Are You A Nihilist?

We all know how it goes. One day we're born, one day we die. Everything that happens in between we know and understand, but everything that happened before and will happen after we know nothing about. As a result, it's really difficult to say what exactly the meaning or importance for us being here is. If we can't tell how we came or where we came from, how can we know why we're here? In the same vein, if we don't know where we're going or what we're going to become, how can we tell if any of our present actions have any significance at all?

It is this uncertainty of both our collective pasts and futures that has allowed the question, "What is the meaning of life?" to plague humanity ever since we became sentient. We've never been able to objectively answer this question as a species. However, a lot of us have found comfort in many different ideologies to at least subdue the anxiety that it causes. In many different religions, a deity made the entire universe, put us all in it, and whatever we do on this Earth will be used to determine when and how we spend eternity afterward.

For some others, the meaning of life is the love we share with friends, family, and our loved ones. Some others believe the existence of life in itself is what makes it worth living. But for nihilists, life is meaningless. All action, suffering, emotions, both good and bad, are entirely senseless and meaningless. This is nihilism—the belief in nothing.

At some point in our lives, many of us have been faced with nihilistic thoughts. We're hit by a strong sense of purposelessness, like our lives have no meaning and we have no intrinsic value. Usually, this happens when we begin to question our old beliefs, but also just before we get new ones to hold on to. It's in that phase where you're growing out of your parents' beliefs, learning new things, getting new experiences, and forming your own views about the world.

And usually all of these thoughts begin with one simple question: why? A three-letter monosyllabic word that's capable of making anything and everything that feels like the rock of your foundation start to become slippery like quicksand, dragging you into the misery that may be, just maybe, your whole life hasn't been what you thought it was.

Just pause and take a moment to think about your core values and just ask the question: why? Why do you believe those things? Where did they come from? Who did they come from? Keep asking and eventually you'll arrive at a point where there's no longer an answer. You'll arrive at nothing. All the religions of the world, all of our scientific discovery, but yet the question "why?" is one that we still cannot answer.

And so, for the nihilist, it is at this point that they come to the conclusion that there is no why. There is no answer. There's simply nothing. As Alan Watts once wrote, "Life is nothing more than a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium." It's really in the name. The term nihilism comes from the Latin word "nihil," which translates to nothing, and "ism," which translates to ideology. It's the ideology of nothing.

But that doesn't really help us in understanding it completely. Usually, people confuse nihilism for pessimism, but they are very different from each other. Pessimists believe in the worst outcome; they have a downtrending view of the world and tend to focus on the negatives in life because they believe that in the end, evil will always overcome good. And this is what makes them different—pessimists believe that there's good in the world, but they just don't think humans are capable of doing it, at least in its entirety.

Nihilists, on the other hand, do not believe in anything. They don't believe that there's evil in the world; neither do they believe that there's good in the world. In the mind of the nihilist, the world simply exists, and humans created morality, thereby creating good and evil.

Let's take the glass cup metaphor for instance. Optimists say you should see the glass as half full, while pessimists say we should see the glass as half empty. Nihilists, they say throw the entire cup away because what does it matter if it's full or empty? Full or empty? Good or bad? It's all irrelevant. We're all going to die anyway.

Nihilism is also often compared to several other philosophies like cynicism and apathy, but again they are all very different from one another. Correctly categorizing your thoughts in these baskets may be harder than you think. Cynics believe that people are always motivated by self-interest. They don't believe that anyone can have intrinsically good motives. They have no faith in the human species and believe that we're all entirely selfish, only fighting for our own benefit.

However, the idea that humans are not good means that in the mind of the cynic, good exists out there somewhere, just not in humans. In the mind of the nihilist, nothing exists out there. There's no good or evil; they don't see people as evil; neither do they see them as good because they don't believe either of those things exist. They're simply traits we've applied to things.

Apathetic people just don't care. They believe that there's meaning to life, but they simply don't care about it. Nihilism, on the other hand, is the idea that there's no grand design or purpose—nothing to believe in and therefore no meaning.

This brings to mind the paradox of nihilism. If you believe in nothing, then that nothing becomes something that you believe in. But since you now believe in something, then there is no nihilism because nihilism is the belief that there is nothing.

Nihilism is quite different from other philosophical ideas because it was first a literary invention before it ever became philosophical. As a result, it's not clearly defined as many of the other philosophies that exist. Many different people explained it in many different ways, but eventually these different definitions got categorized, forming many different kinds of nihilism.

There's political nihilism. Political nihilists believe that for humanity to move forward as a species, all political, social, and religious order must be destroyed. Then there's ethical nihilism. It rejects the idea of absolute ethical or moral values. With this type of nihilism, good or bad is only defined by society and, as such, it shouldn't be followed.

If we as a species will ever attain absolute individual freedom, we can kind of just do whatever we want. And then we have existential nihilism. It's the understanding that life has no value or meaning. It's the most popular kind of nihilism and the one we've been talking about for most of this video. For nihilists, the existence of things like the state, religious bodies, and even communal morality is a breach on our freedom as individuals.

If we can't do absolutely anything we want to do, then are we truly free, or have we simply bound ourselves by some kind of invisible mental chain for reasons we can't explain? One night, I was scrolling through Reddit and I came across the question: "If you had the chance to save your pet or a stranger, who would you save?" An overwhelming number of people said their pet. Pretty obviously, when one commenter was confronted, they simply asked the question: "Why do you think a human life is worth more than that of an animal?" And no one really had an answer.

Of course, people tried to beat around the bush, but the question why was never answered. And that right there is the point of the nihilist. If we can't answer why we bind ourselves by these rules, then why do we choose to do it? Well, it might be because of the existential horror and the emotional anguish that comes with agreeing to the fact that life is meaningless.

Think about it for a minute. If life is truly meaningless and everything we're doing has no value, then all the feats of science, the wonders of technology, things like space exploration, and human rights movements—look at how far we've come—and then think about the fact that it all might just be waste—a blip in time with no consequence whatsoever in the grand scheme of things.

Knowing that all the things we experience, the ups and downs we go through, that in the end, it's all for nothing. We aren't obligated to understand the chaos of reality; just to laugh at it. Friedrich Nietzsche was a strange philosopher because he argued both for and against nihilism at the same time. Arguing for it, he explained that there is no objective structure or order in our world except for the one that we create for ourselves. He once said, "Every belief, every considering something true is necessarily false because there is simply no true world."

He believed nihilism would expose all of humanity's beliefs and truths as nothing but a symptom of defective Western mythology. As he famously said, "God is dead." Now, he wasn't talking about the actual deity of the religions; he was talking metaphorically about the power that religious orders held at the time and how people were starting to chart their own paths, find their own meaning in life, denying what the status quo was at the time.

But then, in the same breath, Friedrich argued against nihilism, saying that in the coming centuries, the advent of nihilism would drive civilization towards a catastrophe—a disaster waiting to implode—a river that has reached its end. And if you look at the most destructive civilizations in human history, we can clearly see that this is true. Long-standing cultural traditions, beliefs, religious institutions, and even financial systems are broken down and nothingness starts to creep in.

Think about it. If nothing matters and we're all just a random combination of transient atoms, how can we call Hitler objectively one of the worst humans to ever live for trying to wipe out an entire culture? At a fundamental level, most of us understand that all of these things are indeed terrible, but the danger is that because we cannot explain why we feel that way logically, we can never convince another person to follow the same path. And that is exactly what Friedrich feared.

Some people still blame him for the Nazi era because although he saw all of these dangers, he still continued preaching nihilism. He believed that if we could work through the breakdown of civilization that nihilism would eventually cause, we can then create a new course of action for mankind. He believed that to move forward as a species, we must create a new morality—one that does away with the prejudice of what existed before because, at the end of the day, tearing down your old house shouldn't make you homeless; rather, it should present you with an opportunity to build a bigger and better home.

Pause and look around you for a moment. Observe everything that's going on, particularly on social media, and you can see that we as a species might just be heading for another nihilism outbreak. Religion no longer holds any saying what is morally acceptable. People are destroying long-standing beliefs and cultural practices and are instead charting new courses for themselves. Anything, no matter how despicable you think it is, now has a loyal fan base defending why they have a right to do whatever it is they want to do. And in reality, why not? That's the question no one can answer.

Humanity will keep shifting the needle forward ever so slightly until one day none of us will be able to tell the other that they're wrong because why are they wrong? William Shakespeare once wrote, "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing."

If life is truly meaningless and we have no purpose for being here, our response should be to make the best out of a bad situation. Instead of seeing the glass half full or half empty, we can simply throw it out and drink directly from the faucet until we're satisfied because at the end of the day, life alone is reason enough for living.

Here is an apple and here's a banana. Pick one. Whichever one you picked, it was your decision completely. This is what we call free will. It's the idea that we are the sole authors of our destiny—that in the face of multiple choices whatever decision we make is completely down to us. We have the power of free choice.

But what if I told you that free will is a myth? That we are all just a group of atoms who will react to a particular stimulus in a way that can be predetermined? If you picked a banana at the beginning of the video, and we go back in time, if free will truly exists, you should be able to change your mind and pick the apple instead.

But what if I told you that if we go back in time under the exact same circumstances, you'll pick the banana again? What if I told you that I can actually tell which of these two options you're going to pick 300 milliseconds before you actually pick it with 100% accuracy? In the 1980s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist, used an EEG, an electroencephalogram, to show that you can read and tell that somebody is about to move 300 milliseconds before they decide in their conscious mind to actually move.

This means that before we decide that we want to move our bodies, it's already been decided for us in our subconscious, and we only think that we made the decision ourselves after it's already been made. In a similar study, participants were asked to press one of the two buttons while looking at a clock with a random sequence of letters on a screen. With the use of fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, they discovered that two of their participants' brain regions showed what button they would press 7 to 10 seconds before they consciously made that decision.

The results of this research only prove one thing: a few seconds before you pick the banana or the apple, your brain makes that decision for you. It is after this decision has been made, deep in your subconscious, that your brain becomes aware of it and we become convinced that we are in the process of making that decision. Because the brain is like the heart; we don't tell it what to do. It just does.

So in reality, consciously making a decision, the experience we call free will, is actually an illusion. It’s simply a visualization of events that the brain has already set in motion. It tells you what the brain has decided to do. For as long as society has existed, we've understood the role of surrounding influences on our decision-making with idioms like "it takes a village to raise a child" and "you are the product of your environment." We understand that to a great extent, our upbringing, our parents, the society we grew up in, all of these influence our decision-making process.

If someone is born religious, it's not crazy to think that they'll be religious throughout their lives. Taking it a step further, things like genetics also play a huge role in our choices. Charles Darwin, in the theory of evolution, brought forward the idea that if species do indeed evolve, then things like intelligence must be hereditary. Intelligence is a trait that helps us make better decisions, and while you can study hard to know more than the average person, for the most part, how intelligent you are is not entirely up to you.

So some people cannot make certain intelligent choices, not because they don't want to, but because their genes are limited. In that instance, would you say that the person has the freedom to make those intelligent choices? Because in reality, they do not. Their fates are predetermined by their genes.

How can we all truly have the freedom to decide our fate when we're not dealt equal cards from the start? And it's not just the cards we're dealt; it's also the ability to play those cards. Some are simply born better bluffers than others. When you look at the concept of free will critically, the whole idea seems to crumble pretty quickly. In fact, researchers have come to the conclusion that believing in free will is like believing in religion; neither of them agree with the laws of physics.

Think about it. If free will truly exists, and if choice is not just a chemical process, then why can things like alcohol and antipsychotics completely change a person's behavior? Even worse, we've seen brain tumors turn people from pediatricians to pedophiles. Dominick Miello was once a respected pediatrician for 30 years. He was loved by his patients and adored by their parents and everyone in the society. In a shocking turn of events, however, in 2012, he began facing trial after being accused of making pedophilic advances towards his female patients.

Neuroscientific research showed that Miello had a tumor growing at the base of his brain that changed his behavior. In 2002, a similar thing happened to an American school teacher. He suddenly started having pedophilic urges towards his stepdaughter and was arrested. Then it was discovered that he had an egg-sized tumor growing in the part of his brain that was supposed to be responsible for decision-making. After the tumor got removed, the man's pedophilic urges stopped completely and he was able to return to his family.

If free will exists, why can removing a tumor change a person's choices? Is it then possible that by altering brain chemistry or physical composition, we can completely change a person's beliefs, ideologies, and choices without the person being able to do anything about it? In more recent years, lawyers have started using MRI scans to help plead the case of their clients, with neuroscientific research proving that brain tumors and malfunctions cause them to commit their crimes.

It's difficult to argue against it because if they did not have the freedom to choose to do something else, then why would you give them the heaviest punishment for actions they could do nothing about? Brian Dugan was facing execution in the state of Illinois after he pleaded guilty to murdering a 10-year-old girl. However, MRI scans revealed that he had mental malfunctions that affected his decision-making process. His lawyers pleaded with the court to spare him the capital punishment because can we really say that it was his fault if malfunctions in his brain caused him to do what he did? Then he didn't have the free will to make a better decision.

While he was on death row, his case continued to get argued, and as a result, the state of Illinois abolished capital punishment. Some scientists who still want to cling on to the idea of free will argue that while it's true that the subconscious makes decisions for the conscious, we still have the free will to shape the unconscious world. On first glance, this makes a lot of sense. You can read a book, and an idea gets into your subconscious; then in the face of a choice, the idea you’ve read floats back out of your subconscious forming your conscious decision.

However, there's a flaw in that idea. It's much like a paradox. Because where then does the desire to change your subconscious by reading a book come from? Desire, much like choice, comes from the subconscious, so a conscious effort to shape your subconscious is actually a subconscious effort to change your subconscious.

The biggest obstacle the idea of free will or lack thereof faces is morality. If morality is based on free will and free will doesn't exist, then what happens to morality? What happens to every other man-made institution that has been designed around the idea of free will? When faced with questions like these, many people immediately fall into a trap of fatalism. Fatalism is the idea that we are completely powerless in the universe's game.

People who think like this believe that since we are not completely in charge of our destiny, we're completely at its mercy. It's random and not up to us. Then they become a lot less happy and start slacking in their relationships. They stop trying to be good people or uphold any moral standards, and overall they start to have a lower sense of fulfillment in life.

But we don't have to fall under that trap. The scientists who champion the idea of the absence of free will would rather explain it philosophically as determinism. Determinism is the idea that all events are predetermined by existing causes, that everything that will happen can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. It doesn't mean that we're completely powerless and simply at the mercy of what's to come; it simply gives us a different way to look at everything that happens around us.

According to the government of the United Kingdom, more than half the people in prison have a brain injury. Doesn’t that tell a scary story? Understanding the true concept of free will will help us realize that those people are no different from us. They're not worse humans, and many times they're just there because of a combination of bad events that were totally out of their control.

In the same way, with deterministic thinking we would also show more humility when talking about our achievements because now we understand that we are simply a product of our past experiences. It helps us to have empathy for people who are not in a similar position as we are, and it helps us to reduce our sense of entitlement.

If the people in higher positions in society do not attribute all their success to their personal efforts alone, they're more likely to do more for others. They're more likely to help and to give back to others, hoping they might be able to recreate the factors that help them succeed. If you're getting scared or confused right now, I totally get it. Even the scientists who have been studying this for decades have found it very disturbing.

It's a difficult thing to wrap your head around because it goes against everything society is built around. Free will is the basis of our society; it's what determines who is right and who is wrong, who gets the praise and who deserves to be punished. It tells us that a man who killed another man deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, and that someone who works hard deserves to live a good life.

And that's the fear of spreading the absence of free will message. Many scientists believe that if enough people are aware of this idea, it could literally end society as we know it. Because why would someone else risk his life to save another person if after he's done people will only say, "Well, he didn't decide himself to do it, so he doesn't deserve any praise"? The reality is praise and punishment are two huge factors that help influence our decisions.

So if we remove them from our society, we pave the way for fewer good deeds and much worse ones. It's a strange dilemma to be in because although the truth is that we do not have free will, believing that we do is actually a lot better for us. This is the concept of illusionism, that although free will is an illusion, it’s one that we must keep up with because faced with the choice between truth and good, it benefits the most of us to always choose good.

So next time you see a homeless person down the street, don't just roll your eyes and judge the person. Understand that there are a multitude of factors, many of which they might not have been able to control, that caused them to be where they are. Be humble about what you have and what you've achieved because just a tiny less intelligence in your DNA and you might not have made that one decision that changed your life.

Know that you do not have free will, at least how you imagine it, and you're just lucky your mixture of atoms makes the right decisions. But immediately forget that. Forget everything I said for the past 10 minutes and act like every decision is yours completely because only then will you be able to make the decisions that can truly change your life.

Those words were spoken by Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer, a sex offender, necrophiliac, and cannibal who brutally murdered 17 Milwaukee young men throughout the late '70s, '80s, and '90s. Dahmer’s story makes for a chilling example of a psychopath whose appearance of normalcy played a huge part in his ability to get away with so many atrocities.

Yet it is also this facade that causes us to wonder how much a person who seems perfectly normal on the outside could commit such outrageous acts of violence. We want to look into the eyes of these individuals to get a glimpse of why they are the way they are. We want to understand the psychology of a serial killer. As a society, we like to think we have psychopaths and serial killers figured out, and in some ways we have.

In 1980, a Canadian forensic psychologist named Robert Hare created a master list of 22 traits you can use to diagnose psychopathy—a list that is still the most widely used by experts to this day. The list includes things like superficial charm, grandiosity, pathological lying and deception, impulsivity, proneness to boredom, showing no remorse, a lack of realistic long-term plans, leading a parasitic lifestyle, and being unable to accept responsibility.

When most of us think of the term psychopath, these traits pretty much perfectly describe the image that comes to mind—a person who is full of themselves, unaware of the emotional reality of others, deceitful, manipulative, and self-centered.

Where things get a little complicated is when you discover that there's still a distinct difference between being a psychopath and a serial killer. Although the two distinctions often overlap, unlike what a lot of us think, the fact that someone is a diagnosed psychopath doesn't automatically mean they have the capacity to kill, and vice versa. Just because someone is a serial killer doesn't automatically make them a psychopath.

Dahmer is a perfect example of a person who is a serial killer, but not necessarily a clear-cut psychopath. The revised 400 version of the Hare psychopathy checklist is used to evaluate individuals. Those that meet 25 to 35 of the criteria on the list are considered to be psychopathic, while other notorious psychopaths like Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy all scored within the 25 to 35 range; Dahmer only matched 13 of the warning signs.

And you can pick up on this just by watching some of the interviews he gave after he was caught. "I acted on my fantasies, and uh, that's where everything went wrong." Dahmer comes across as startlingly soft-spoken, self-reflective, modest, remorseful, and honest about what he did and why he thinks he may have done it. Other serial killers struggled to convey this level of apparent normalcy after their crimes were exposed.

For years, Ted Bundy tried to lie and manipulate his way out of responsibility for his crimes. John Wayne Gacy admitted to his acts with absolutely no remorse, referring to his victims as pieces of his property. Richard Ramirez proclaimed proudly, "I love to kill people; I love watching them die." Both displayed signs of obvious narcissism and psychopathy, traits that could pretty easily single them out in a crowd and make them appear obviously different from you or I.

This is what makes Dahmer different and perhaps even more terrifying than other serial killers. At the time that he was committing the murders, Dahmer was able to fly under the radar more easily than others since he didn't fit the image of the deranged egotistical maniac that everyone was looking for. He spoke and looked just like you and I. He could have been your classmate, your close friend, your cousin, or even your brother, and you would have never known.

Jeffrey's own father, Lionel Dahmer, wrote an entire memoir about how shocking it was for him to wrestle with the fact that his oldest son, who he remembers as being a sweet, playful, curious child, went on to inflict such horror on so many people. Whenever people hear a story like Jeffrey Dahmer, the knee-jerk reaction is to focus on the perpetrator's childhood, assuming that they must have been abused, neglected, or psychologically damaged in some way.

This approach is understandable; people want events to follow a linear point A to point B cause and effect pattern. It makes evil easier to predict, identify, and prevent. Unfortunately, the motivations, desires, and urges of serial killers don't usually operate that way, making these questions about the person's childhood usually pretty unhelpful in explaining their behavior.

While Dahmer didn't have a picture-perfect upbringing, by no means was he physically abused or taken advantage of in any way that even came close to the horrors he went on to inflict on his victims. During his sentencing, Dahmer went up on the stand and said this to the judge: "This has never been a case about trying to get free; I never wanted freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did not for reasons of hate. I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. I know how much harm I’ve caused. I tried to do the best I could to make amends after the arrest, but no matter what I did, I cannot undo the terrible harm I’ve caused."

This quote encapsulates the questions we're all asking: What is this sickness that drives serial killers to do what they do, and how can someone who appears to be so stable commit such insidious violations of humanity? Experts have come to learn that the desire to inflict extreme harm on others is more often a mysterious dark urge that originates from deep within the individual and not something external, like we tend to think.

Dahmer described this urge as a compulsion which he says started stirring him around the age of 9 or 10 when he became fascinated by the bodies of a lifeless crab he found on the beach. Over the next few years, his compulsion grew, and he began to dissect other small animals, including dogs and cats, saying that he was captivated with the way that the insides of their bodies looked.

In his early teens, these desires switched from animals to humans. Dahmer didn't hear voices in his head that told him what to do; he was not a person acting on impulse or for revenge. He went out on secret, premeditated missions, honing in on strangers with the singular intent of committing vicious atrocities on them.

After his first murder in 1978, Dahmer claims that he tried to get his urges in check, and he did to an extent, going six years without blood on his hands. But he, as well as all others like him, could only keep the uncontrollable urge at bay for so long.

One framework that psychologists use to categorize personality traits is called the Five Factor Model. It divides the human personality into five main pillars: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. The combination of these traits that is most commonly used to describe a psychopath is a person who has low agreeableness and conscientiousness and high in neuroticism.

This type of person has a low level of sensitivity towards the emotions of others, a low level of intelligence and ability to adhere to the rules, standards, and structures set by society, and a high potential to experience emotional instability or possess some kind of mood disturbance. It's been theorized that the most noteworthy trait difference between functioning psychopaths, who are able to become relatively successful based on our society's normative standards of achievement, and unsuccessful psychopaths, who are unable to amount to much of any quantifiable success, is conscientiousness.

Possessing high levels of conscientiousness makes a person dutiful, organized, deliberate, and competent. For example, let’s say there's a diagnosed psychopath named Jimmy. Jimmy has low levels of empathy towards others, a tendency towards lying and deception, and a grandiose sense of self. In almost all professional settings, these psychopathic characteristics would make Jimmy an unlikable and untrustworthy person in the eyes of his co-workers and employers, putting him at a disadvantage.

However, let's say that Jimmy also has a high level of conscientiousness. This conscientiousness would help him to self-identify the potential pitfalls of his cold-heartedness, lying, and grandiosity, and likely give him the motivation to adjust or hide his other negative behaviors enough so that he could get ahead in the workplace.

This measurement of conscientiousness can also be used to differentiate serial killers. Those who have higher levels of it are called organized killers. They tend to lead methodical lives, have skilled employment, be socially proficient, and have high levels of intelligence. Disorganized killers, on the other hand, possess low levels of conscientiousness. They're more likely to have lower levels of intelligence and are less concerned about leaving behind sloppier crime scenes.

The difference between psychopaths and serial killers is that with psychopathy, conscientiousness can be a positive trait, which can help them gain control over their negative psychopathic qualities. But with serial killers, there are no positives. It makes them even deadlier, as it only seems to pair their murderous internal urges with organized, competent, and deliberate plans of execution.

This is what makes them better at finding strategic ways of getting away with their actions, at least for a while. As you would expect, Dahmer was one of these people. He committed heinous crimes in his apartment and had bodies hidden throughout in various stages of decomposition. Yet, anytime someone mentioned an odor or noticed anything that might seem out of the ordinary, he always had a meticulously crafted answer that made sense.

He methodically targeted racial minorities and homosexuals because he knew, sadly enough, that law enforcement at the time was simply less interested in pursuing crimes against people of those identity categories. Humans like Dahmer force us to ask questions like how can we identify killers who hide so skillfully behind these masks of normality?

And I think this question is where so much of the intrigue about both psychopaths and serial killers comes from—the idea that anyone around us right now could be outed as the next murderous maniac. As you're watching this video, you may be haunted by the possibility that one of your neighbors, close friends, or even family members could be one of these people, harboring hidden fantasies about hurting others. For all we know, you could even be a psychopath whose desire to inflict harm on someone for your own pleasure is just being suppressed under a mask of normality.

In the words of Ted Bundy, "We are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere." This is green, this is red, and this is blue. But how can you tell what you're seeing as blue is the exact same thing as what I see as blue? We've named the colors to give us a way to communicate and reference them, but in reality, there's no way of knowing if what you see is the same as what another person sees.

Even with the small steps and the giant leaps we've made as a species, there's still a lot to learn about earth, life, and the human condition. There's still everything we don't know. On the 26th of February, 2015, one picture of a dress divided the internet. You are seeing white and gold. "Where you looking at? Oh, just change white." No, you're kidding.

While some saw it as gold and white, others saw it as blue and black. Ever since then, there's been a number of repetitions of the same experiment, either using the same sense—in this case, sight—or even other senses like hearing in the famous "Yanny or Laurel" debate. These experiments remind us that there's no way for us to tell that you and I sense the same things.

What I call red might just be what you call blue, and there might be someone out there who sees human beings with purple teeth but just refers to it as white. Seventy-one percent of the entire Earth is covered by water. Humans are made up of about 60% water, potatoes 80%, watermelons 93%, and cucumbers 95%.

It's very clear that water is essential for life on Earth, but we really don't know that much about water—not even about the very oceans we came from. In fact, we've only explored 5 to 10% of the Earth's oceans. The rest? Well, who knows what's down there? It's even scarier when you realize that fish like the blobfish and the barreleye fish belong to the slim percent of things that we've already discovered.

The deeper you go, the crazier things seem to get. What's at the bottom of the ocean? For the most part, we just don't know. But back on the surface, countries that are bordered by water use something called coastlines to mark their territory. The coast is the land along the sea, and the boundary between the coast and the sea is known as a coastline.

So how long is the U.S. coastline or any other coastline in the world? The answer is, well, again we don't really know. Coastlines constantly curve and cut in and out. Even the smallest deviations from a straight line can add distance, and over time these small distances add up. Some of these features are massive, like bays, while others are minuscule.

Now measuring each and every little crevice isn't really efficient, so surveyors cut corners and straighten rough edges into easily manageable lines. If you do a quick Google search of the measurement of any coastline, you'll find a lot of different answers. They all cut corners just differently.

Humanity as a species, though, well, we've done really well for ourselves. When in a pinch, we invent something to push us through. We made clothes when the weather was harsh, shelter so we could be safe from wildlife to rest and recuperate, weapons to hunt for food, money to replace pure bartering. But what about fire? Was fire a discovery or an invention?

And music. Music has been described by scientists as a relatively recent invention by humans. It's believed that music helped our ancestors to bring together a close-knit community. But did humans really invent music, or did we just discover that certain sounds sound nice with other sounds? Birds sing, whales sing, even tree frogs have a nice rich baritone sometimes.

So can we really say man invented music? If we did, then what is the true definition of music? I guess we'll never know. On the list of man's greatest inventions has to be tools. In fact, for a really long time, scientists were pretty sure that this is exactly what made us human. We were the only animals who, through the use of such a variety of tools, were able to expand and grow so quickly.

Except we aren't the only ones who use tools. A lot of animals, mainly primates, use tools for all kinds of reasons. A study by Jane Goodall on African chimpanzees would change the definition of man forever. In the research, it was discovered that these chimpanzees use tools to gather food, brush their teeth, and even more.

So would this mean we must now redefine man or redefine tool? They use tools for the exact same things we would do. Do we accept chimpanzees as human? Well, of course not. This begs the question: if using tools doesn't, then what makes us human?

In the same research, it was also discovered that chimps had individual personalities and were capable of rational thoughts, like emotions and sorrow. They gave pats on the back, hugs, kisses, and even just messed around with each other just for fun. They developed affectionate bonds with family members and with other members of the community, and some of these bonds lasted for over 50 years.

If emotions, rational thought, and affectionate actions do not, then what makes us human? In the past, it was thought that humans were the only animals who were self-aware. However, in the past 30 years, extensive research has proven that many other animals are too. In fact, in 2012, a group of neuroscientists created the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which states that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness; non-human animals, including all mammals and birds and many other creatures, also possess these neurosubstrates.

If consciousness, sentience, wakefulness, and the ability to feel and experience do not, then what makes us human? We really just don't know. All we know is that one day we weren't; today we are, and one day we will be no more. We don't know what happened before we existed, and neither do we know what will happen after we die.

If a person dies and comes back to life, it's referred to as a near-death experience because we see death as a finality. But what if it isn't? What if one of the beliefs of humanity's many religions is true? Even the Earth itself can be very weird, and sometimes you just see formations that make no sense, like who built Stonehenge and why. The same goes for the pyramids.

Some people think the gods of Egypt made the pyramids; others are convinced it was made by human effort, but in reality, we just don't know. The human mind is everything. All of man's greatest inventions, theories, and discoveries have all come from the human mind. We first conceive of an idea in our mind before we can ever create it in the real world.

But perhaps we don't yet know or understand exactly how powerful the mind can be. The placebo effect gives us a glimpse. I made an entire video about the placebo effect, but basically doctors appear to give a patient treatment, but in actuality, they don't. However, this fake treatment registers in the brain, perceives it as real, and kickstarts the healing process. Basically, the mind heals the body because it thinks the body is getting treatment, even if it isn't.

In research on social, cognitive, and effective neuroscience, it was discovered that self-affirmation helps maintain a positive self-view and helps restore your self-confidence and self-worth simply by telling yourself nice things. It is indeed possible for your mind to convince your brain and body that you are those things. And these are just the things we know the mind is capable of.

Think about everything we don't know. There are a lot of things we know about animals. Dogs are sweet and loving; cats can have an attitude; and the lion is apparently the king of the jungle even if it lives in a savannah. Not everything makes sense, and we really don't know as much as we think we do.

Going to space is one of man's greatest achievements. However, what space exploration has clearly shown us is just how small we are in the grand scheme of things. There are at least 2,500 other solar systems that have been discovered, but that number could go up to the tens of billions. We just can't know for sure; that's just in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies that are out there.

It's so incredibly massive that you just can't help but think, are we alone in the universe? And if we aren't, why hasn't anyone said hi? We have ideas, but as always, we don't know, and we really can't prove most things. A very fundamental question for nature is: What exactly is the universe made of, and why is there stuff in it to begin with? We know that almost all matter is made up from indivisible atoms, but why?

Why do atoms exist, and where do they come from? When we die, what exactly do those atoms become? And everything else? At this point, you've listened to me talk for about 7-8 minutes. Time is persistent for everything with mass. Time never stops. We all know that yesterday is in the past, today is the present, and tomorrow is the future, but what exactly is time, and where does it come from?

Even more confusing is did humans discover or invent time? There are so many things about the world that we just don't know. And while some are deep questions like we've talked about, others are more trivial. While watching the video of this person yawning, you probably also yawned. So even more importantly, why is yawning contagious?

When we're happy, we laugh; when we're sad, we cry. But why? For a long time, it was believed that laughter was a social tool to show one another that we're enjoying what's currently happening. It was an evolutionary tool used to help enhance connectivity in societies. But if that was the case, then laughter should be unique to us humans, or at least primates. But it's not; other social animals like dolphins and even rats laugh.

So why do we laugh? Also, why do we cry? It's as if crying has emotional healing powers. Crying activates our parasympathetic nervous system and helps return our bodies to a normal, fully functional state. It's a good thing for your body, so why do we associate it with such sad things? We often cry after something bad has happened, not really while it's happening. Is it a process that evolved solely for our brains to process emotionally painful things?

Then again, we cry for happy reasons as well. So scratch everything I just said. Why are some people right-handed and others left-handed? Why isn't everyone ambidextrous? Wouldn't that have made a lot more sense? We can have theories for many, many things, but they remain just that—theories. In actuality, proving theories as a fact of nature is a lot harder than you'd think. Many scientific theories are superseded with time, considered obsolete, or simply wrong.

We used to think that Earth was the center of the universe; then one day we realized it wasn't. Then again, not everyone could accept the fact that their view of the universe was so wrong. I mean, there's a theory that is, as recently as World War II, the Germans attempted some advances under the impression that the Earth was hollow. So it is very possible that mostly everything we do know about the world right now is wrong. Honestly, it probably is.

We simply don't know everything about everything, and that's okay. All we can do is keep asking questions and keep learning about the world around us, trying to uncover each of its mysteries one stone at a time, hopefully answering the most important question of them all: What does existence truly mean?

"Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Have you ever met someone who calls himself a nihilist? Maybe you have a friend from college or a family member who says they're a disciple of nihilism. At every opportunity, they love to wax poetic about the meaninglessness of life.

Briefly indulging them in their philosophical ideas can expand your mind and help you to see things you never would have. But the truth is, outside of philosophical discussion, leading a nihilistic life is bleak. Think about it. If nothing matters and we're all just specks of dust floating through space and time, what's the point in trying at all? Building healthy relationships with friends and family doesn't seem worth it because in the end, everyone you know will die anyway.

All attempts at self-improvement are futile because in the universe's grand plan, none of it matters. Even if you're not all doom and gloom, there will be days when getting out of bed will seem pointless, where life itself will seem kind of pointless. And the current state of the world, with issues like the climate crisis, the rise in extreme politics, and economic instability, doesn't help with our psychological state.

This glimpse into the void might dissuade you from wanting to do anything with your life. You're staring down nihilism—the belief in nothing. Framed like this, it makes life sound pretty awful. But there's another way to look at nihilism—one that teaches you not to see the glass as half full or half empty, but instead to throw the glass away and drink straight from the faucet until you're satisfied.

This is optimistic nihilism—the realization that the universe's meaninglessness is the most liberating thing in the world. It's the type of nihilism you get when standing on the precipice of a huge mountain or watching a mother bird feed her young. It's the profound smack of insignificance you feel when faced with the miracle of your existence.

The amount of luck and chance that it took for you to get here in the first place. Optimistic nihilism doesn't mean we're doomed to live in a meaningless universe; instead, it allows us to experience the universe in our own unique ways. According to the nihilist, you and I don't matter. Nothing does. Religious morality or societal norms don't restrict your existence. You are entirely free in the control of making your life mean something.

Once you accept the meaninglessness of your life as a gift rather than a burden, you find peace with the life you have. Because life is brief and fleeting, it's precious. Writing in the late 19th century, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was worried about modernity. He was very critical of the traditional European morality and the religion of his time, which placed Christian beliefs at the center of social and political life.

In his 1882 book "The Gay Science," he proclaimed the infamous line, "God is dead; God remains dead, and we have killed him." Here, Nietzsche didn't make an argument for atheism; instead, he observed that believing in one true Christian God was no longer central to European society. People's lives no longer revolved around the church's calendar or teachings. Industrial means of production gripped Europe, flooding the pockets of factory owners and enforcing a standardized workday on everyone else.

With that, personal freedom and agency became core values in society. People no longer yearned for a higher power to guide them through life, explain what comes after death, or show them right from wrong. Increasingly, people took these matters into their own hands. While Nietzsche was critical of religion, he was equally skeptical of what society could become without it.

He understood that without Christianity as a guiding principle, people might move through life confused and disoriented. A world without God creates a void of understanding in our lives, and humans aren't psychologically capable of a pure belief in nothing. We're always searching for purpose in anything, even when we're not aware of it. Think about how you start your day.

Imagine you wake up and look out your window to see a beautiful owl perched on your balcony railing. You might associate that with having a good or bad day depending on the culture you were raised in. We're constantly making connections and associations like this in our lives, down to the most mundane things. People aren't built to remain in a constant nihilistic state. It's only a phase that allows us to gain perspective on the structures that govern our everyday life.

According to Nietzsche, we fill the void where God once was with ourselves. We become our own tiny gods, so to speak. We give ourselves the authority to distinguish right from wrong and determine our individual meanings in life. If nihilism from a Nietzschean point of view interests you, we made an entire video on nihilism, so you can check that out by clicking on the link in the description.

The existentialists who came after Nietzsche, like French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, expanded on this idea. To Sartre, we have complete freedom over our lives in a world without God or objective meaning, but with great power comes great responsibility. You have the power to shape the life you want to live. Let that sink in for a moment. Yes, you can make good choices for yourself, but how are you supposed to know which choices are good?

And how often do you do things that are against your own self-interest? In good moments, when things are going well for you, you might feel empowered and in control. You may get the promotion you deserve or marry the person you love. You might move to a new city and establish a community of friends that you couldn't imagine life without.

You've invested time, energy, and love into making a meaningful life for yourself without following arbitrary rules or some intangible plan ordained from above. All the good things in your life have come from you, yet in the trenches of the everyday, life can seem overwhelming, especially when you're in charge of making sure you have a good one.

To give our lives meaning, we create internal narratives about ourselves, and this is where we start to run into issues. We tell ourselves we're hard workers, and consequently, the importance of our jobs and the identity they provide us with starts to weigh us down. It's the same at school. Students get sick with anxiety about test scores and grades as if getting into the perfect college will finally confirm their life's worth.

Similarly, you inject meaning into your love and family life. You strive to be the perfect parent, child, or partner because of your belief that these relationships will make your life meaningful. This is what keeps people in unhealthy or toxic relationships. They've attached this idea of meaning or worth to something that's ultimately meaningless.

Having to constantly reaffirm who you are because there's no higher power to do that work for you can be exhausting. While we have the freedom of total control, that also bogs us down. What happens when you're busy shaping the life you think you want, yet you're still unhappy?

All this meaning-making, trying to make sense of your life contributes to a plague of depression and anxiety, especially among millennials and Gen Z. People are burned out, stressed out, and exhausted. So why do we chase meaning, even with this feeling in the back of our minds that none of it matters?

There's a contradiction between our pursuit of meaning and the reality of a meaningless universe. It's devastating to confront the idea that all the hard work we put into making our lives mean something is for nothing. Optimistic nihilism is the solution to this anxiety that we inherit when we're forced into the position of making meaning out of our lives. Yes, nothing matters, but isn't that a relief?

You can find yourself responding to the seemingly urgent work emails at 3:00 AM or over obsessing over your Instagram caption, but in the moment, it feels like the weight of the world rests on these things. You spend late nights tossing and turning, all of your mistakes and wrongdoing spinning until you've convinced yourself that you're the worst person on the planet.

But embracing that none of these things ultimately matter is freeing. Forgive yourself for your past mistakes and look forward, excited to experience the future. When we're the center of our own structures of meaning, every choice we make, good or bad, becomes weighted with significance.

When you find yourself in one of these mindsets where your life feels too big to handle, remind yourself that you're small and insignificant. The universe is indifferent to your worries, struggles, and mistakes. And in the end, none of it matters. You'll die one day, and in the future, no one will remember your brief flight on this planet.

There's no use fretting about trying to create the perfect life because the energy spent making your life mean something is worthless when it's all said and done. You're dust. It's completely normal to allow the squirming sensation of your insignificance to wash over you for a moment.

But staring nihilism in the face is only comfortable if you let it be. If you call yourself an optimistic nihilist, it's probably good practice to confront all the different emotions your meaninglessness makes you feel. Otherwise, you won't reap the actual benefits of optimistic nihilism. Instead, it'll be a bandage to your problems—something you just tell yourself to believe in order to get through the day rather than a true guiding principle.

You need to sit with your nothingness and accept it for what it is. Then use the objective meaninglessness of life to relieve yourself from the pressure that meaning-making entails. Take a look at your life and all it means to you—your relationships, the values you hold close, the things that get you out of bed in the morning. You have to be willing to part with all of them and embrace the void that they leave behind.

Suddenly, the choices you make and the problems you face every day—things that take up so much of your mental capacity—don't seem so overbearing. Optimistic nihilism frees you from the crushing burden of meaning-making. Of course, it doesn't absolve you of wrongdoing; your actions still have consequences, and you shouldn't give in to all your impulses for the sake of it.

Continue creating a life that you love—one that you're excited to live, whatever that means. But just know that in the end, everything you've made will dissolve into the ether, and you'll leave nothing behind. In the face of this reality, take advantage of all the sweetness life offers. The good things in your life are made all the more beautiful because of their fleeting insignificance—sharing a meal with those you love, the smell of blooming lilacs in spring, and even petting your cat.

It's such a miracle that you're here, able to experience anything. So shouldn't you spend your life enjoying yourself instead of worrying so much about making your life mean something? Life is precious, beautiful, and awe-inspiring despite its chaos and disorder. It's a wonder that you can find goodness amid a void of meaning.

You need to end the hopeless search of meaning-making and dive headfirst into the void, and when you emerge on the other side, you'll find nothing but that—nothing. Nothing will be clear and bright, a guiding light into a better yet fleeting life.

Why do we love being scared? Is it the way our hearts pound in our chests? The mixture of curiosity and revulsion when we see a monster or a ghost? Or is it something even darker, like the disturbing themes portrayed in popular culture? Are we drawn to genres like horror because we recognize them as a shadowy reflection of ourselves?

Since primitive humans first gathered around campfires to tell stories, we've been trying to scare each other. In 2021, historians at the British Museum identified the world's oldest drawing of a ghost, carved into an ancient Babylonian clay tablet dating back 3,500 years. It lays out specific instructions for getting rid of unwanted spirits. Early mythologies are filled with these kinds of terrifying creatures—often these monsters were intent on punishing humans for some perceived misdeed.

The story of Medusa tells of a woman who turned men into stone in retribution for her own defilement. African legends speak of creatures called impundulu—vampiric lightning birds that summon storms and steal unprotected children. The Oni of Japanese myth are terrible flesh-eating trolls who often bring about disease or calamity. Many of these early horror stories are rooted in folklore and function as cautionary tales—they're meant either to deter or encourage particular behaviors. Abuse and murder will result in a vengeful haunting by a poltergeist; honoring an ancestor's grave will keep their soul at peace.

Even as society has moved on from using these legends as guidance, the need for horror still remains. Our modern idea of horror emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries with the rise of Gothic literature. Novels like Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" by Bram Stoker paved the way for a new genre devoted solely to terror. Unlike older folktales which primarily served as moral lessons, these stories were written with the explicit intention of frightening their audiences.

They incorporated dark, claustrophobic environments characterized by fear, decay, and the constant threat of the supernatural. Gothic literature set itself apart with an intense focus on how the present is always haunted by the past. More than two centuries later, modern audiences still love to be scared. We spend hours on YouTube watching creepy videos, gather outside of haunted houses hoping to run out screaming, and flock to theaters to see the latest horror flick.

It's no surprise that John Krasinski's "A Quiet Place Part II" earned nearly $300 million worldwide at the box office. But, of course, there's no better testament to horror's popularity than Halloween—an entire holiday celebrating all the things that make our spines tingle. The same year that "A Quiet Place Part II" broke pandemic-era opening weekend box office records, it's estimated that Halloween spending hit an all-time high, surpassing $1 billion.

So why do we like being scared? To answer this question, we need to understand the nature of fear itself. In a basic sense, fear is an evolutionary adaptation that allows us to rapidly identify and react to physical danger to increase our chances of survival. On a neurological level, it engages our amygdala—also known as the fear center of the brain. This cluster of neurons essentially functions as an alarm bell, controlling our emotional responses and creating feelings of anxiety, aggression, and fear in reaction to perceived threats.

Other parts of the brain involved in rapid decision-making and the encoding of long-term memories come online during this process as well. These not only help us to quickly respond to a situation but to also clearly remember the incident later. That way, if we ever find ourselves in similar circumstances, we know how to react—for example, if shouting and making a lot of noise is able to scare off a lion that has been stalking you, the next time you run into one you'll remember to do the same thing.

This is why, generally, the more emotionally intense an experience is, the better we remember it. It's how our brains learn what to seek out and what to avoid. This applies not only to moments of intense joy, such as a graduation or surprise party but also potentially frightening experiences like riding a roller coaster—which, although scary, can be remembered in hindsight as incredibly fun and pleasurable. This feeling makes us want to seek out and repeat these experiences again and again.

Another reason we may like being scared is because it releases a host of chemicals that our bodies naturally crave. Fear activates what's known as our sympathetic nervous system—a complex network of nerves that controls some of the body's unconscious actions. When triggered, the system initiates a intricate physiological process known commonly as the fight or flight response. If you've ever experienced sweaty palms, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, and a sinking sensation in your stomach, then you know what this feels like.

During the fight or flight response, the body is flooded with a complex chemical cocktail that includes everything from adrenaline and endorphins to serotonin and even oxytocin. This particular recipe helps maximize our chances for survival by initiating various physical responses, such as blood moving from the extremities to larger muscle groups where they're actually needed. Interestingly, every one of these chemicals is also associated with other more traditionally pleasant emotions, like happiness, surprise, and excitement.

So what on the surface may appear like an undesirable experience can actually turn out to be extremely enjoyable. It makes sense, then, why people with particularly efficient neurological reward systems tend to like being scared more. The thrill of a slasher film produces an immediate pleasurable rush of adrenaline, much in the same way as skydiving.

It's important to understand, though, that there's such a thing as too much fear. If something is terrifying enough, it can trigger the development of phobias—an extreme and irrational fear of a particular object or situation. If experienced repeatedly over long enough periods, it can lead to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But when encountered in a safe, positive setting, fear can actually be fun.

Think about it like this: almost drowning in the ocean when you were a child—bad; watching "Jaws" and jumping out of your seat when the shark eats the late-night skinny-dipper at the beginning of the film—good. There's also another reason why we're drawn to horror, perfectly summed up in a statement by celebrated author and professional boogeyman Stephen King: "We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones."

And he's right. A 2021 study found that horror fans fared much better psychologically during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic than those who said they didn't like being scared. It's speculated that people who regularly expose themselves to terrifying situations, even fictional ones, may be better at regulating fear because the more time spent in this heightened emotional state, the more desensitized the brain becomes, reducing its instinctual responses in favor of rational decision-making.

Therapists use this all the time in exposure therapy—a treatment specifically designed for anxiety conditions including obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD, and various phobias. It works by retraining the amygdala through repeated activation by encountering a feared object or situation over and over. The severity of the brain's response is lessened over time. Think of it like exercise. The first time you go to the gym, your body is going to be extremely sore and achy afterward, but with each repeated visit, your soreness decreases. Your muscles become accustomed to the stress.

The same goes for your brain and fear. As the brain recognizes that the threat no longer exists or wasn't even real in the first place, it transitions from its fight or flight response to a state of rest. This shift creates feelings of relief and euphoria that can alleviate anxiety and even boost self-confidence over time. Exposure therapy moves the patient's neurological reaction away from the amygdala back to parts of the brain that control higher cognition. This reduces the intensity of instinctual gut reactions, allowing for complex planning and logical decision-making.

For example, if someone's afraid of sharks, therapists will have the patient think about sharks, visit an aquarium, or even go deep-sea diving with the help of virtual reality. With every repeated exposure, their fear response decreases, eventually causing it to recede. Horror has been shown to be similarly effective at doing this. The formula of suspense and resolution common to the genre mimics the exact neurological process one goes through when encountering a fear-inducing stimulus.

This could be why some people who suffer from anxiety disorders really enjoy horror. Trauma survivors and victims of abuse, in particular, might even benefit from it. The internet is filled with anecdotal accounts of people with PTSD and generalized anxiety feeling a sense of relief and calm after watching a scary movie or walking through a haunted house.

Aside from relief, this attraction to horror may also have something to do with a phenomenon known as repetition compulsion—the tendency for trauma survivors to seek out similar situations. Humans find comfort in what's familiar and predictable, even when it's actively harmful to us. This can look like a person returning to a toxic relationship or a war veteran watching footage of the battle in which they were wounded. It's the classic "the devil you know is better than the angel you don't."

Potential reasons for this behavior range from low self-esteem to an aversion to change, but one explanation is that the brain is attempting to achieve a form of mastery over the situation. We never want to feel powerless again, so we repeatedly enter the same scenarios to hopefully gain control over them. And as it turns out, control plays a big part in regulating fear.

A 2018 study found many people enjoyed scary movies exactly because they created these feelings of mastery and control. Horror, then, can be incredibly beneficial for trauma survivors by allowing them to delve into a world that is alien but familiar at the same time without re-entering the same toxic situations in real life. This creates an avenue for recontextualizing traumatic experiences in a safer environment—a form of exposure therapy—a continual process of confrontation, coping, and relief.

This may actually account for 2021's rapid uptick in Halloween-related sales and the success of recent horror films like "A Quiet Place Part II." We now have an entire population looking for ways to cope with having lived through a global pandemic, hoping they'll be in better control if history ever repeats itself. But what happens when we don't face our fears, or when we try to hide the parts of ourselves that we'd rather not think about?

20th-century psychologist Carl Jung proposed that every human mind contains a shadow—an unconscious aspect of our personalities that doesn't conform to the picture we have of ourselves in our heads. It's an emotional blind spot, a personification of everything a person refuses to acknowledge about themselves. An unconventional interest might invite mockery; preferences in sexuality could result in social rejection or even physical harm; a traumatic life experience in your past might make others look at you differently.

So instead of expressing these parts of ourselves, we repress them, burying them deep beneath the surface. Yet at our core, we still naturally seek out these parts of ourselves because the mind craves integration—the process of assimilating various elements of our personalities into our concept of self. We don't want to see ourselves as a desperate collection of divided pieces forever at war, but as a unified whole.

If a person fails to do this, the shadow threatens to overtake their personality, coming out in malevolent and often violent ways. This is a situation best represented in the novel "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," where a scientist literally transforms himself in order to indulge in vices without the consequences. Is it any wonder then that Gothic literature first took off during the Victorian era, a period defined by intense societal repression, or that its defining theme involves the past returning to haunt the present?

Stories act as gateways into our unconscious urges and desires, allowing us to safely explore them. For some, this may be vicariously living out unspoken fantasies. For others, it can be an opportunity to confront past traumas and hopefully grow beyond them. By its nature, horror includes an element of evil, often personified by figures like Dracula, Leatherface, and Hannibal Lecter.

It's this evil that must be defeated. In the same way, horror forces us to confront our shadows; it challenges us to grow and begin a process towards becoming stronger and more confident individuals. At its core, fear is a survival mechanism. It's meant to help us overcome threats and keep us alive. From a psychological perspective, the most effective way to do this isn't to fight or run from the parts of our personality or our past that we don't like, but instead to incorporate them into ourselves.

By doing this, we create the fittest, most robust individual possible. Horror, then, is about completeness; it's about feeling whole. Some love it for the thrills, the spectacle of blood and gore; others use it as an outlet to deal with and overcome a prior negative event, recontextualizing it and regaining some form of control. But for all of us, horror represents an opportunity to confront our fears. Only by doing this can we come to understand the ghosts of our pasts and hopefully accept the darker parts of ourselves.

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

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

You should have never crossed the road. Now imagine how betrayed the chicken must have felt when it was being taken to that terrifying part of the farm. Given the thousand days' worth of evidence, the chicken's trust in its owner was ironically at its highest level when it was eventually slaughtered. Perhaps, if it wasn't so foolish to believe that it was special or unique, maybe it would have at least been spared the feelings of betrayal that one final day completely changed the outlook of the chicken's life.

That one piece of evidence outweighed the previous thousand days, and it's not even a contest. This is something known as a Black Swan: a single event or observation that comes as a surprise, with disproportionate consequences radically changing our outlook about something. People used to think that swans could only be white until they saw a black swan, which basically reshaped the way people thought about what is out there.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a book called "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" to study this very phenomenon and shine light on how vulnerable we are to black swans and how we are only becoming increasingly more vulnerable with each passing day. In his book, he talks about some fundamentals of epistemology that limit our ability to understand the black swans before they happen.

But first, let's talk about why our modern society, as technologically advanced as it is, is the perfect nesting place for a Black Swan event. Let's say we're going to weigh a few thousand people, and at the extreme end of that sample contains the heaviest person in the world. So long as that person is subject to biological constraints like the rest of us, it doesn't really matter how much he or she weighs—let's say 2,000 pounds.

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

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

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

You can conduct the same thought experiment with book sales, scientific publications, shoe brands, and so on. The point is, the modern economy is very much a win-or-take-all system that rewards a very small number of people with a disproportionately large portion of the pie. If it were more like the weight example we just talked about, you wouldn't expect the outliers to be so wild. But the fact that they really are indeed so wild just goes to show how unpredictable the environment we're living in really is.

The forecasts we take for granted today often fail to take into account the true nature of this unpredictability—these Black Swan events. You might be inclined to say that no, these billionaires put in the work day in and day out, and therefore they can enjoy the fruits of their labor. Indeed, most of them probably worked really hard; some of their innovations might later pave the way for a better future for all of us. I'm not discounting that.

However, the system is not rewarding them proportionately. More importantly, it's hard to say how much of their efforts are the fruits of their labor and how much of it is due to pure chance. If you were to run a few simulations with extremistan-type circumstances, you would inevitably have a few Jeff Bezos-like outliers. We may be biased into thinking that we understand what causes Bezos-like outliers in our society—you know, the usual think-out-of-the-box, start a revolutionary company, work extremely hard for a few years, and then smell the roses, happily ever after.

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

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

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

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

Yuval Noah Harari, in his book "Homo Deus," cites a paradox about knowledge: Knowledge that does not change behavior is useless, but knowledge that changes behavior loses its relevance. The more data we have, and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

Despite the measures we have taken for a Black Swan event like 9/11, that does nothing to improve our odds against a future Black Swan. If anything, it might lure us into a false sense of security and, in fact, worsen our chances of coping with the impacts of the next highly improbable event. We tend to convince ourselves that we understand risks once we have understood a game of dice or blackjack.

However, trying to approximate the risks in real life with the same methods used in a closed-loop artificial game is simply oversimplification—a mistake that we commit daily. Taleb calls this the "ludic fallacy." We learn simple games and immediately conclude that the stock market works in the same way. Even though one of these things lives in mediocristan and the other lives in extremistan, if the markets were well understood, do you think something like GameStop or AMC would have ever been