More than a Meme: "Forever Alone" in 2022. #ForeverAlone

you guys know i like to start at the deep end of the pool on these issues and someone in the audience was asking if this is going to be shallow or this could be deep it's shallow and it's deep at the same damn time people i want you to imagine and it is not going to be all that difficult for you to picture this in your mind's eye regardless of where it is in the world you grew up who it is you grew up with what kind of family packer you have imagine you live in a society that is 99 muslim and you are an atheist that's the situation you are profoundly alienated from 99 of people and you reach a point in your life where you realize that you are going to be hashtag forever alone now a lot of people a lot of people on reddit a lot of people on youtube a lot of people on instagram a lot of people who identify as hashtag forever alone they are at least as alienated from their own society at least as alienated from their own members of their family and perhaps more so than someone who is an atheist living in a muslim majority society flesh it out for just half a second here if you're an atheist you may have perfectly pleasant and cordial relations at work with people who are devout muslims it may not be a problem for you every day in every way you know you may be able to get along with and cooperate with colleagues at school colleagues at work the person you buy your groceries from i've lived in parts of the world where i'm buying my groceries from people who are muslim you know you have a little bit of chit chat a little bit of social interaction but in every important way you are going to be forever alone now some of you will say nobody in my audience is gonna say this but someone hypothetically might say oh well there's still that one percent you know you're not alone there are a few other atheists there are a few of our other people who who share your values and you can make the effort to go and meet them which is true even if you're living in a country like iran even if you're living in one of these societies that's 99 muslim you can go to conferences and events for other dissident intellectuals you can meet other atheists one way or another and you are going to have the more or less soul-crushing experience of realizing that even though you have this one thing in common with them you have nothing else in common with them that you're not compatible as friends and there's only you know maybe fewer than one percent of people have this and come with you you can meet other people who are atheists and guess what they're 30 years older than you like even if it was someone who in some other universe if you'd been the same age you could have had a relationship well you're not and by the way that's that's happened to me i remember one woman not going to say what this is but she was about 65 and i i i was maybe 25 and i thought just on an intellectual level she was someone who had a lot in common with me i was thinking huh i thought could i make this work you know i wasn't i wasn't really attracted to her but you know i thought hmm you know yeah you could meet someone else you're compatible with you have something in common with but they are just too old for you you're born of the wrong generation you meet someone's you have these things in common with but they smoke cigarettes and you don't smoke cigarettes but they eat meat and you know what you're gonna find the vast majority of the time you meet someone and you have these things in common with them that alienate you from the rest of society but they're already married well guess what the vast majority of those people there's one percent of people out there have something in common with you but they're already so guess what your your hashtag forever alone you know there there are all these people who are profoundly alienated from the culture and the political circumstances they're born into and they come on the internet to bemoan the fact that they are forever now as i warned you i like to start at the deep end of the pool some people might jump into this audience now and say no no no that's not the problem the problem isn't intellectual the problem isn't ethical the problem isn't that's the problem with that the problem is just that they're ugly well i got news for you there were a lot of ugly people in this world and there are a lot of people who can accept your ugliness it's much easier to get used to and sit down and have a cup of coffee with someone who just happens to be physically ugly the shape of their face as it turns out is kind of unpleasant or the shape of their body you know like you know i admit there is a prejudice in our study when you first meet someone your first impression of someone whether it's a co-worker or a friend or what have you that oh okay you know it may be a little bit hard to look at them there are people who are that ugly where it's a little bit disconcerting but you get used to it and you get along and you learn to appreciate that person ugliness it's common it's easy for people to accept and it's easy for people to overcome and if you are an ugly person and you are willing to be in relationships with other ugly people whether that's friendship love marriage as long as you're willing to accept someone else it's not really it's not really that much a problem you know what you can't accept if you're an atheist you can't accept being with someone who's muslim and if you're muslim you can't accept being with someone who's an atheist and again just to put a human face on it just to put it in a scenario that you guys can immediately relate to and visualize and understand there are parents who remain devoutly muslim and they can never accept it they can never get over it they can never sit down and eat lunch with their own children because their children have rejected their religion and become atheists you know like maybe for a very brief phone call they can do an update where they said oh yeah okay how are you doing is everything okay and that is about it there's a visceral incompatibility there's a hatred there's a resentment and it happens the other way around too it's not as common but you can have atheist parents secular modern atheist parents and their children become muslim fundamentalists and the parents are taken aback the parents can't accept it and again maybe they can have a brief update by phone but you can't sit down and you know eat lunch together you can't really share your lives together you can't have that closeness that that cooperation there's this sense in which you're you're mutually alienated and look i get fan mail i get hate mail i get people challenging my views which is great i'm happy to i'm happy to hear it happy to interact with the audience that way i'm happy for you guys to to join in right now when i talk about the problem of video game addiction and the way video game playing is is changing our culture i had people writing in and talking to me and challenging me and saying well isn't it the case that the same problem could arise just through someone being addicted to coloring books adult coloring books they challenge me and say well you're you're picking out this particular problem but isn't it just one example out of many of all kinds of problems okay no the culture of playing video games the way in which the internet uh changes civilization the way in which computer technology uh changes your civilization the way in which video game edition changes our civilization that's that's a mass phenomenon on the scale of billions of people you know a tiny percentage of people not even a percentage a few people on the whole earth may be addicted to coloring books their people get it washing their hands their people get addicted to i've read about this people get into eating earth eating soil out of their garden you know they go in and get help from psychiatrists for it that's why we know they exist because it's a pretty pretty affordable addiction if you're addicted to eating soil [Laughter] you can go and buy a buy a bag of dirt at the local garden center and you're set you know yeah there are these tiny numbers of people with these strange addictions but we have to recognize when something's a mass phenomenon with tremendous social cultural and political significance video game addiction has this kind of significance and it is partly linked to and partly you know related to this phenomenon of of forever alone now speaking of the garden center i would say this to you if not not everyone who's forever alone identifies with the hashtag not everyone goes to the reddit group not everyone thinks if you go to any garden center i've always found this when you meet and talk to people who are into gardening a lot of them a lot of them are forever alone a lot you know and uh you know they could be widows or widowers they could be people who used to be married they could be people who had a relationship earlier in their life and now they've lost that they've gotten divorced or their partner died or whatever uh you know obviously this isn't something completely new the forever alone phenomena has existed for centuries it has been out there but what percentage of people are at any given phase of their life struggling with the feeling of being forever alone and it might it might turn out to be temporary it might be you feel that you're forever alone for 10 years and then at some point you meet someone and you move on you start a new face with it's possible it happens but for what presented you people in our society today is forever alone not just a sentiment not just a sense of regret something behind them it really does accurately and realistically describe their their situation in life you want to go into my baby yeah i like to start at the deep end of the pool yeah i know well i was just thinking about this prior to starting live stream when i was a teenager my space was popular and there was somebody that i was too young to be interacting with but nevertheless i messaged them uh via myspace and also aol instant messenger and that person i uh of course i was too young to really get involved with them romantically but i was very much interested in them and um it was an affair that couldn't happen because because my parents forget me it was a forbidden relationship so i used to you know see his posts what he would share to myspace and what he would post about often was his feelings of being forever alone huh but he was somebody that was attractive like people were interested in him and i remember this this was my first introduction to seeing this uh you know hashtag forever alone right right that this is somebody who ostensibly seems like an attractive person he's a popular person yet he's coming online and talking about his feelings of being forever alone and i wondered you know just to myself you know what is this about you know like what is this this you know obviously there are people interested in him um how how is it so that he feels this way and it's talked about in songs you know where you feel alone in a crowded room you know you you are surrounded by people but you still feel alone um yeah this was my first like concept of seeing this and um you know i i think we all have to understand and accept that we as individuals we we are alone and we have to not rely on other people to give us kind of egoic confirmation or like affirmation of who we are we have to develop on our own like that that at our core we are we are alone but it's what we can bring into other people's lives and what they bring into our lives that make life interesting that's part of what makes forever alone interesting is that i think for most people it's an accurate analysis of something that's underlying their conditions in the here and now like you may not you know i mean you may have some level of gregariousness in your life and yet you're still also dealing with these kind of this underlying problems of being uh for overwhelming yeah so i guess what else i wanted to say about that is that it's not that there weren't people that would would have been interested in this person right right or that wanted to have a relationship with him it was that he wasn't willing to right whether it's lower his standards or whether it was uh just what he expected out of a relationship like he wasn't willing to put in that there was some alienation there there was something he couldn't have come so is it is it that you know is it an emotional thing that that you know it is possible for these people who identify as hashtag forever alone right that they they could reach out to people and they would have to make the effort to to try to so i've got to jump in with a with a really important distinction here there's a difference between being lonely and being alone like if you are alone it's an objectively real fact and you may not feel lonely you may not be unhappy about like you know you can be lonely and you can be alone and i know this is going to sound ridiculous but there are people like famous rock stars and celebrities who are lonely even though they're not alone they're successful they have fans they have lovers or they may sleep with groupies they may sleep with prostitutes they may have kind of shallow relationships but there is still an important sense in which they're lonely but not alone i think part of what's important in this discussion is to indicate that we are talking about being alone and then the whole challenge of the you know slash our uh forever alone subculture is okay what now what do you do from here like you can acknowledge to some extent maybe it's something wrong with you to some extent it's something wrong with the society you live in you know something wrong with the majority of people the culture of the context you happen to be born into and that's why i think it's so useful to start with example of what if you are an atheist living in a culture where 99 of people are devout muslims this exists all right and so you are alone like this the reality now you can blame yourself you know maybe sometimes you do like yourself you know like maybe sometimes you do and sometimes you know maybe sometimes you think oh if only i could lower my standards if only i could conform if only i could integrate if only you could live a kind of double life where you pretend to be part of the religion and culture every time then you wouldn't be so long but i'm just pointing we have to start with a recognition that we're talking about being alone not being lonely you can be married and be lonely is that even rarer a lot of you guys don't have friends with that if you have friends who are middle-aged married people you can be married and be lonely you can have a job like let's say you're a hairdresser working hairdressers on where every day you talk to people your co-workers your clients there's a lot of talking about socialization and you're lonely you know what i mean so being lonely i do think is different from being alone and and just in that sense now you know look um whether it should be praised or blamed is one question but i mean you you raised the issue of already to what extent are these people alone because of choices they've made or because of characteristics they've had or or their reluctance to assimilate into the culture they've been pointed to and what i'm starting off by saying is even if it's a hundred percent their fault like even if 100 their choice their option we're still not going to blame them for it like there's no point like there's no point in saying to an atheist why can't you just assimilate into muslim culture why can't you just right i can't i can't like everybody else right and the the the ethical and intellectual estrangement there right like the way in which a devout muslim is going to regard me as an atheist and the way i am going to regard a devout muslim the sense in which ethically we mutually reject each other intellectually we mutually reject each other right right now 2021 2022 if i get on an airplane and go to banff banff alberta banff national park skiing resort if i go to a skiing resort now you guys may not be able to see it but i reject those people and they reject me there's actually a similar kind of mutual estrangement and incompatibility and it runs just as deep as an atheist versus a muslim right it's hard to accept that hard to take that seriously but i'm asking you to take it seriously we were both laughing at there's a youtube channel called bread gang yeah and the whole show is all they do is stand outside of nightclubs many nightclubs uh there's some kind of area in front of the nightclub where people mill around and smoke cigarettes and chitchat partly because it's too noisy inside the nightclub to talk to each other they were just interviewing people who were in various stages of being drunk and high on drugs in banff alberta the same ski resort town these are people on a ski vacation spending a lot of money to be there and they're going out and using cocaine and mdma and other mindlessly drugs and alcohol and whatever and and by the way some of these people are incredibly good looking of course i mean like you know this is whatever this is canada you know and these people are all able-bodied enough to go skiing and they're all wealthy enough to do this there's some aesthetic level in which many of these people or all of them may be you know appealing or attractive or enviable people right but i'm saying to you if i go to that nightclub if i go on that skiing vacation whether or not you can see it and i think most people can feel it there really is a depth of antipathy antagonism mutual rejection there's a sense in which i will be alone in that nightclub i will be alone at that ski resort and i will be alone if i relocate to saudi arabia iran so on and so forth yeah and that's not about feeling lonely i i may or not feel lonely i'm saying to you in a more objective sense you know i am alone yeah yeah um do you want to talk about your own life a little bit i'm sorry because we don't have to but i was starting by just framing it in that big sense no no i think that's good but yeah one of the reasons i'm doing this is because i know a lot of viewers don't think of that and i know you don't think of it that way that's why we started talking about this couple weeks ago or something came up i was like oh no no like i've had big parts of my life where i was really alone so you want to talk about your own aloneness i mean intermittent aloneness i will quote eisenmazard something that you said to me was about relationships you know at times in my relationship with isil i have lamented that i don't i have enough friends or that i'm like looking for connections with people and um not being able to find this so in some sense you know i am really lucky that i have isil that we understand each other and that i feel we have a really positive relationship because of the way that we relate to each other so this is the quote that i'm getting at like that relationships are a way of relating to one another that you know as well and i we we can really have this you know we have this strong report we're able to really relate to one another and share um a lot with each other and um and encourage each other yeah and that's that's really like what you're reaching out for so um you know if you are if you have such a deep divide between people you know what kind of relationship can you have and do you really want to relate to that person do you want to make the effort to relate to somebody that you find morally ethically despicable someone even repugnant let's say going on or somebody that uh you know if you're being really honest with with each other i mean if somebody is of a different religious belief um they literally believe that when you die you are not going to heaven and yes um that you're their enemy yeah so what is the relationship when it's on that very fundamental basis uh you're at odds with one another on that on that belief system and yeah it's it's um that's i i can imagine it would be extremely isolating and alienating to grow up muslim or grow up in a muslim society and decide no i'm not a believer in this faith and i wonder how many people are and also on a more shallow dated level i don't care about doing the things you people do because you know there's the religion and the philosophy but there's also just the daily activities things like prayer and even the clothes you wear and stuff i don't give a [ __ ] about these accoutrements of the religion and culture that you people may obsess yeah but go i'm just saying because it is it's not just a purely intellectual philosophical thing it's also what you do with your time but yeah absolutely like skiing you know yes well what i was going to say is that i wonder how many people that live in those societies are not ironically but consciously deciding to put on the same behaviors and and perform as a muslim in their hearts not really believing in the religion because they know that this is so fundamental to fitting in and having connections with people so um yeah we were talking off-camera about you know making the conscious decision to get involved with people who you know um are not you are not connecting on this on this level like you know and deciding what in what ways you can relate to them um you know if you are not going to be able to uh bridge that let me let me ask you this because again like i i want you we can talk about the kind of universal global uh generalizations but i think it's worthwhile for both of us the significance of this in our own lives who are both people who have dealt with and do deal with and looking forward to the future continue to deal with the forever alone you know uh issue the meme if you like you know it's more than just a meme you know um the islamic example is very straightforward in a sense in that if you go to high school and you already know you're an atheist and you go to university you already know you're an atheist you can very easily visualize and touch and see the alienation between yourself and 99 of people in society someone gave the example of being an atheist at a catholic school yeah you totally realize okay right you know um at what point though did you start feeling alone or perceive yourself alone compared to the other people you went to high school with compared to the other people you went to university with because like from my perspective around age 23 24 i think you were still reflecting on that like i remember remember you talking about some friends you still had some distant connection with you known in university and you were still kind of philosophizing about like gee really like like you even really kind of hate this person you know i mean like you were kind of admitting to yourself i guess i've always hated her and she's really a terrible person and you know you you were still kind of feeling that out but like to to recognize yourself as alone and to recognize that alienation i remember you talking about that and like you reflecting on the extent to which your own roommates and your own friends in college they wouldn't admit things to you and wouldn't discuss things with you that they did admit to their other friends by the way it was stuff like getting drunk and sleeping around you know like like when there was this sense in which they really weren't treating you as a friend and weren't trusting you and there was this this alienation there yeah so you say what you know and look you know maybe i'm like i don't know what she's gonna say i'm not i really don't but do you think there was a point of recognizing the alienation do you think there was a point where that changed for you we thought that's a good question like today okay today here we are 2021 2022 the end of 2021. i know that today when you look at the facebook profiles of people you knew in high school or people you know university people from your hometown generally you think wow i have nothing in common with these people i'm totally alienated you know what i mean you recognize that alienation right away but there was a time when you didn't and you recognized we've talked about we've talked about moving back to our hometown we have we've talked about like living there for whether it's for five years or ten years or forever we've talked about the possibility of making that our home and like you recognize now right away whoa like you know there is this profound alienation if i go back there i am going to be alone i am not going to live my life with those people they are not you know [Music] yeah so so but the question i'm putting to you is yeah do you think there was a turning point that do you think there was a recognition it's a good question because [Music] uh yeah so i was 22 years old when i became vegan so veganism is something that like almost automatically alienates you from people that you know you used to have respect for once you've introduced these topics to these people that you've known these connections that you've had and they are not receptive to it at all that is that was a big source of alienation for me because i thought that if they just knew what i knew they would change their ways they would they would not be eating meat if they knew that this was what was going on um so i think probably at that stage that's when i started to feel more and more alienated from people however or maybe you recognized and analyzed and understood the alienation that was always there because no offense i i just have heard her talk i think that it already was there there was a sense in which you were alone or alone in the crowd going in yes that thank you yeah you've said it to me a lot like you recognize other girls had best friends and close friendships and you didn't like you you philosophized about that a lot during the time we've been again that there was this sense in which you were alone and these people yeah okay all right something that you've said to me is if i'm going to be honest i want to be all the way honest and uh yeah so i i guess i'm introducing that as like that is the that is the time when i was able to really like conceptualize it and you know pin it pin it down on something like you know some behavior like eating meat but even when i was younger you know i i was committed to sobriety and i had you know in high school like i did feel alienated from other people because of that commitment and because of you know that i wasn't sleeping around and that was when i started noticing that people were not like sharing with me what they were doing because i don't know if they were worried about being judged by me or whatever it was so so yeah um you know i'm not going to say that it just started with veganism but that's when i started really like parsing this in my mind like what what is this that's alienating me from people um but yeah no i mean i i i grew up with the influence that if it's possible you should try to be friendly with people you should try to you know find what uh what could bind you what what could uh you know bond you together what what what common interests you share and um generally i i found it uh you know in order to be a polite person or whatever like i did want to not really be honest with myself that i really hated people or you know like for them but again cutting to the chase a little bit here there's a difference between being friendly and being your friend yeah and that was the reality of your life there were a lot of people you were friendly with but they're not your friends yeah and no i mean you know i'm not saying this to shame you were saying but i think you can reflect most of your life before you met me i think it's fair to say you had no friends you know you you had a boyfriend who was in love with you and somewhat obsessive about you all everyone who's i've been a relationship with was obsessed with me by the way but a lot of obsessive ex-girlfriends and whatever you know uh so i'm not saying that in any very loaded way but you know it's different it's different being in a relationship with someone who doesn't particularly care about you or as a detached addition someone who's obsessive about you i've had that experience i think you've had that experience too being in relation to someone who's obsessed with you but your boyfriend aside i mean i really i really think you you wanted friendship but there was this sense in which you were alone and again being friendly with people being polite with people that is not friendship and just really briefly you guys know i've lived in thailand i've lived in laos who lives in cambodia when you are yourself an emigre when you are yourself an immigrant a person living out of out of your own native language and cultural circumstances you can see that distinction much more clearly like in my relationships with thai people ocean people cambodian people okay this is someone who's friendly towards me this is someone i have some level of cooperation with yeah but they're not my friend you know like it's maybe easier to kid yourself when everyone's speaking the same language you know and you're you're from the same culture or from the same neighborhood or from the same school yeah no that's that's a good point actually that's something i hadn't really considered the the experience of living in china and and yes like just meeting with people who who don't speak who aren't from your same town like just from like your your same community the same country you know like then you start to analyze relationships in a different way that that's yeah i could say more about that but i don't want that to be the main topic of the conversation here yeah so sam walsh comments uh quote despite differences with my friends i focus on the ways i can connect with them i think that's more productive than total isolation i speak of our differences sometimes but i can only do so much there this isn't a black and white problem he says quote i don't cut my parents off despite her profound differences i work with what i do have in common but it does limit the relationship right but okay so sam i don't know your situation you may or may not be alone right but that's what we're talking about in this video there are some people and obviously almost everyone has parents a few people were raised in an orphanage or an institution the vast majority of us have parents but you can have parents and be alone you can have parents with the only conversations you know that short phone call where you check up it's this very limited kind of you know procedural relationship you know oh you're not in jail you're not in the hospital good you know like really you know that's it are you you poor you need money you got a problem that well that's really about it it's a very transactional issue you know and some people would really say they're not alone because they have a tremendously meaningful close relationship with their parents now i'm going to digress into something here that i knew i was going to talk about in this video if you're looking at the reddit group forever alone or if you're listening to people complaining about being alone which by the way i support i think if you've got a problem it's a wonderful thing to be able to come on the internet complain about it you should come and make a youtube video like it's great i'm i don't think i do not think people who have this problem should shut up about it or silence themselves just like no you know talk about it think about it and maybe you can make progress maybe you can take a different attitude different full subcontinent um uh great no derailment [Laughter] okay you want to jump in just something you want to say um i no i was just waiting but um if it comes to you let me know sorry so this is this is sam uh talking about cutting off his parents or not yeah okay i guess i could you know i could expand upon that because you know somebody who's listening in the audience might you know i i i don't disagree with you i think that it's true that i've lacked friends and it is there is a big difference between being friendly and having friends or you know what the meaning of friendship is uh yeah no it's it's uh definitely something that i've dealt with my whole life basically yeah so yeah and you're going to deal with in the future i mean whether better or worse i mean i i obviously i think your life has improved a lot i think you're totally prepared now to go into the decade of your 30s much yeah much better prepared but yeah um so what i was going to say is this if you are reading so i've reclaimed my train of thought by the way uh you know if you are reading the discourse that's on the forever along reddit group with these other public forums it will occur to you a lot of these people dehumanize the other people in their lives a lot of these people live in a very asymmetrical unfair sort of way i'm going to give a really shallow example first then i'm going to get deeper a lot of these people for example feel that they themselves are tremendously obese they're they're unattractive and overweight but they don't expect to be in a relationship with someone else who's also obese and overweight they're living with the expectation obviously a tragic expectation they're aware as a treasury exhibition they want to be loved by desired by have relationship with someone who is slender and fit and athletic or very attractive now obviously you know we're all human it's not hard to relate to that that kind of asymmetry well okay that's that's a really shallow example i think on a deeper level part of what's going on is they don't just look at other people as other people it's very hard to look at your own parents and think well these are just people these are just people who happen to be my parents you know what i mean and then to evaluate them that way and evaluate the relationship that way you're like okay well this is who my father is this is who my mother is what kind of relationship can i really have with them give you know and just think about the kind of guy is if he weren't my father if she weren't my mother would this person be my friend with any part of my life for most of us the answer is no you don't have that much compliment there are people who happen to be your parents if you let yourself evaluate them as people you'll understand that many of the people in the forever alone discourse not all many in the same way that someone who's enormously fat may yearn for a relationship with someone who's in great shape who's slender or athletic you know without feeling that it's incumbent upon them to match that level of self-discipline and commitment to to fitness in the same way there's this sense of going through life rejecting others for not living up to your standards your intellectual standards your ethical standards whatever it is while expecting unfairly that others aren't going to reject you in that same way seeing others in terms of the wish fulfillment fantasy seeing others in terms of how you want them to make you feel or what role you want them to play you have nothing about now at the start of this video my way of framing it very much excludes this uh this train of thought i was really saying like look if you are an atheist living in a muslim society you have to understand it's reciprocal the rejection is reciprocal so like i'm an atheist i'm not really comfortable being in this kind of relationship with someone who's a profound believer in the muslim faith but by the same token i can understand their discomfort living with me like having a close intimate relationship that reciprocal sense of fairness is very often missing from the uh from the forever long discourse and again so to come closer to your experience it might be very difficult for you back at age 22 uh she's 29 hours away but like let's say we travel for you at age 22 from melissa at age 22 to get on an airplane and go on a skiing vacation in banff national park and for you to feel rejected and alienated and alone it might be very difficult for you to say yeah you're damn right like i reject these people they're not gonna and from their perspective they reject me that makes sense i think for most people that's incredibly hard to live with it's incredibly hard to accept and it's incredibly hard to think through in even a kind of fair and even-handed way so again putting a human face on it i reject my parents many of you in the audience do too all right but it seems very hard for people to accept and they also reject me like i judge them they judge me you know and and you know i judge them negatively they just realize negatively your parents may be muslim and you're an atheist you're vegan your parents you meet whatever your parents are left-wing and your right-wing whatever the sources of alienation are well you know your father is just a guy he's a human being who happens to be your parent the person and the person at the gym you have a crush on or the person your co-worker the person in the office you have a question they are a person who just happens to be sexually attractive to you you know they're they're a person right but there's like their rejection of you it's probably gonna line up pretty well with your rejection of everyone in society generally and god knows i get it you may feel like hey i'm so attracted to this person i'm willing to overlook the fact that they're muslim i'm willing to overlook the fact that they smoke cigarettes i want to overlook the fact they eat meat or they have a pet dog or whatever there's things i don't like but they're hot so i'm like wait and they don't feel that way about you right that's not reciprocal that's not mutual but the sources of alienation are still there the reasons why you're alone are still there yeah yeah now look you tell me so i mean in your own life do you feel there was some of that asymmetry there before you got involved with me i know you know what i mean it's oh yeah i definitely made a lot of uh sacrament not sacrifices but compromises with who i was involved with you know right but but and then you're hoping other people will make those compromises for you that your friendship is going to be rewarded and returned yeah and yeah yeah um i can thank you um yeah i mean in your case it is partly because you're so good-looking there have always been men wanting to be in relationships you and i have talked about that you really have never had a time in your life where there weren't men willing to you know take the step and commit or weren't trying to get your relationship with you know again when you're 45 that may be different you're 55 that may be different but for you as a young woman in your teenage years and 20s there have always been men willing to lay it down the way but i think it is significant that when sex is taken out of the equation the extent to which you did struggle with still the deep underlying issues of hashtag forever alone right yeah absolutely yeah the when i uh first mentioned this uh internet romance uh my first uh basically first crush and first uh real heartbreak or feeling like you know uh yeah feeling that a sense of heartbreak um you know that that older boy i don't know i guess he was like 17 or 18 when i was 14. um you know he was interested in me you know he asked me you know sexual questions like he was he was interested in me like all the way um but you know he was willing to so if you were 14 he was willing to roll the dice son ended up in jail or something yeah probably i mean it's a good thing it's a good thing my parents intervened when i was having conversations with him on the phone at like two in the morning or whatever but you know i i just i never did anything like that like we're talking about when i was 17 or something and you know i think partly like like women my own age were already so immature like you know like i'm 17 year old brother seven years old that like the thought of being around like even just talking to someone who was even more immature was was really yeah like i was struggling to have friendships with people my own age but yeah it would have been easier for me to be in french people than me not a brag but come on guys but i was saying in terms of what life is like when you're 17. that never occurred to me but i know a lot of guys are and there were a lot of there are a lot of criminal charges a lot of controversy it is quite common for 17 year old guys to be with a 15 year old girl or 16 or whatever to for there to be a little bit of an age gap but at that stage every year is a long time it's a big difference in maturity and life experience and responsibility the difference between being 19 and being 16 is a big at that stage because people are so ignorant and so helpless anyway like you know it's a big deal but anyway so video but this guy was 18 19 and he was born yeah i know he was willing to get hands on with a 14 year old all right i believe that's a that's a prison of an imprisonable offense but am i yeah anyway um yeah no it's it's uh just despite that i didn't have the words for it i i did not conceptualize myself as right yeah i i i'm 29 now so i'm able to reflect on it and you know realize what all the factors that were at play there and you know like you say the the uh just being an attractive person i guess uh did in france what did i i mean i don't know i remember who i was at that time like i i was i was me you know i was melissa right but but let's let's be real you were you were still no you were still playing with dolls you were still playing video games before i know what it is certainly yeah playing videos just interesting um so um for sure like but it is still for me like i i still know the feeling of of thinking that even if people are interested in you it doesn't mean i'm interested in them and like you know i did feel like i was making a compromise with my first relationship that this was somebody that just wasn't compatible with me in a lot of ways but um i i did still want to be in love with somebody you know i still want the experience but it's like it comes back to the same idea if it's if you aren't able to relate on these very basic ways like in in ways that you find um you know that you have respect for the other person and that person respects you and for like the same reasons then then what kind of relationship do you have and once i realized that like once i was able to be honest with myself like i just couldn't believe that i'd let that relationship continue for so long and like push it and continued when it was incompatible the whole time you know so um hopefully that makes sense somebody asked me what do i mean with compromises you know like um that's are are you going to um pretend that you are okay with somebody doing drugs when right when you're really not are you well so just to clarify grammatically you make a compromise for something right now for a lot for many people they are making a compromise so that they're not alone like you don't want to be alone so for the purpose of not being alone for the purpose of you know so for some people it's just sex for some people it's love for some people's having children i look you know there are men who are homosexual but they choose to pretend to be heterosexual so they can have children all kinds of things they make a compromise but like look some people it's very shallow they're like oh this guy is too ugly or this woman is too ugly but they are going to compromise so that they cannot belong for a lot of people it's not physical characteristics right it's ethical characteristics intellectual characteristics this person is not smart enough for me in some complex sense this person is not good enough for me but you decide to make a compromise for a reason and you know the type of reason we're talking about here is the contrast between being forever alone and you know having some kind of relationship or group of relationships you know yeah i would just live in your life but most people don't feel that way and you've been through that too where you didn't feel that way yeah oh yeah you didn't feel like oh i'd be better off being alone than making this compromise no exactly right if i had then i wouldn't get well and you know i think you know as a young person you were more ruled by instincts you know now i could generalize and say we all are but maybe not everyone has a lot of people are where you're ruled by really animal instincts that include again instincts are not just sex you know they're really not they go beyond that wanting to feel safe wanting to feel part of a community you want to feel part of a group like there are there were a lot of instincts involved here but those animal instincts were probably you know gnawing away at you it's not some purely yeah yeah absolutely um we got a very simple question here when are you moving to la and it certainly relates to the topic of this video one of the main reasons to live in l.a is to try to be around other highly ambitious people be around ambitious people be recreative people be around people who want to change the world and both of us hope we live lives that are less alone in l.a i mean i can look around this town we live in victoria canada currently and yeah there were like so many places called victoria on planet earth i have to say victoria so there are a lot of towns named victoria um you know if i if we live the rest of our lives in victoria we're going to be totally alone uh inclu even when you look within the subcategory of of people who have something in common so i'm going to come back to this but really briefly guys i i kind of meant to say this earlier it didn't if you think i'm not alienated from this culture i could start up uh tinder right now on my phone i don't think it's installed i have to download install it but like if i start up the tinder app and start paging through like the degree of alienation between myself and other women my own age i think tinder wants to show you people in the same age bracket it's unbelievable like you know i could sit here and do a stand-up comedy routine oh yeah look at this [ __ ] here she is and you know women really photograph themselves put themselves on tinder with you know the the defining iconography of their life on camera here one of the most popular things is for them to show themselves drinking alcohol and throwing an axe it's a it's a trend here in the pacific or going ax throwing you know what i mean like here is this woman with her dog grilling steak drinking alcohol like here are her hobbies your interest in life you know displayed for you in just a few pictures you know also there are people who make a display of what they're into in terms of pop culture they show various things about their life what is that consumes their their time and imagination well you know i am really alienated from those people and you know it may be that i'm physically attracted to some of them not many and maybe that some of them are attracted to me and again that's like guys once you get past like 22 the vast majority of people you are attracted to are already married or in a relationship that is tantamount to marriage that is as serious as murder you can just be boyfriend and girlfriend but it's serious like you know where and you know are you willing to do that do you want to go break up someone else's relationship so you can have a swing at this you can try you never swing at that you know um anyway yeah i'm just saying when you talk about this kind of alienation and isolation aloneness if i go through tinder it tells you something something about me tells you it tells you a lot about the culture i'm living in the social political context of living you get a [ __ ] cross-section of the canadian middle-aged mind leafing through tinder now this isn't the only uh cross-section i can take i could sit here now and rant to you about the type of people i meet on the university campus at the university of victoria all ages so that's like age 18 through 65 because there are elderly professors and people getting phds phd level students can be quite quite a bit older and there are people who go back after dropping out you know as middle-aged people so not just talking with young people i can sit here and you know dish about the types of imbeciles i meet and interact with on the university campus we're not going to do this on the point of this but like you know yeah it may not be as obvious as the difference between atheist and muslim in a muslim majority society but yeah i am alienated from the culture here and you know i reject those people and they reject me the rejection is mutual and in a city like los angeles there's the possibility that there will be five people 10 people 50 people that there will be some number of people that have enough in common with me enough in common with melissa that they really share our lives in a meaningful way and that we are not hashtag forever alone living in l.a has involves terrible sacrifices it is not paradise and we've been to paradise we've been we've spent time in thailand together i've lived in thailand more long term than she has i can still speak to thai language i'd have to work to brush up it's been so many years but still like i have the fundamentals of tai and laotian as languages and just mention when i hear people speaking in lotion on the news you know watching news it's really weird the way that party or brain starts to wake up again but anyway uh you know there in some ways thailand is paradise in some ways laos is paradise in some ways the south of france is paradise in some ways athens greece is paradise los angeles is not paradise but you know you wanted to make that sacrifice and this is a big part of it so that you are not hashtag forever speaking of which guys uh hit the thumbs up button if you can we got 43 people in the audience which is great i appreciate you being here you know i live stream with really no warning but guys if you change your mind later you can you can undo the thumbs up button but it'll help more people join the conversation now and also people discover the scope of the video so anyway um here's here's a flattering comment uh ahri says melissa is going to get a lot of attention in l.a well look melissa is a good-looking woman but no compared to being in china when we were in dil hong china melissa got a lot of attention you were the beauty queen of the hong china if we moved to japan you know come on people will be all over people be freaking out in los angeles people are not going to stop their cars on the street and offer me a job teaching kids on the spot oh right and if you've been in a bigger city people have been offering you a job as a lounge singer or to work in a nightclub you know there's that kind of work too oh good-looking white woman yeah they'd want to recruit you to be a beauty be a beautiful woman working in a nightclub you know what i mean whatever being the maitre d or something you know that all that working in restaurants and stuff too so i think what they want but we're also doing modeling and acting what we're going to say i was just going to say los angeles is a place where the most beautiful people go so i doubt that yes no no no no no no no no no so you know do you remember we went down so we've been to los angeles before you remember we went down to the beach and there were there was that area where people were playing volleyball yeah like holy [ __ ] there were good looking people playing men and women you're in l.a on the have to be at a beach of criticism some of these were middle-aged women there would be women who were 50 years old playing volleyball but they were like the best looking like you were a fifth year older ago wow i didn't know that existed so if if melissa is playing beach volleyball in los angeles she does not stand out and you you blend in but no if we if we went to japan i think japan's a good example then sure you know everyone's going to be fawning over you as a great beauty and so on but in l.a no i mean i think um well and another good example so i've mentioned this before i was invited to do work as an actor when i was in uh kunming i didn't oh i was gonna say didn't go to auditions i went to one actually i auditioned for partner movie once in quebec but anyway i wasn't i wasn't generally hunting it down but i talked to some people in the movie industry there so yes someone like myself and someone melissa if we were in china if we were in japan if we were in south korea we probably would be offered acting roles right away it's just a reasonably good looking white person who can work a microphone but you know no but in la no yeah i mean competition is fierce anyway you guys can go way back i've talked about my channel for for so many years one of the most notorious videos on my channel so i was saying this about nina and randa my fellow youtubers nina miranda it's like look if nina and randa go to an audition in los angeles nobody thinks of the most beautiful woman there you know nobody's going to make it easy for you now that doesn't mean you can't win you know again this is all about living a meaningful life blah blah blah but no uh yeah if anything the two of us will be uglier about la standards compared to victoria here but you know good looks good looks only matter so much in life i i'm sure as hell uh i i never wake up and think i wish i was going to to be a model in los angeles it's not not the way i want to compete in life not the kind of life sorry just uh just catching up with your comments guys oh i could talk about bumble because right sure i've used it for bumble bff the friend finding app um the the part of the app no but let me just say so bumble bumble is partly a dating app and it's partly a friend finding app but i do think that relates to our conversation here i think when we moved to victoria both times we moved here once and then we moved back again a few years later i think there was a real question of to what extent are you going to be hashtag forever alone even though she has me so she's together but you know she has one great relationship in her life but you know um and as i recall when we moved back here you really said this time you were going to make a big effort the first time you did go to a couple events with me both in vancouver and victoria where you kind of sort of could have made friends with people but i think you recognized that one reason why you didn't have friends was that you weren't making that difference okay this time i'm gonna make the effort and you signed up and did bumble bff the friend fighting at bubble yeah yes i met i met about three or four women and uh face to face yeah there were more people he had messages but yeah face to face you met yeah so actually meeting in person and having a conversation which i felt all the conversations were good i you know i didn't feel i had i struggled with conversation with anybody but it's uh it's i don't know if this is a area specific or if it's canada as a whole generally but on almost all the profiles that i see they say you know i know how hard it is to make friends as an adult but victoria especially yes so there seems to be this idea that like in victoria this is this is the sense i get from having scrolled through and then the sad thing is the next thing they say is who wants to meet up with meet up for drinks at the night club okay so definitely somebody i'm looking for a crew of girls i can go to the nightclub with get drunk and party there's a lot of that oh god yeah there's definitely a lot of that um a lot of a lot of nerds also saying they want to smoke marijuana and play video games with people yeah someone to come over get stoned for sure there's that uh and also i have a dog and i want somebody to walk dogs with me or help me walk my dog um and yeah i it's it's uh just this week this past week i i went on uh bumble bff again and yeah it was it was uh definitely that based on the cross section of what i saw it's it's people who have relationships with their dog basically and then spend most of their time alone or working virtually and it reminds you of how alienated you are from the culture and from most people here or perhaps everyone here yeah yeah absolutely um yeah i definitely find the pet thing as being endemic to western culture is that i guess i should say at epidemic levels well look you can correct me i'm wrong though i think that your experience meeting those women face to face the few women you did meet with through bumble bff i disagree with me want to or take your directions but i think it reminded you of the kind of threshold or the kind of barrier to entry of am i really going to try to trust this person let them into my life share my life with them and if so what's in it for me and what's in it for them where you know there's this feeling of okay i know you i've had coffee with you you know but are are we actually going to become friends am i you know i mean trust i know trust is a loaded word but like it's not okay how many people do you tell how much you hate your own parents your problems one of the reasons you don't tell other people that is because what's the point like it's not even like you think oh if i tell them about how bad my relationship with my parents says they're going to go on the internet or go talk to a journalist and they're going to expose me like it's not like trust in terms of secrecy but if you don't have a high level of trust why should like why would you tell them why would they listen why would you know it's not you know so yeah i mean you know criminal but i think you did you know with with the meetings kind of short-term attempts at friendship the other zone there was a feeling of an awareness of like okay you get up to a certain threshold and there's this question of is it worth it what's the point absolutely that was right that was a huge part of the experience that i had with trying to make these friendships with people in my late 20s is that number one i did have the experience with revealing some personal information and finding that it really meant nothing because it meant less to me than it did with sharing with somebody that i would really want to know and uh that somebody that i trusted so when you share some of these things with people that you have no relationship with no connection with really um this is i mean this is partly why i find the relationship that people have with therapists yes to be that productive because okay you can you can share this kind of information about yourself and about your relationship with your parents uh you know but where where where is it going from here and um what does this mean so yeah i did have that but i also had the other person doing the same for me like just piling on every all their trauma like at once like telling me everything that has happened like wrong and what's what's been tragic in their lives and wanting to comfort them but at the same time feeling like wow this you know this person's like literally crying in front of me like what should i do you know we don't even know each other i mean it is like quickly like building this bond between you and i i wish no harm on the people i you know i wish i wish only rest for these people but um yeah there were there were just things that seem to be um barriers between us whether it's meat eating whether it's uh uh just drinking alcohol doing drugs like what what they actually do with their lives which is who yeah and people cheating on their boyfriends and girlfriend stuff so so you know i don't know if i'd say i only had one friend who's from here in victoria but it's pretty close look at you know maybe it was two or three or something like yeah there were a few people in this city who were my friends but one of the few were not going to say her name she was a she was a woman who cheated on her boyfriend during the time that she was friends with me and she several times called me up for moral support when she was at that time actively lying to her boyfriend and cheating on him and was there was more than one person she pursued like where she was trying to cheat on her boyfriend or whatever and i remember just very surprising she knew my youtube channel she knew me we knew each other face to face we were friends face to face and i was nice to her in saying this but like you're saying in the nicest way possible like look i you are doing the wrong thing you know um i can put it to you i you know what you know that you're doing the wrong thing and here's the right thing to do by the way i wasn't saying she should be true to the guy like you should break up with this guy first and then pursue this other relationship you know what you know it's not like i'm saying uh she should she should remain committed to the same boyfriend she wasn't happy with him blah blah blah but the way to be unhappy with your boyfriend is not lying to him deceiving him cheating on him and so and so forth and i'll support that and you know uh sh that that that and again she was nice to me back on the phone but that ended the friendship you know her sense that i was judging her even though she knew i was right and she got in touch with me later and told me that so it's not just my opinion it's not like me saying to you i she knew i was right she has said that to me she has said to me directly look i knew you were right i knew what i was doing was all right she knows now or whatever you know that's how she looks back on it also but she never got over it so you know when you were saying before building up this kind of friendship or bond or togetherness of somebody it's also a question of what is it for you know yeah and depending on what walk of life you're in you may not have to question that all that much but you know are you in an alliance with people for a lot of people you're just in the last people in order to go out get drunk and cheating your boyfriend you're an alliance people to go and do things that you think are naughty but entertaining right you know it's part of a reckless life of self-intelligence when you don't have that what is this friendship for and um again you guys can tell i'm a gregarious person i'm i'm good at talking whatever you want to say i have good social skills whatever it's not that but you know you might be underestimating just the extent to which i am alone because of this kind of ethical incompatibility with with other people and they feel it you know no matter how nice i am they feel judged they feel they're not living up to my standards i've had people tell me directly like like in exactly these words that when they're with me they feel stupid when they're with me they feel they don't live up to my intellectual standards they feel like i've had people say that to me even more bluntly than that they say when i'm around you i feel dumb you know when i'm around you i like i feel like i'm not living up to this higher standard of you know reading and learning things all the time and having interesting things to talk about i've had people say to me that they don't want to be friends with me because they feel that they don't have enough interesting things to say whereas i always have interesting things sometimes yeah yeah it looks it ain't deep but it's real it's shallow and it's profound at the same time you know so you can live your life alone because you're too interesting a person not because you're too boring a person i really mean that and i'm really in a position to say that and i can say that when i was hanging out with people who were all enrolled in phd programs in cambridge england like people like people of high levels of formal education but they're [ __ ] boring shallow stupid people you know yeah in terms of finding somebody that will engage in naughty night of debauchery with you or something yeah yeah um i've had people like pressure me and not really believe that i live a sober life they think that i'm just pretending and i have had people uh say you know oh just make an exception this night like let's let's get drunk tonight like let's yeah this is my special night was that in detroit or was that he written yeah it was um could you just work in america in america so yeah i've had people that like don't respect my commitment to this and don't like really they don't get it [Laughter] it's something i don't eat i don't even think about it i don't crave alcohol you know but like but it is still something that every day like i i make this choice you know i and it's it's something that has taken uh determination and discipline and i don't want to just drop that to have a fun night with you and and um you know i respect that and and a lot of people don't they just you know they want to live out kind of childish ideas of what friendship is that friendship should be people uh making excuses for your bad behaviors and uh if you want to you know scream and dance and run around and act act like a kid act like a like a i grew up i grew up in ontario okay i grew up in ontario there were many young men and their sense of socialization came from hockey so ice hockey you know you could call this little league ice hockey but it's it's not the actual term but they did some kind of intramural small hockey league and hockey was more than just hockey hockey and again this could be like already when they're 12 like 12 to 22. we super life but they would meet up with guys they their first experiences drinking alcohol were linked to the hockey club their first experiences having heterosexual sex worthy a lot of these guys had homosexual and bisexual experiences through team sports throughout a lot there's a lot of that going on you know like you know they still identify as straight but you know once once they've got the toga on or something you know what i mean once they're once they're getting drunk and partying with you guys and then you know what you're saying is still wanting to have this childish thing very often okay then they go from doing intramural hockey to being a stock broker and working on the stock market and many of them in another exam where they still are trying to reproduce that sense of you know group clannish reckless self-indulgence that they had when they were a small league hockey player that was when they felt they were with a group of guys together and they may continue playing hockey you can be a middle-aged man who's in a hockey you know amateur hockey club not not a real serious but you know and obviously there's some guys for whom that's basketball you know my point is this model extends to a lot of people's lives but yes the sense of transgressive risk-taking and for them that's what friendship is about maybe what their whole life is about yeah yeah the camaraderie that comes with um a night out like that yeah sense of danger right yeah exactly i think um i i definitely can see that being more of a factor for men who have been involved in team sports but also like women who yes they uh get dressed up it's it's this occasion it's kind of like just the act of putting on makeup um blow drying your hair and it can be very tribal stress or something yes it's very much a ritualistic thing that now i can engage in these behaviors that i don't feel comfortable doing with on my day earlier in the day or whatever in some ways women they're putting on a mask together and then they're going out to a masquerade yep there's a lot of that and for women too it may involve lesbian and bisexual activity or group sex other kinds of transgressive sexual acts and a lot of people get get stuck on that you know forever um so look guys i really planned in this video to address how this applies to me and i just say you're like you know it's one of these things being self-confident doesn't mean you're not alone being handsome doesn't mean you're not alone being intelligent or being brilliant doesn't mean you're not alone there is a very understandable assumption that struggling with being forever alone is because you're stupid it's maybe because you're lazy you're self-indulgent it maybe is because you're uncharismatic maybe because you have a speech impediment like you're really not good at talking one way or another you have some kind of disability physical or mental that prevents you from from socializing with people there is a real assumption that struggling with being alone or being forever alone is because of weakness rather than strength now as we've already hinted at it really can be because of the strength and it can just be because you're incompatible with the culture and political circumstances you happen to be born into again if you are an atheist living in a majority muslim uh culture if you are someone who rejects the values and compromises that define the the cultural circumstances around you then you are alone whether you regard that rejection as a as a weakness or a strength uh there have been a couple different people referring to someone was saying that he went to a university where every single person drank alcohol no exceptions there were no sober people at this at this university well i used to live in scotland i used to live in glasgow scotland and i think that would have been 1991 1990 i could pin it down exactly it's a long time ago let me tell you at that time you know there nobody was sober in glasgow scotland i mean there was no culture and no concept of sobriety the dominance of alcohol drinking sports watching culture was absolute and in my university years this was really really during my last year in high school um when i quit drinking and change started to make the transition this more intellectual way of living you're like whoa and now i'm totally alone like now i'm alone now i'm cut off from again things change now i'm cut off from the drinking culture and again look i was self-confident i was well-spoken uh i was handsome and there were women who still wanted to have sex with me in the circumstances they met me to give an exam you know i went i was reminded this because i was talking to somebody else about writing for the newspaper you know i remember when there was a one year where i wrote for the university newspaper and the woman who was the president i think of the newspaper as a student it's the university newspaper she wanted to sleep with me like you know right away she's she's a smart interesting person too she was okay like you know uh i don't have anything against her you know uh you know so the little bit of social contact i had with other people it did bring me into contact women who wanted to have sex with me but nevertheless like i was really alone i was really cut off from the culture i was born into and again you guys i think many people just because i'm self-confident because i'm well-spoken because i'm objectively like there's nothing wrong with my face or body i'm six foot three i can bench press more than 200 pounds i can do more than 200 push-ups there's a sense in which i'm in good health and always have been like i've never really been that far out of shape and even even when i have more weight on guess what guys not all women are looking for a skinny dude when i've i've been 20 pounds heavier than i am now women still want to [ __ ] me being brilliant helps but you know i've been in shape i've been strong even when i had more body fat on um being tall and strong you know well guess what you can still have to struggle with and still have to philosophize about being hashtag forever alone now again a lot of you guys haven't visualized it this way when i was at the university of toronto i was alone yes there were women who wanted to have sex with me i was alone in exactly the sense you know spent an hour you know i was explaining to you totally alienated from the the culture well how do you think i felt when i was living in thailand like a fascinating rewarding life in so many ways but i was alone like to illustrate this um i had a girlfriend at the time this is when i was with my blonde ex-girlfriend there was one morning when we woke up early and we were going to a particular museum it was hard to get through so i could fill in all the details but there's no point so we woke up early it was 7 a.m like it wasn't insanely early it was something like that and most of the shops were still closed restaurants were still closed and so on and uh at that time i was 90 vegan but i identified as strictly a vegetarian i would eat i would eat parmesan cheese on pasta i had some vegetarian but not vegan stuff in my diet and you know so okay so we woke up early and i think like we're going to start the trap the trick to the trip to this museum starts at 7 30 am or something so go okay where can we get a bite to eat or get some food and i was assuming we're just gonna go to 7-eleven go to a convenience store and buy some vegetarian chocolate bars or something but there was this restaurant that was open i was like oh wow great what a surprise there's a restaurant doing breakfast you know kind of the crack of dawn kind of thing and so we go over and sit down and we're really surprised the the menu is in english because you know it could be for local thai people but there's obviously a place catering to uh foreigners and we sit down and we order some order some stuff it's a big surprise and then the next surprise is a whole series of middle-aged and elderly white guys come in and they say hi to me like i'm a friend of theirs like they know me from somewhere so yeah oh yeah you know i i don't i don't know what's up and again i'm going to this museum i got my blonde uh girlfriend again she's not an asian woman she's a white person i knew from canada you know and after a certain amount of time they they turn on the tv and what it was was this restaurant was specially opened that morning for the super bowl and if it wasn't the super bowl was some other major football game in america i don't feel sorry so like you know if someone checks the calendar and like no that's impossible because this is what i don't know the support but there was some important football game being broadcasted in america and like the title i don't know it's on at 6 00 p.m in california which is 7 30 a.m in thailand yeah you know they started watching this thing and that's why they were saying hi to me was they completely assumed that i was another beer drinking prostitute sleeping with you know a long-term tourist or retired person that i was a white man like them in thailand for the same reasons they were who was going to sit down and start drinking beer at 7 30 in the morning and you know like first thing in the day they did all those guys ordered drinks and started drinking first thing in the morning while watching you know a broadcast american sports game so look you know um like in this same sense you know when i was in toronto i was alone when i was in thailand i was alone and being handsome and being self-confident and being able to get laid it doesn't solve the problem and i really had to philosophize about it and you had to ask yourself is this worth doing is it worthwhile to remain committed to the things that are making me alone that are making me a pariah in this culture in the same way that someone an atheist might consider converting to islam just so they can live a better life within within that culture sure you know i had to i had to really think about it but guys so i just said my current attitude is maybe not that significant this video but now i'm a mean old man i'm 43 years old and so on right but like you know um a lot of you in the audience will not appreciate and you will not have ever imagined that i'm someone who really identifies with and relates to this hashtag forever alone but it has been a huge part of my life and in a meaningful sense it still is you know now uh i i can put some other hypotheticals into just to perspective okay you know what if melissa and i have a child in los angeles we don't have definite plans we may have a kid we may not you know it's there's more than one possible future okay i have to go and meet the parents of the other children at that school you know like dude like i'm alone like i really am alienated from this and again i may not complain you know there's no not necessarily any drama not necessarily any conflict like being alone doesn't mean there's conflict or trauma in your life it can be not you can go and meet these people and sit down in the room with them and go through the motions but like dude you know i am alone like the things that bring me together in close contact with or force me to cooperate with other people in that society they're only going to illustrate or demonstrate again the the depth and extent of that alienation the extent to which i still am in some ways you know forever alone well [Music] we had a conversation earlier this week that went really in depth with this about human nature about our requirements biologically versus intellectually like what we desire from people like from our relationships um and this desire to reach out to people like even in that example if if this is some parent as parents that your child is going to school with uh the parents of the child that your your child is going to school with um it would make sense for you to like want to have some relationship with them right like i know this is a hypothetical thing but people deal with this people you know they want to have parents that they can have play dates with their kids to set up play dates so be a member of the parent teacher association absolutely yeah and that doesn't have to be a religious thing you know can you can just find people um at your your kids preschool or your kid's daycare um so yeah i think uh you know we all have this kind of urge to find other people that we can you know collaborate with and cooperate with um and at what point do you decide that they are not uh worth it or you know it's it's uh incompatible but most of the time the rejection is mutual yeah most time those people are suspicious of me like that that's what i said like it's pretty rare it's going to be my choice you're going to feel yeah you're going to feel the alienation you may actually feel disgusted about these people you know yeah no that's true yeah and they and again like this thing i differ from a lot of the people on that reddit group in that i really do sympathize the other side like i understand okay for these other people that's what their life is about that's what's meaningful for them that's what they cherish and you know they don't even want me to exist you know they don't want to be in any kind of contact with me i'm you know they may find my politics disturbing my religion disturbing my ethical values what to me is good for them is evil and vice versa there's a really deep mutual competition no that's that's really true and especially when you add a child into the mix like i don't have my child associating right i remember when i was uh raises the stakes yeah go on yeah i i don't want to you know extend this too much but i will just say like this relates uh because when i was in elementary school i had a i had a friend and her mother identified as she had yes stickers on the back of her car that said my other car is a broom um broomstick wiccanism yes yes so my mother was christian she was lutheran and she wanted to raise me lutheran and she was worried about this influence but nevertheless she she knew that this was my friend and i wanted to to hang out with her and she uh she made this compromise this uh you know if she had been more committed to you know separating me from other people from from seeing other ways of life i guess um you know she would have ended that friendship or kept me from from being friends with her as a as an eight-year-old kid or nine-year-old kid um so yeah i mean yeah yeah to what extent do you want to allow your children to see other cultures other or you know be influenced by other people and what what you consider evil um you know some people might consider us evil because we're nihilistic atheist people and you know we're tearing we want to tear down the things that they hold dear to them and precious to them so yeah i recognize it is mutual alienation there um well and another example in our lives is you know i reject people who are communist and people who are communists reject me you know i'm an anti-communist that might sound controversial well have you been on a university campus in the 21st century [ __ ] half of the professors are communists i have to deal with professors who are active members of the communist party and again they perceive me as evil and i perceive them as evil you know yeah so uh it's shallow and it's deep at the same time and and people who are less intellectual than we are they may not think it through and assign words to it they may just experience it as a kind of panic as a kind of revulsion you know look my fellow vegans feel that way about me so i i am vegan or i happen to be vegan but there are all these vegans who devote their lives to running a petting zoo i've talked to vegans they're like oh they have 35 pets living in their apartment they don't own a house they live in an apartment with 35 pets now go yeah i rescued this cat from here i rescued this from there and oh we have to keep these animals in separate rooms in separate cages because they'll kill each other like they got 35 animals in their [ __ ] apartment you know that's their whole life it's not their whole life but you know a lot you know they're they're devoted that you know so i mean someone that might be a little bit interested in me in my my way of thinking in my philosophy but there's again they may not think it through they're going to reject me and i'm going to reject them they're all these things so you know what this comes down to it's both the social instincts and the anti-social instincts you know we have anti-social instincts for for a reason too um but look today i mean i'm putting myself in the mindset of a younger man or a younger woman for different reasons today i am a hundred percent at peace with being forever alone now i don't have plans to do this but guys i could move to thailand and live in thailand for the rest of my life and not give a [ __ ] that i'm forever i don't care at all and like if i'm living in thailand you know there are like european tourists american tourists australian tourists it's one kind of person but where i'm forever alone like there's really no and then of course there's the entire population of thailand then there are chinese people too there are other asian like there are japanese people chinese people but there are thai people in thailand and i can get along with them and live my life and totally embrace being foreign but that's me now that's me in my 40s right where i already have a meaningful life i already have a very firm grip on what i think the meaning of life is and i can go around with this tremendous sense of self-confidence like yeah i know what's up if you don't [ __ ] you you know what i mean i you know like th this is my meaningful life if you want to be a part of it great if not you know jump off you know i don't give a [ __ ] you know that that's where i'm at now and it would be difficult for me to figure out at exactly what point my autobiography i was there a hundred percent of the way you know the other the other funny thing about me is right now i'm writing a book writing a book is a completely solitary art form i don't really need anyone else publishing a book is another thing if any of you are involved in publishing hit me up i'd love to have a real publisher and i don't i can just dump it on amazon but you know most of the things i wanted to do with my life they were social they did involve other people cooperating together including just politics including learning languages and teaching languages a lot of these things bring people together and you have to cooperate closely with people so you know my life would be different if i were a painter or if i'd consistently remain just an author just focused on on writing in that way there are things i could do that would have would have cut me off from people sooner but um look for someone at my age and my stage of the game it's difficult to [Music] cast my mind back to the feelings and attitudes i had at like age 18 where it's like whoa i am alone and i am forever alone and you know i'm not saying this to insult people you can be at that stage when you're 28 when you're 38 when you're 48. you can be at that stage when you're 68 and your husband or wife died like maybe you weren't forever alone your whole life but you're forever alone now now you're old and nobody likes you and nobody cares about you you know so on and so forth you know like so you know my point is not to trivialize it by saying you know i'm thinking about how i felt at age at age 18. uh and it can be it can be at any age but like to really appreciate that sense of you know this is this is a real simple straightforward way to put it but it gets it's it's deep you know what am i alone for you know like you know if you join the army what are you joining the army for you know if you join the army and you're assigned to a particular brigade a particular platoon why am i with these guys what am i with these guys for well i hope you know the answer if not leave the army you know if you have a sense of esprit de corps on purpose i'm working with these guys to win this war to achieve this objective you know to it or even just to achieve excellence in the particular job you have in the army like you're going to be the best machine gun operator you can possibly be it's just that kind of you know pursuing excellence for the sake of accident whatever it is you know um [Music] you know you know what you are together with these people for well what are you alone for and is it good enough and then i i think that tears people apart because there were people who made the decision whatever it is you studied or whatever line of work you got into i mean i used to be a scholar of buddhism i had to ask myself did i get into this to be alone like do i want to keep doing this if i am going to be hashtag forever alone like oh yeah it's great being oh yeah it's not great sorry i'm speaking sarcastic i was going to say it's great being the most brilliant person in the field it's not it's horrible nothing is worse than being the most brilliant person in your field and not because i was that brilliant but because everyone else is a [ __ ] [ __ ] you know what that's like it's horrible it's terrible you know what it's like being smarter than your own university professor you know it's like being more knowledgeable and more well-read in the subject your professor has their phd in it's awful and that was my experience in buddhism again and again and again there are these old men with phds and they know less than i do they and already 20 years ago they knew less than i do for real bro um so it's not great it's not great having nobody to look up to and have being the most brilliant person it's not so like in my case is a very particular example like did i get into this the study of this language this kind of research did i get into this to be alone and if the answer is no i got to change my whole life i got to find a new field of studies i got to find a new career which i did but like no i'm not cool i'm not cool with with with being alone in this line of work you know but my point here is a lot of people are studying something or have a line of work which is way less rewarding than buddhist philosophy or buddhist history but it's politics right a lot of people are looking at the job they got a degree in chemistry they became a dentist you know whatever it is they got some job that earned some money and they're looking at their life and going whoa when i signed up for this i didn't think i would be alone they had some assumption they they would have colleagues they would have friends they'd be part of a larger unit they'd be leading a meaningful life together with other people with some sense of esprit de corps and some sense of purpose and they've got to sit here and look at the reality fact that they're not and again it doesn't matter if it's your own fault it doesn't matter like you know sure it's other people's fault to some extent if it's your fault whether it's 50 50 or 80 20 or 20 doesn't matter because you are dealing with that reality of being hashtag forever alone no matter whose fault it is no matter where you cast blame or cast aspersions in your analysis earlier you asked me when you started feeling alienation from people in this way um so i could ask you the same thing um however i feel like you know you've given a pretty good outline of like at what's that okay what i'm trying to say is i can see how this uh has influenced how you've lived your life because you weren't living for your friendships in toronto right because right you decided i'm willing to to you know move across the world and never come back you know never come back to canada willing is an understatement i was willing to never come back to toronto yeah yeah you were eager but a lot of people they do feel this sense of loyalty to stay in a place because of the friends that they have so in some ways i'm not saying it's you know and they keep they keep being judged and keep judging within the same little cultural context again and again and again they keep getting rejected and they won't move or won't change going yeah yeah but it shows to me um a real strength of character that you had that you were not going places for the people yeah you were not going to i used to laugh about that go on yeah yeah yeah yeah i'm not i'm not moving to thailand to meet people and i think that really did kind of um you can you can disagree with me but my sense is that that influence like the relationships that you did have with people right that you weren't um you know heartbroken if you're you might you might have at various times been been upset by friendships ending but i think like um how you you've just met a lot of different people you have a lot of different stories that you can draw upon you know from from having met a lot of different people um that you know you saw them as individuals as who they were not as people who were um trying you know not that you were trying to be their friend or you weren't caught up in this i hope i hope this is making sense like the the um being caught up in this idea of trying to make friends it might distract you from actually like getting to know people who they are in the same way that like trying to have this relationship with your parents distracts you from like who they actually are and um you know really getting to know people um as as yeah as they are as individuals versus like you know the kind of relationship that you're building so i don't know hopefully but you you were asking a question your question was at what point do you yes yes you wanted to restate the question sure yeah um so at one point did you feel that you would be forever alone in these um uh i can say very precisely so it was the second last year of high school and that's kind of the end of my period of being involved in the theater uh well not quite sorry so after that while i was in university for no sorry actually my involvement theater continues to university in some ways so i had maybe two years in high school where i was really involved in the theater and think of myself long-term as being involved in and it's interesting i didn't think about filmmaking much but i realized if you if you're successful in on the stage you can you know branch out and do film but live theater was really what i was thinking about uh being a playwright etc but then to some extent also being an actor and stand-up comedy and that stuff so maybe two years in high school where that was more and more at the front of my mind i did when i was in university little bit about i was a theater critic to some extent it was attending plays and seeing what was going on and i went and i auditioned in the theater department at the university and had had contact with them and so on uh you know there were there are two parts to it one is accepting the forever alone thing but you know that was that so that happened then that was during high school for me absolutely absolutely was specifically second last year of high school and the trend so that whole year and then the transition to last year of high school absolutely that's when i had to recognize that and philosophy didn't really deal with it so it was during high school for me what took longer was accepting that other people were actually stupider than me i really wanted to believe for the longest time that like other people were just as smart as i was they just weren't trying hard they just weren't motivated you know what i mean they were just and it's you can talk yourself into that you know like oh yeah all these people they're all so kind of brilliant and hard-working they're just you know they're doing something else it's not their interest which you know obviously that's projecting because a lot of things i can remember whatever i can remember teachers perceived some teachers thought i was a genius and some thought i was an idiot it's like look i'm you know i remember getting an a plus and a test and like the teacher coming over talking to me i was like look i never read the book i like i don't know what the [ __ ] wrong with you like you think i worked hard to get this a like i i literally did none of the reading i did you know i've made no effort at all you know i just have a good memory whatever you know like you know that's not even testing your intellectual abilities in any real sense uh you know but in my involvement in theater also in university what was harder to really accept and deal with is like wow these people are that stupid these people like like look wow sorry i could tell anecdotes like you know all the time for me at least when i was a young man you'd think this person can't be that stupid it can't be that bad it can't be it's like it's that bad and that took a lot longer um and that's obviously you know i talk a lot about generosity of spirit on this channel i think i was kind of born with too much generosity of spirit where i really wanted to think the best of people and assign positive motives to them and yeah positive intellectual traits of them and then really accepting like oh wow no like things that i can do that i totally take for granted other people can't do and are never going to be capable of and you know some of them are jealous of me some of them resent me and pay me for it most don't most of them are just happy getting drunk and watching sports going to nightclubs and doing cocaine doing the things they are doing with their time and you know i know this is a shallow example but it is relevant to this it's relevant to theater the way you and i will watch a tv program well it's true of documentaries we can watch an historical documentary and i can be pausing it and pointing out you all the things that are wrong with it and the things the narrator is lying about and the ways in which the narrator is intentionally misleading you and other people watch that same documentary and they don't catch any of that and they they even can't you know that's the really weird thing about living living life the way i do and you know sorry so that was the harder turning point that came later because i still i still don't want to believe it i want to believe everyone's brilliant i want to believe everyone's smarter than i am to give an example i want to believe my parents are smarter than i am they're not both of my parents were much stupider than i was their whole lives as old people and as young people when i felt like i grew up with stupid parents guys and that was hard to accept like whoa like they're not doing this on purpose they're really that stupid like they're not pretending to be stupid really dealing with that with your own parents and uh you know i wanted to believe my teachers and university professors were smarter than me and really whoa no you're not pretending you're really this stupid all the time you know and it's not that your mind is preoccupied with something else it's not you know yeah that was the harder thing to to get and um anyway yeah and also i mean the other thing is i always scoffed at it but there always were people whether it was university professors or not the earliest one i can remember uh this kid wasn't my friend like for any length of years i was a kid it was my friend for a couple weeks or something when i was when i was a child i didn't know this kid for very well maybe a couple months i don't know but i remember i went uh with this kid and his parents to a museum and this museum i'd never been to before so my parents weren't there i didn't have any parent so it was me with this kid and his his parents going to this museum and again i've i don't think i ever did anything with that kid after that but some kid i knew at school for a short period of time and i was really little this was i think kindergarten year or could have been grade one i was a really small kid i remember how tall i was and as i was walking around this museum like i was okay maybe could that have been grade two i'm sorry i could i could be i could be misremembering a little bit i remember how small i was but you've even seen this with my daughter my daughter in kindergarten or her verbal ability was really high in english yeah i know i know but anyway i think it was like it was like that it was like with my daughter where you like can't believe how well spoken this kid is when you're like four years old i really think it was at that stage i was really like kindergarten so i was trying to put it later because remember the other person but no i think that was for me that was like kindergarten year um anyway and while i was walking around the museum i was able to point to and say intellectually sophisticated things about all this stuff in the museum and i remember both the boy so the other little boy who's the same age as me like i knew him from school or whatever and his mother they were both saying in different ways like whoa this is the most brilliant child like i've never met anyone like this before you know and i remember you know when the mother said it i just completely scoffed at this but the same way adults will tell you you're very handsome or very beautiful as a child just you know you know what grown-ups are they want to say something nice to look at and you're aware they'll even the ugliest kid they'll patent that say oh you're beautiful you know like you know i just kind of dismissed that uh but i was much more confused by the boy my own age because little kids insult each other and fight and stuff and i remember him really saying like whoa you're some kind of extraordinary you know person this way and um and i found that harder to kind of deal with and i was i was trying to say what don't you know this stuff i was like what's you know what's the matter with you kind of thing i didn't i didn't say that but that's that's what i was thinking like what do you mean like you know it doesn't doesn't everybody knows and that came up with the times when i was a little kid i remember a kid coming over to dinner at my house i remember who this kid was a kid i knew for several years and he was just shocked to see me uh talking politics with my father that would have been this would have been great too so yeah now i'm comparing that first memory that really was like kindergarten and then this was great too and you know i really i didn't i disagreed with my father like we'd you know that i was i was self-confident and true now obviously when i was a child i didn't go wrong but he um and we we didn't just talk about politics i mean we talked about science and history a little bit you know my father and i were at the dinner table and i think it's fair to say nobody else talks like my mom and my sister it was me and my dad dominating the dinner table and i remember this kid saying to me like i think i walked him home after dinner at my house he said like oh look now i realize why you're so brilliant like you know it's because you've you've grown up in this household we have these intellectual discussions over the dinner and i didn't think of myself that way at all and i looked at him like what do you talk to your parents about me like what like you know and like you know this kid was was blown over that so no it's no i'm just going back to the earliest examples obviously i have experience when i'm in university and once i'm actually writing things but you know um [Music] that was a second much more difficult thing to accept and that here's why i'm talking about it the result is you are alone like that's what comes out of that you live in a fundamentally anti-intellectual culture like toronto canada and you're alone now if i had been born and raised in berlin it'd be different the germans are not hyper pro-intellectual but they're somewhat prominent they're somewhat supportive and somewhat pretentious as a culture i didn't grow up in berlin i grew up in toronto you know what i mean and i feel it you know i've known um i had black friends growing up by the way i did um i had black friends who were intellectuals and they they grew up walking distance from me like it's you know i lived in downtown toronto but they did they did in effect live in a black neighborhood i'm very shortness of where i am but anyway they lived closer to other black people and i knew for them they grew up in like an even more ridiculously openly anti-intellectual culture these are like jamaican immigrants in toronto uh you know or just you know uh the dominant culture warships sports marijuana alcohol a certain kind of machismo certain kinds of gender roles for both men and women you know in this very openly anti-intellectual culture you know so i knew i knew a couple of black intellectuals when i was uh in high school i didn't know my friend i wasn't close to anyone in university uh was in that category and again this alienation and hostility and and what have you and i can remember being in that black neighborhood and i've probably told this before and people assuming people coming up to me and assuming and talking they assumed that i was a light-skinned black preacher for one of the religions like black guys coming up to me in the neighborhood being like hey brother are you with like they asked if i was with the louis farrakhan group or if i was in this group like just because i'm like carrying a book and i'm gonna it's like no like like i'm not you know like for one thing i'm not black it's like they perceived me as a light-skinned black guy i had a shaved head like they thought i was someone who was like 1 8 or 1 16 black or something they perceive me as being part of one of those religious groups because in that neighborhood the only people who kind of carry a book and i don't know look and act the way i do are our people are part of those religious groups so yeah look i'm i'm just saying this to contextualize it if you grew up as an intellectual in hong kong china where you're supposed to just care about earning money if you grew up as an intellectual in south korea if you grew up as an intellectual in thailand a lot of these are profoundly anti-intellectual cultures so yeah um look so ron sims says i know i know quite a bit about ron from over the years uh so you know wrong i'm sure ron can relate to him talking about will be different people in the audience to what i'm talking about okay you know what else sucks being stupid you know like that's this is not my struggle in life but i think that and feel that about my fellow youtubers all the time like how do you look in the mirror and cope with yourself it's one thing to look in the mirror and feel that you're ugly to look in the mirror and feel that you're stupid and to be performing on youtube and listen to your own youtube video later and think whoa i'm stupid so yeah that's my struggle that's my situation and it absolutely is about being hashtag for everyone it is relevant to this i'm not just doing this self-indulgent way but sure for other people it's instead the sense that they're disappointing to others that they're too stupid others you may have the feeling that you're too stupid for your own parents that your parents feel impatient and let down by you when you talk to them that your friends like oh god what is it now you know like you may be the one who's who's too stupid and you know yeah sorry go on but you know i just say it's not that's not everyone's struggle but either way whether it's because you're brilliant or stupid or whatever it is you can be for whatever reason if you're alone you're alone you know it's the same real fundamental fact which is not being lonely you can be lonely under any any uh conditions but this is about you know the reality of being alone good good good answer that was that was my question when when did you first start noticing you know that you're hashtag forever alone um yeah yeah no i mean going in do you wanna well i was gonna someone's raising the issue of narcissism which i know a lot about uh i used to have a member of my family who was diagnosed with narcissistic personalities in case you don't know who i'm talking about it's someone who was a member of my family before and isn't a member of my family now so i know quite a lot about the diagnosis and the reality of narcissism i just say you know the reality of narcissists and the reason why they cause so much friction in society and i'll just say at this time there's no medical evidence that narcissism is a biologically real condition it may be i mean it's possible i remember um i remember a particular study with mri scans of brain abnormalities with people diagnosed with with narcissistic personalities with mpd it is possible that uh the same way that autism is now known to be a biological real condition it's possible narcissism will will will be diagnosed it's also possible that narcissism and autism are the are two different types of behavior resulting from the same biological problem it really is uh anyway sorry but you know so i know i know quite a lot of narcissism but the reality is narcissists are not hermets they're not people who want to be alone they're exactly people who are always reaching out for and seeking validation now i just say this i've spent the last hour talking about myself um there were many many ways in which my behavioral type or psychological life is the opposite of a narcissist and i've taken those tests i score almost zero it's on twitter with my actual score i got like two out of 200 or something on the narcissist and like uh the average for an american was 33 or something i was like i'm way way below i'm basically at zero on the narcissist scale but one of the things you might not know about me is that i don't like telling my own story i don't one of the things that test asks you a lot about is being the center of attention i don't try to be the center of attention i'm quite delighted to not be the center of attention now anyway you can get into the background and who i am what i'm like and talk about it but because of the format of youtube you're used to being the center of attention because i'm the person giving the monologue it's actually not the way i live my life that's not the kind of guy i am i'm not an attention grabbing uh type of person but i mean i think what's interesting about narcissists is that they are constantly rebelling against their isolation they actively crave and they often do outrageous and daring things in order to get validation from other people now is this to what extent is this the same topic we're discussing this video video the forever i don't think well we framed this conversation by talking about a very meaningful type of aloneness a very meaningful type of isolation but there's a much less meaningful type of isolation which is just that you want other people to validate your ego which is a lot of what goes on with npd with narcissism pardon me with narcissism in its medically precise definition um so this is an anecdote which you'll hear from many sources if you have a therapist's office and it's some kind of psychoanalyst psychotherapist or psychiatrist who specializes in people with mpd who has a lot of clients in mpd the secretary will know which of the clients are there for npd because one of the most predictable behaviors they have is bullying the secretary to make adjustments to the schedule so there will be a special exception made in their case they'll come up to the secretary and say oh okay so you do all the appointments uh on the hour or thirty minutes after they're like all the appointments are there for five o'clock or 5 30 or 6 o'clock 6 30 in this pattern okay well in my case it has to start at 4 45. they well you're going to make an exception my case because i'm an important person that is like that one example if you've known people with mpd that is the condition they they want it and they will bully the secretary at the doctor's office so like in this outrageous childish way just to get the validation just to get the recognition that they're special or important you know that's what mpd is is like that's their struggle so you know early on in this video i talked about the difference between being lonely and being alone in that sense people with mpd people who really have narcissism uh as truly divine they're always going to be lonely they're never going to be gratified enough they're never going to be satisfied with this kind of uh this kind of validation i think it's fair to say for you and me both we're worth the opposite of the spec we we don't really give a [ __ ] about above of anything i mean we uh sorry but like we can go from shelter to deep you don't need anyone to tell you that you're pretty like you don't need people to make you feel like you're high on the status chart with like competition with other women for how attractive you are but also like you would never record music and upload music because you need people to tell you you're talented music you know if you do she has made a few songs we've done a few mystical things on youtube you know as a joke no but you know for real but you don't when we did that there's no sense of uh craving validation and ego that kind of narcissistic no you know it's very challenging wanting to know that you're special uh want to be able to do so yeah it overlaps with friendship and with being alone and loneliness and being for there's an overlap there but it hasn't been especially what we're talking about in this video yeah no it hasn't been i just wanted to say uh in response to um something that you had mentioned earlier um about there is also loneliness uh and feeling alone in feeling dumber than other people that you might not have had much experience with um given that you're brilliant uh yeah but i'm bad at some things never learned to drive a car we're going yeah there are things is ignorant at some point you know you learn yes and you know i i still feel like there is a lot of hope for people um like i still feel like there is some value in my reaching out to people who i don't think are intellectuals or you know haven't really considered it like i i still want to believe that people can become more intelligent and people can become uh people can change their minds about things so in that sense i still feel like optimistic um that people can change and that there's a point in mind not just embracing being forever alone in this way and you know trying to make the effort to to reach out to other people like there is something that could come from it um but you've had a lot of experience with this of being the more intellectual partner in both friendships and relationships and you've had the experience of putting in a lot of effort yes and a lot of time to help someone else to help them raise up their level yeah and then finding that either for emotional reasons or for um i guess intellectual reasons that it's just not going to work out like that all the effort that you put into it is for naught and that you regret that too sure so um you know i respect that at this time in your life you're you're more comfortable with your you know uh not having colleagues not having like a salon of people to to discuss things with in this way um but you haven't always been that way and you know i've seen you struggling with it throughout the years that you know you you want to have contemporaries but look so great great just putting a human face on in case people can't visualize we're talking about with having a salon having colleagues autobiography of benjamin franklin his whole career was made by having a salon by having yeah and he describes for you how it was organized a book reading club how a salon was organized and then the book reading club they donated their books and created a library this is a very 19th century 18th century sense of what a library is it was you know gentlemen coming together and you know and again sorry with gender roles at the time were what they were most of these guys had married women who had no education at all so their their marriage was not in any way an intellectual partnership many of them had arranged marriages and purchased marriages many of them owned slaves so like their home was a place where their wife was ordering the slaves around it's totally intellectually barren kind of place uh you know and then these men made time to go to the salon and be part of a society of learned gentlemen and you know he his whole political career his newspaper publishing career and his own development education he had no formal education he really never went to school came about through these salons to participating in these book reading clubs literary clubs gentlemen's intellectual clubs but you're saying to put a face on it you know that's you know that really lets you visualize what you mean by having colleagues having contemporaries yeah absolutely yeah um that is a great example and but what if you're the dumbest guy at the club yeah right so my blonde ex-girlfriend she raised that with me all the time because she when she was around me she struggled with her own self-esteem she said that she just felt so stupid being around me she's bad everything and many times i gave her examples there'd be examples i'd be smiling like i was like oh but remember like sometimes i'm the dumb one and i was i'd give something but remember in this situation like i didn't know anything else because there are some things that ignore enough there's some things i'm incompetent and and she'd say yes but you're smiling and laughing about that now because the other 95 of the time you're brilliant and you're right you know what you're talking about you're great at everything you know and she would say that her situation was that she was wrong and stupid ninety-five percent of the time was only good at something she really struggled with that and she told me about it that was you know it wasn't implicit in the relationship it was really articulate so how do you feel if you have those contemporaries but they're always helping you you're never helping them well so the hypothetical situation of not being alone not being forever alone but where you are the third wheel or you are the weakest link in the chain you're the dumbest guy at the book club uh you're the dumbest you're the guy nobody remembers from benjamin franklin's uh you know salon you know yeah you're the guy who's struggling to keep up and having other people explain yeah and i remember from a young age i have two older brothers so my older brothers are like seven and five years older than me so being the younger sister i had a lot of experience of them bullying me for being stupider you know so at a very young age i got used to being put on this put on game i was going to say but like just being made fun of for being stupider yeah and um you know i know that feeling of where it's like well how could i possibly know that you know i'm younger and i don't have that experience like how can you expect that of me so yeah i do also sympathize with the other situation and feel that there is still like as long as you can get over the like kind of emotional response to that and and learn like you can you can still like improve and um be comfortable with your own ignorance your own stupidity but learned learn to move past it you know so i like you know i i just say uh in our relationship as well obviously yeah you are more intelligent you have been through a lot more experiences than i have so i've also dealt with that same you know sense of inferiority uh but once i've gotten over that it's so much better to just recognize that like let me let me just point this out though okay right your situation is that no matter how inferior you may feel you are to me at any given point in time you still have the fundamental strength in your ego the fundamental source of self-confidence of feeling and knowing that you are better today than you were five years ago and you're better than you were two years ago yeah you know i think are you better today than you were one month ago you know it gets it's hard to say maybe you had a bad month but you know but no the amount of intellectual progress ethical part the amount of you know growth as a human being what use whatever heavy terms you want yeah you know but the amount of intellectual progress you've made is so great in the progress of in the in the space of five years that even if you feel your way behind me or way below me you're you're better than you were well a lot of people don't have that a lot of people they're dumb and they stay dumb they're ignorant and they stay ignorant and they've been treading water for the last five years you know and you know whatever james aspie all kinds of people just because of the life they live or for whatever combination of reasons i don't i don't mean people who are mentally disabled or something but people who are just not making progress who don't have that don't feel that way or or they feel that the ways in which they did try to make progress they failed and let you down and they weren't smart enough weren't good enough or whatever yeah that's true yeah but i i do think that other people can harness that same um absolutely ambition to become a more intelligent person absolutely and that's more sympathetic and look that's that's why i'm doing this i mean you know i didn't have anyone to look up to when i was i did i only had negative examples looked up to you i can only look at this guy and think i don't want to end up like this guy i want to do the opposite of what this guy is doing you know i only had negative examples whether you're thinking about on television on the internet people i knew face to face authority figures professors i had nobody nobody i could look to positively and i mean this this youtube channel began so i could be that for my own daughter so if you guys don't know i have a daughter growing up in france i never get to see her maybe in the next few years i'll get to see her i do have lawyers working on it but um you know i've no i have no reason to think the legal situation's gonna change or improve any time fast i just had email with her mom my ex-wife in the last few days actually so you know but there's there's no room for optimism but sure when i started this youtube channel i wanted to show what kind of man i was and how i lived and to really demonstrate this is the life of the mind this is having a meaningful life this is what it's all about and then she can take it and do with it whatever she wants to my daughter may become a professional wrestler like you know you don't know she may become a i was going to say fireman firewoman fire person you know she may work for the fire department you don't know i don't decide that and i'm not going to i'm not imposing that on her but it's like look kid if you want to know and uh just to mention briefly you know so we have another mention here that i'm a former uh scholar of buddhism well if i'd never created this youtube channel my daughter could have grown up thinking about her father primarily as a scholar of buddhism she might have thought of me as a stereotypical hippie she might have thought of me as someone who smokes marijuana and has dreadlocks and falls into a certain cultural pattern i want to say you know she might have thought of me quite an effeminate figure also it's like no guess what i was this really boisterous dominant self-confident masculine guy very nihilistic very skeptical very modern scientific attitudes who went into buddhism and i wasn't a hippie and i never got along with the hippies that's why i had this big impact on buddhism in the few years i was i was doing it you know and then you know as you know on my youtube channel you can see in the years sense that i that i took another direction but sure you know um the book i'm writing right now there are two uh sources of inspiration for it and they know it you know one is voltaire i've talked about that in the channel before i read voltaire and thought well i can do better than this that's a negative inspiration but the other is there's this younger youtuber oliver shields and i've said this to them before i said look you know i'm writing this book for you i'm writing it for any young men like you and you know the style and substance of the book it's really aware there are these younger intellectuals who are going to learn something about the meaning of life for me i'm not going to learn everything you know i don't i don't ask all the right questions and i don't give you all the right answers i'm not claiming this has a kind of biblical [Laughter] quality it's not supposed to be a totally exhaustive examination of these things but you know i know i can set this down in a way that's going to that's going to benefit other people and people will react to it and some people react to it negatively and some people take inspiration from it take it another direction but you know for me now i'm doing the final rereading revisions and editing uh for me the least interesting parts of the book are exactly the part where i'm i'm really speaking to a younger reader for me it'd be a more interesting book if it was one cynical middle-aged man just writing about politics and philosophy and history for other cynical middle-aged men but it's not you know some pastors of it are at that level but some of them are really breaking it down and and teaching to someone and by the way guys obviously you could be 45 and you're new to this game you know uh so no you know look i'm i'm really aware of that i'm really aware that that's the big positive impact this youtube channel has on people's lives and them that have ears to hear you know let it hear but here's one thing is significant it comes back to the top of this video okay this is exactly the same discourse that you see people stumbling through on reddit slash r slash forever alone you have all these people who say they can't fit into the expectations their society put down for them they can't fit into the expectations their parents sat down for them they maybe can't fit into the expectations that uh tumblr or tinder so their dating apps like this have sit down for them they're like okay they can't live up to this this and this so what are they gonna do for the rest of their lives what is the meaning of life and you know the conclusion they all come to it's a generalization but still i think it's about the conclusion they'll come to you again and again is that they have to figure out how to live a meaningful life on their own terms for their own reasons they have to start living a life that they will be happy with with no validation from anyone else no friendship from mimosa no encouragement from anyone else maybe only negative feedback from what else they have to live the way an atheist lives in a 99 muslim society they have to live with some sense of real commitment to a sense of reward coming from what it is they're devoting their time to and for some people yes that's going to be research into the cure for cancer it's going to be something that's obviously rewarding in some way for most people it's not going to be the cure for cancer and i'm interested many of them i mean this is kind of pathetic but many of them they talk about using steroids that they've decided to become really muscular you know and they they feel and again you know you don't know what they look like but they're people they're people who say things like they're forever alone they've never been hugged or kissed they've never even had a like even a you know simple relationship on that level that wasn't consummated and you know now their decision is to devote their time to lifting weights and using steroids other people it becomes the stock market or something but you know they start to they're groping around in the darkness for a more meaningful life and for a life that's so meaningful that this crippling awareness that they're forever alone is relativized by it is is it becomes a relatively uh unimportant problem yeah yeah i i think i know this is maybe not that deep or meaningful of an example but we do see plenty of youtube channels just a variety of topics you'll find on youtube people who are really people who are really interested in a subject and they make an entire youtube channel just devoted to what pens they use or what what pencils they use uh people who we we've been looking into uh joystick like people making yeah joystick modifications custom groups yeah but even the study the study with me channels i think too and stuff we're going out yeah so you find people that obsessively studying on camera yeah they're they're interested in these in these subjects and they even you know are so um passionate about them that they share it on youtube and they don't care if they only get 10 views or whatever you know you can stumble upon these these channels you know not in it for fame or the fortune glory um so yeah i know it's a kind of small example it's not the cure it's not finding the cure for cancer it's not even something like working as a dentist like you said you know um it's just you know eventually you do have to get comfortable with um finding what it is that you're okay with doing even if you are doing it alone well and let's make this explicit in our century you're never going to be handed that meaningful life by an institution right like if you think the solution to your problems is studying philosophy at a universal at a university [ __ ] shoot yourself like are you [ __ ] kidding me you might as well commit suicide now if you think you're gonna find the meaning of life in the academic study of philosophy at a university homie it's over for you you've got to do it yourself but like more broadly a lot of people in some other century people used to go to a buddhist monastery to try to have the meaning of life people used to go to a university you know the ancient university of toledo you know people used to get higher levels of formal education uh the classic you know gentlemen's university and liberal arts and you know to provide the study of classics for many centuries you know you've now read some of those books you know how meaningful they are you know appian and thucydides and everything else there were gentlemen of all ages who decided to take the time and take their money and go and learn the classics and go get an introduction to the thought of ancient greece and rome there was a time when there was some kind of institution people believed in as helping you graduate to a more meaningful life and i don't just mean graduation like getting a certificate or a credential there was a time when people believed in institutions and maybe some of them real today today do you want to be an actor nobody in the right [ __ ] mind will tell you to go to university and study acting are you kidding me in the year 2022 you might as well kill yourself if you think you're gonna [ __ ] learn to act going to university and enrolling in an acting major you are [ __ ] living in the wrong century you're not gonna learn jack [ __ ] you're gonna learn how to be fifty thousand dollars in debt you're going to learn nothing you'd be better off learning an act by joining the army you know be in the marine corps for a couple of years practice acting in the shower you know what i mean like it's like you know i'm saying this like it's a [ __ ] joke it's no joke like the extent to which people are groping around in the darkness for a meaningful life the extent to which uh people are seeking out uh friendships trying not to be alone and that they have to go through that process alone it's them sitting there with google i mean these are all totally different examples but oh do you want to be an actor you know do you want to be a stand-up comedian what percentage of stand-up comedians studied comedy in university do you want to do a news and politics show on youtube what's the preparation for that is that a universe sorry i know these are kind of funny random examples we wanted to go into baking we were so [ __ ] stupid we thought the way to do that was to enroll in a university where you study and like you know the the the low tide of formal education the disillusionment with and the discrediting of educational institutions and formal ways of progressing towards a meaningful life whether that be uh secular education or religious because again also going to a buddhist monastery is discredited yeah go to the shaolin temple knock yourself the [ __ ] out you might as well go to disneyland all that [ __ ] is like going to disneyland it really is university is disneyland year 2022 university is [ __ ] disneyland you know yeah man it's so true at least in the united states it's on you i'm sorry that really funny i know it's tragic but yeah yeah yeah it's uh delivering you you know i've got experience i've got a friend who teaches german at a university and every so often she jokes with me about what's going on with their students in these classes this is in the united states of america people are paying a hundred thousand dollars to spend three hours a week in a classroom studying german they're learning like i'm sorry but if you want to learn german you would save money you could go to germany and live in a whorehouse you could live in a brothel in germany and it would cost you less money than going to university united states america and you would come out completely [ __ ] fluent in german like like the the the the in effect like to say the the education united states america is inefficient is an insult to efficiency right it's so totally counterproductive if you want to if you want to learn to speak german you can go to germany and join the army or something you go to germany and get a job digging ditches but yeah you can live in a [ __ ] brothel you'll come back fluent in german you know like there's so much there's so many ways you can learn german and like this is not one of them so no like but those are skills that are tangible and testable like how well you speak german you know what i mean like when we're getting into the intangibles we're getting into having a meaningful life and that's why i'm using things like acting or the creative arts but we can talk about anything else you know the extent to which it's on you if you go to university you got to bring the meaningful life with you you can't find it there that is a new challenge in our era of course you know we didn't invent it but yeah you know in prior centuries and many of us our parents and grandparents will have that attitude that there's some institution you can sign up for there's some credential there's some form of matriculation or graduation you go through that's going to help you out that way and today there is nothing i mean what the [ __ ] is the point of going to university your professors are all middle age alcoholics who are taking prozac like all you're seeing is like the process of [ __ ] degeneration for these nevishes with phds who are in positions of authority you know and half of them are communists and like 25 of them are insane christian fundamentalists like oh if you don't want to go to the communist university oh have a great time at the [ __ ] mormon university have a great time at sister mary's catholic [ __ ] university like you know it gets worse the left-wing universities are bad the right-wing universities everywhere so you know the but you know perspective is really cheap video used to say don't drop out of college to go right right right right durianrider was not wrong about everything [Laughter] well yeah it's way harder the challenge is way worse in accepting that it's all on you and i think the good news is there's a positive liberating aspect to it like right now so we're moving to los angeles does anyone here want to be an actor does anyone here want to be a comedian hit me up we can work like really you and me we can do it like there's something liberating to saying hey look oh do you want to get involved in news and politics well i can do a news and politics show we can work together like any of you in the audience you know hit me up let's try to make it out maybe it won't work out maybe we'll hate each other you know whatever you know no false promises here but there's something liberating about taking responsibility for that stuff if you're like hey it's on me you know what i mean now if you want to be a dentist you got to go to dentist not everything is like that you know but that's so many of these horizons in life you want to be a sculptor you want to be a painter you want to be a stand-up comedian you want to be an actor you want to be a writer whether that's a screenwriter or write a book or something that we're oh wow okay it's all on you and there's something terrifying in the fact that getting a degree in english literature will not prepare you to be a successful author in any way whatsoever i mean you learned more about how to write an essay with me you learned how to really did it thank you that take that degree so yeah you know there's something liberating about it there's also something horrifying about it and and it relates to this big issue of forever we looked at the possibility of melissa going to business school right and getting an mba and like it was there's most of the websites most of the pamphlets for these business school but like the main thing they're selling you is that you won't be alone you'll have friends you'll have colleagues uh uh you know you'll have connections yeah you'll make networking network connections that'll change the rest of your life that's right and like do you want to put that in the contract homie because i can go i can go to university and i do you think i'll have one friend do you have one call really really like you know you aren't promising me [ __ ] you know i can what the [ __ ] i can study at the university of toronto for five years and never make a single friend or colleague i can study at university of victoria for five years are you are you kidding me and and i can be the most charismatic most brilliant person in every [ __ ] class i enroll in these are small classes you know it's sorry a couple of my professors still talk to me to this day uh i i when i okay when i was in that class for creative writing i was the most brilliant creative writer in that class let me tell you i'm not alone i'm not saying every year the guy could have had other classes other brilliant people but you know no the competition isn't that great and i'm the mo i'm one of the most memorable people for that professor and he still remembers me and he still talks to me you know what i mean i do so that happens but no oh gee so do you think so that creative writing class all the time i was talking to the professor we were doing q a but he really appreciated me as a colleague you know do you think one [ __ ] person in that class wanted to be my friend do you think i have one friend today other than the professor who still talks to me do you think one of them was interested in reading my work or reading do you think any of them want to be my colleagues do you think any of them thought this guy is talented and he's a background in the publishing industry which i do i should go into business with this guy this guy we could go together into the publishing whether as a writer or an editor or the actual publisher not one [ __ ] person all right and i can see this about buddhist studies yeah i have a lot of experience being the most brilliant person in the room in buddhist studies context not [ __ ] one person so you know but all these institutions want to sell you that lie sign up now and you're going to have friends for life and people are willing to pay people who want do you know how much people pay for a [ __ ] mba ronald do you know of any [ __ ] idea people will spend more than a hundred thousand dollars uh to get an mba and sure this is a huge part of it it is partly about being hashtag forever alone you gotta do that you gotta take away i think that's a great place that's a wrap