doesn't mean you've actually moved anything. When you scroll on your phone, nothing changes except for the color of the pixels on the screen. Nothing is moving; it just seems like it. When your laptop overheats, it freezes. No British king would have this issue, though, because no ruling British king has ever used the internet before the invention of phones. The question "Where are you?" was probably never asked.

Eventually, when you're ordering something or sending a letter or something, you may have to put Earth as a part of your address. Maybe when you can live on the moon! You've seen more of the surface of the moon with your own eyes than you will ever likely see of Earth, actually. If you think about it, about half of the universe is in your field of view at all times. But for now, humans are on Earth, but we're weird and a little broken.

Brushing your teeth is really the only time you ever clean your skeleton. Cleaning is just rearranging dirt. Speaking of cleaning, you should probably really clean your glasses. Right now, they're disgusting. You really can't clean something without making something else dirty. You also can't move your top teeth. Go ahead, try! You can't hum while holding your nose shut either.

Go ahead, try this one too! And while you're at it, you also can't snap your fingers inside your mouth. Humans cut down birdhouses to make birdhouses. If you've ever clapped your hands before, you never actually stopped. There's just a really, really, really long pause between claps. We do have some redeeming qualities, I guess. We live a lot longer than most animals.

If you're over the age of 30, you were alive before every single dog that is currently on Earth. We argue a lot, though, over really, really stupid issues, like whether or not we should eat other animals, even though we are animals ourselves. But if vegetarians don't like each other, is it still considered beef? Let’s flip a coin and decide.

Flipping a coin isn't really a 50/50 thing, though; it's random. In a vacuum, a robot can flip a coin millions of times and get heads every single time. Humans only really use it to make decisions less stressful, even though it's a purely random event. Machine learning is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives every day, but you observe machine learning all the time—your brain.

Your brain is really, really good at learning things. This is shown in your dreams. Your brain can recreate scenarios with people you've known for years and just have full-on conversations with them that your brain made up on the spot, even with people you just met. And it can all feel so real. But no one has ever dreamed about popcorn until it happened. And honestly, the person who discovered popcorn had to be super confused when it happened.

You ever think about how arms on chairs are just like chairs for your arms? Also, if two mind readers are reading each other’s minds, whose mind are they actually reading? It's weird. But what's also weird is that blue is usually seen as cold while red is usually seen as hot, but blue fire is hotter than red fire.

It's likely that another kid is going to grow up in your childhood home and have a lot of the same experiences that you did while growing up there. You'll use every room, toilet, staircase, and light switch that you did. But why are they called light switches? At the same time, they're also dark switches. Almost everything you have ever owned is still on Earth somewhere.

Unless you're Elon Musk, then send your car into space! All of the materials needed to create today’s technology have existed since the beginning of the Earth. It just wasn't in the right form or put together yet. You're living in an age where you can be smarter than almost anyone in the past two million years. You can be smarter than almost all 100 billion people who have ever lived. You have the world's information at your fingertips, but you'd rather sit here and listen to me tell you what I think about in the shower.

I'm flattered, really! But please get out of my house before I call the cops. Not gonna lie, the world is kind of funny when you step back and really think about it. In a day and age where everyone takes everything seriously, it's nice to pause and consider the intriguing and sometimes flat out just weird thoughts that some of us have but for the most part never share. Some of them are pretty interesting, like the fact that the Earth's population has doubled in the past 50 years, but it took almost 2 million years to get to the 3.7 billion human population in 1971.

For every person alive today, there's about 15 dead people throughout all of human history. Or that one day, in the far future, someone will be the very last person to die of cancer. Others are honestly just annoying. You normally breathe and blink on autopilot, but now since I just mentioned it, you're doing both of them manually. Sorry about that!

But the fact that your tongue is probably touching the top of your mouth right now, but no matter where you put it, it just doesn't feel comfortable. Why do women's pants have fake pockets, but babies' pants have real pockets? These are shower thoughts.

Whether you have these thoughts in the shower or in the car while you're in traffic or when you're laying in bed for hours at night when you just can't sleep, the location doesn't matter. The Earth is revolving around the sun. The sun is revolving around the center of our galaxy, and our galaxy is in a unique orbit with the nearest galaxy to our own, Andromeda.

So with that being said, every single second, the Earth is moving into a new position in space that it has never been before and will never return to again. Ever. Your age in years is how many times you've circled the sun, but your age in months is how many times the moon has circled you. If you could steal just a second of life from everyone on Earth, you'd be able to survive for nearly another 240 years.

But did you know that two people can be born at the same exact time, but because of time zones, have different birthdays or even be born in different years? Maybe there's no reason as to why we're here, or at least that's what we're supposed to think. Maybe we're just characters in a universe-sized video game. Sleep could be a save point, which is why we really don't know what happens between the second we fall asleep and when we eventually regain consciousness some hours later.

We also trust our bodies enough to just go unconscious and continue breathing so we don't die. If you think about it, it's actually healthy and recommended to sleep for four months a year. But in order to bring us back, alarm clocks are made for the sole purpose of being annoying enough to shake humans into consciousness. You might want to smash it and break it, but don't!

Every analog clock that no longer works actually shows the time on it where it died. If you order a new clock to be delivered to you and it arrives safely, your time has arrived. Speaking of being conscious, humans, there's a lot that goes on inside our bodies. Your brain makes your heart work, and your heart makes your brain work.

It's really quiet given the things that are going on inside us right now. Like imagine if you could hear blood gushing through your veins or if every time we blinked it made a noise. But wait, if everyone on the planet blinked at the same exact time, nobody would be able to tell that it just happened. We have eyes to see; we have a nose to smell; we have ears to hear, and hands to feel; and we have a mouth to taste.

But is this every sense that there is? Could there be other senses that we just can't perceive because we don't have the means to? We just haven't evolved to need them because it's not needed on Earth. But what about on other planets? When we colonize Mars, will the far future humans evolve to have different senses than we do today?

Evolution is an interesting idea. The voice inside your head has also evolved with you over time. Do you remember if it was the voice of a kid when you were younger? If you heard your eight-year-old voice today, would you recognize it? Being able to record things digitally is something that we all overlook. We view old writing like "The Wealth of Nations," or the Bible, or "The Epic of Gilgamesh," and we see them as some of the most influential pieces of writing to ever exist.

But in the year 3000, we'll be able to look back at thousand-year-old videos and recordings just like we view old writing today. If you're watching this, by the way—hello! But due to deepfakes and people getting really, really good at editing and faking things, there's only going to be a very brief period in human history where videos can actually be trusted as evidence.

People see glasses as a sign of intelligence for some reason, even though we all failed a test in order to get them. But you know, Antarctica is probably the smartest and most educated continent on Earth, considering it's populated almost exclusively by scientists.

Science has taught us a lot about the universe, about the planet we live on, and even what goes on inside our bodies. One of the most interesting things that we figured out, though, is that the brain is the only organ that knows it's actually an organ. And on top of that, it actually named itself. But the brain takes time to process information. It's very, very quick, but not instantaneous.

So technically your body is living ever so slightly in the future. We live in a society, and we set up and made rules that everyone should follow in order to keep things going smoothly, but some of them are just kind of funny. For example, parking tickets are just speeding tickets for going zero miles per hour.

We have cars that can go upwards of 200 miles an hour, but there's almost nowhere where you're legally allowed to go that fast in them. In life, people always tell you to stay in school and don't do drugs, but when you get sick, the best advice you get is to be told to do drugs and stay out of school.

You never truly appreciate the fact that you can breathe through your nose until you're sick and suddenly lose half the ability to keep yourself alive. Everyone has taken medicine and seen a warning label to not operate heavy machinery while on the use of it. Now, they're probably talking about cars and such, but almost everyone immediately thinks of like a forklift, or a crane, or a Caterpillar 797F.

Speaking of cranes, though, have you ever actually seen a crane being built? They kind of just show up out of nowhere and then disappear randomly. Language is just weird. I made a whole video about it a couple of weeks ago. Try to think of another English word that ends in "mt" other than "dreamed."

I more closely represent the letter "X" as a math variable as opposed to it being a real letter; it's just a fake C. Anyway, "crane" is the 9,618th most used word in the English language, but you really don't need to know that many words to speak English well. Learning the top 100 words in most languages will usually contain at least 50 of the words you use in everyday conversation.

Bring this up to 500 words, and you'll get to around 80 percent. This should allow you to go out in public and order food without an issue. But when you're at a restaurant and you're waiting for a waiter, you become the waiter.

On the topic of food, the food also doesn't really go bad; just something else starts eating it before you do. Bacteria. Also, I was in a public restroom the other day, and it had one of those touch-free soap dispensers. I don't really get the point of those, though, because as long as the soap does its job—like to remove the bacteria from my hands—does it really matter if I touch the dispenser or not?

But one of the nastiest things out there is what you might be watching this video on right now—a phone. Most people check their phones nearly a hundred times a day, and I don't remember the last time that I thoroughly washed off my phone. There's so many things that you can do on a phone; there's almost unlimited possibilities.

Cell phone providers take advantage of this and sell unlimited minutes, unlimited texts, and unlimited data for any given month. But in reality, you're actually only getting 44,600 minutes a month at most, so they're kind of lying, but not really. There are about 730 hours in a month. If you work a full-time job, you're going to be working at least 40 hours a week or 160 hours a month.

It's all worth it, though, whenever that check comes in. But sometimes you spend money you don't have. In a way, debit cards pay for things with the past hours of your life, and credit cards pay for things with the future hours of your life. But if you don't pay your taxes, you'll get thrown in jail. But jails are typically funded with taxpayer money.

So if you go to jail for tax evasion, you're living off of taxes because you didn't pay taxes. Taxes are like a subscription fee to your country that you can't cancel, even if you don't like the service. The only reason we want or feel the need to make money is to get rid of all of it in the end. For a very brief second, every 19-year-old is the oldest teenager in the world.

In the same way, every single person alive was at one point the youngest person in the entire world. But even more interesting than both of these is the fact that for the smallest period of time, you were exactly Pi years old. Walking is just you continuously screwing up your balance so you fall into your other leg, and the process repeats until you reach your destination.

Knocking on someone's door is basically punching their house until they give you attention. Similarly, clapping is just giving yourself a high five for someone else's hard work. Clapping is universally a pretty good thing—it's a way to show your appreciation for something without someone having to see you face to face.

Facial expressions are something that we kind of just don't notice day to day, but they're pretty interesting. Your skull doesn't change shape at all; your skin, your flesh just warps and bends in ways to form a smile or a frown or anything else. Actually, you've never even truly seen your own face before.

You've only viewed it in pictures or in reflections. The rich used to pay the poor for their entertainment, but today the poor pay the rich for entertainment. Now, you don't always pay; like, YouTube is a thing. But YouTube itself is older than some people watching this video. Watching videos, though, is just being entertained by super tiny pixels changing colors and turning on and off.

So to be honest, existence is just really weird. There are only two days in your entire lifetime that aren't 24 hours long—the day you're born, and the day you die. So hurry, those showers up; you're using all my hot water!

How many sides does a piece of paper have? I'll give you a second. Two? No, it's actually six! You don't realize it until you start stacking it. There's a lot of things in life that take us by surprise—a lot of things that aren't really as they seem, like elephants being herbivores. They'd be a lot more scary if they were carnivores.

Your parents told you not to talk to strangers, yet here we are. When you're talking or conversing with someone online, a lot of times you don't really know that much about them. The nice thing about not knowing anyone's age on the internet is that you can pretty much get in an argument with an eight-year-old and leave feeling superior.

That serotonin boost can be exactly what you need some days. A lot of us could use a boost of those happy chemicals to make our lives a lot easier. When you experience depression, your brain refuses to produce, let's call it a happy hormone, as a reward for your brain cells doing what they're supposed to do.

And as a result, your cells go on strike, refusing to work for no pay, and the whole system comes crashing down, benefiting absolutely nobody involved. Sounds strikingly familiar. History repeats! And speaking of history, it must have been really awkward being the first historian to have ever existed.

I can just imagine that conversation happening. It's like, "So what are you doing?" "Just writing down everything that's been happening." Why? But the way we view history is now changing. At some point, the internet will be older than all humans alive, and future generations will have tons of high-quality video footage of so many extinct animals, old civilizations, and where Santa used to live before the Arctic melted and disappeared.

That might make you feel like an old doomer, but remember, the number of people older than you never increases; it only decreases. It's like a lifelong race to be ranked number one, except the prize for winning is just death. And out of the billions of people who have ever lived, just one of them suffered the most agonizing death of us all so far.

But maybe that happened hundreds of years ago. Until trains were invented in 1804, every human who ever lived that experienced the speed upwards of 56 miles per hour was falling to their death. Normally, the floor is what stops gravity from killing us. But if we get too far away from it, gravity uses the floor to kill us. Life is short, so they say, but life is only short if you love your life; otherwise, it is very, very painfully long.

It's like playing a game. In this case, it'd be more painful to lose the game by one point than by a hundred points. You know what I mean? But enough with being morbid. Good dreams are basically a free trial of a life you could have been living.

But in a way, if there are an infinite number of universes, then our dreams aren't actually dreams; they're clips and previews from another universe that we can see into. But our universe isn't so bad; being able to go to sleep without worrying that you'll get eaten by some random animal is probably the most privileged thing about our modern world. It wasn't always like that, so we should really appreciate it.

We don't really appreciate a lot of free things in life, like taking your health for granted all the time until you're sick. Only then do you actually care. Oh, and email! We take our own planet for granted almost daily. National parks are a perpetual reminder of what the world would look like if it weren't for humans.

Ironic how we enjoy them so much, isn't it? I just blinked, and most of the time, we barely even notice how often we blink. Characters in first-person video games never blink. If you think about it, it doesn't feel like much. It's just one of those manual processes that our bodies do for us that we just forget about.

We really take for granted how smooth the insides of our eyelids are. Imagine if they were like sandpaper! Us humans can barely live with one another without trying to kill each other, so the fact that people can convince themselves that meeting aliens would go smoothly is nothing short of pure hopium. If they got upset with us, they'd just throw another one of those big rocks at Earth, and we'd be toast.

And speaking of big rocks, the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs' reign on Earth was technically the highest ratio of killing birds to one stone in Earth's history. From all the life on land to all the life in Earth's oceans, 99% of everything was wiped out in an instant. We are part of that remaining 1%. I like that quote so much I put it on a hoodie.

You can get it here! Still, the deep ocean is terrifying. People will swim in the ocean at the beaches even though there are definitely many corpses in it. People will not swim in a pool with a corpse in it, though, so therefore, as weird as it sounds, humans all have a corpse-to-water ratio that is acceptable for them to swim in. You can see why people don't like oceans now, huh?

Water makes fabric a darker shade even though water is clear. I guess I probably should have taken my clothes off before I got in the shower. Anyway, after rush hour, I normally brush my teeth, and I'm super grateful to be able to do that. Most animals have never seen their own teeth, let alone be able to clean them.

As much as you'd like to believe it, wisdom teeth aren't useless. They're actually the reason some oral surgeons are able to make a living. It's quite the career. It's weird; we choose our careers when we're worse informed about what they're actually like. Some people will work the same job for their entire life, wondering what life could have been like if they had taken a slightly different path.

Who knows? You could have ended up like Jeff Bezos and had more money than brain cells. Literally, 200 billion is a massive number. There's a certain point in everyone's life where how high can you count changes from a matter of knowledge to a matter of will. And I wouldn't attempt this one: counting to 200 billion will take you over 6,000 years. Our brains just aren't capable of even comprehending things that large.

It's strong, but not the strongest. Yes, the brain did indeed name itself, but it also recognized that it named itself and was surprised when it realized that. So are we actually as smart as we think we are? We can't see into the future, unfortunately; we aren't psychic. But always remember, psychics that don't accept walk-in appointments aren't real psychics. They'd be expecting them, right?

But although we can't see the future, we do remember the important events that happened in our lives in the past. Some stranger somewhere still remembers you because you were kind to them when no one else was. You've made an impact in their life. You made them feel something no one else could.

However, almost universally, you can instantaneously stress out any person just by shouting, “Hey, catch!” That was uncalled for, and I'm sorry for that! Getting hit in the face by a ball at that speed would most definitely have you in the hospital. The hospital is simultaneously the building where most people leave without entering and also the building where most people enter without leaving.

We're born against our will. We also die against our will. But regardless, we're here. We're alive. Kids don't really enjoy sleeping. It's always seemed like a hassle to get them to finally go down. It's probably because they haven't gotten bored of life yet. They're young and may be here against their will, but there's still so much to see, so much to do.

Kids are all different, but they all have one thing in common—they're brutally honest. The easiest way to tell if you're obese is to ask a kid to draw you. If they draw your stick figure with a line for the body, you're probably fine. However, if they draw you with a circle, I've got some bad news for you.

You can be underweight, or you can be overweight. But you can't be white. We all change as we age. We grow, and we mature. This can be seen in many ways. There was a moment where your mom or dad picked you up as a baby and put you down, only to never pick you up again.

You got big, you grew up. If you're still decently young, the odds are that you still haven't met the majority of people who you'll befriend in life, and those are the same people who will inevitably be at your funeral when the lights go out