You can change your life: tragedy and heartbreak as a nihilistic atheist.

all of us in our behaviors are shaped and influenced by television if you are alive and able to watch this recording right now you in your behaviors and expectations have been shaped by television i would even say if you were that one kid in the school who had hippie parents or had religious fundamentalist parents where your parents didn't let you watch television you're still shaped by it because all of your classmates who surrounded you and all of your teachers and all of the adults in life they all grew up watching television and they all communicated that stuff to you i think for years before i saw the movie wayne's world i'd heard every joke out of wayne's world on the schoolyard you know like just other other people at school a lot of those things they get communicated to you it wasn't so much pro for me but i remember one of my one of my uh gym teachers actually was the gym teacher complaining that kids would come in all hopped up off of watching saturday night live the tv shows it had a few years a few golden years it was really popular with with children frankly and teenagers and they'd all be repeating the jokes at a certain level and he would say he could tell because he was a gym coach the kids who couldn't really work out who couldn't really exercise and stuff you know on the on the monday or whatever it's like well they've been up all night you know they haven't been they haven't been not sleeping probably not till 2am or something watching this stupid tv show okay a lot of us [Laughter] to an extent we maybe can never fully be aware of right our expectations are shaped by television if you help people if you try to help people the vast majority of them don't want to be helped you don't see that on television talk to a woman who told me her dream was to get involved with humanitarian work in thailand laos cambodia basically rescuing prostitutes from their pimp now i know a lot about that line of work this woman i was talking to just being with you she knows nothing about it she comes out of a catholic religious background and she thinks she's going to be batman she thinks she's going to swing in on a rope there's going to be a good guy and a bad guy and like she's going to punch out the bad guy and rescue the the good guy and you know because i've done research on this and i talk to people connected to this this industry at different stages you know i say to her have you considered the possibility that when you punch out the pimp the prostitute screams at you weeps runs over and hugs and takes care of the pimp like have you considered the possibility that the pimp has been her boyfriend since high school and that's her best friend if you consider the possibility that this is a woman who like hates her parents and who quite consciously and intentionally ran away with her boyfriend or that's that's the man she shares an apartment with that's the man her life revolves around right that's the man she runs to for comfort and support when she's weeping or screaming and you've just punched him out because you think you're a batman and he's the joker or something right like what makes you assume that this prostitute wants to escape what makes you think she wants to help your offering the compassion you're offering right again sir southeast asia we're talking about here thailand laos cambodia there are a lot of these women who will say to you straight to your face their parents were rice farmers their grandparents were rice farmers they don't want to go back to the farm there these women would say to you in their first month working as a prostitute they earn more money than their father made as a year made more money than father made in their in a year as a rice farmer they don't want to go back to that they don't want your help they didn't ask you to come here and screw up their whole their whole business their whole situation and they may have a plan they may have money stacked up to retire or very commonly to open a shop or something they want to open a restaurant or something want to open a hotel once they've stacked up enough paper they may have their whole life together and you think you're rescuing them and then here's the other thing if they were trying to escape right if they did want the particular help you're trying to offer if they didn't want someone to punch out their they're pimp and off the way out right what what would they have already done before you for you the supposed hero got on the scene right most people you offer advice to even the best advice that don't want that advice right most people you want pardon me most people you want to help most people you're trying to help they don't want the help and because we're raised with television with comic books with these notions of heroism notions of what helping means and so on most of us don't want to stop and reflect on on what the help is we're offering of what value that will be to other people i'm going to talk about how i uh with my years of accumulated foolishness and wisdom actually try to help people who are going through some kind of tragedy going through some kind of heartbreak in their lives and i'm starting by saying i completely believe that i am helping i completely believe this is the advice people need to hear but it's not what they want to hear and it's not what they expect here most people in our culture and our generation our time will respond to you saying that you feel bad by saying oh you need to feel good it's like this is this goes back centuries like you're crying at a funeral oh get drunk drink alcohol this whole culture of getting drunk it feels oh you feel bad about yourself drink alcohol to feel good and it's the same [ __ ] it's the same kind of self-medication strategy with taking prescription drugs like antidepressants ssris prozac you know what i mean like oh oh your problem is you feel bad so we're not going to talk about solving the problem we're not going to talk about how to change your life or whatever we're not we're not going to talk about this person's death we're just going to talk about how you can you can feel good where what you're problematizing is the feeling and the solution sadly is some kind of distraction right like alcohol at best is a distraction it's not going to bring your dead husband back to life you know i mean it's not going to actually solve the problem it's not even going to help you think about or reflect on or getting some detachment on or an analytical perspective on on the problem that's what most people are used to that's what most people are expecting and that's not my approach at all you know what i say to people who are going through some kind of tragedy or some kind of heartbreak is you need to have something more meaningful in your life you need to have something so much more meaningful that it eclipses this heartbreak it eclipses the stretch it's so much greater in scale and intensity right in the same way that the sun is greater than the moon okay all right i've got that the wrong way right i guess it depends which which type of eclipse we're talking about here [Laughter] mixed metaphor you have to have something so much more meaningful in your life that this tragedy you're struggling with it seems like a it seems like a foot it seems seems very trivial indeed and you know sometimes i talk to people this works with young people works with old people also let's just say they're going through a divorce let's just say you know a man finds out that his wife has been cheating on him and now they're gonna have divorce so he's at that moment he's really heartbroken and so on you know but could be anything it could be a professional disappointment it could be you're enrolled in university program and you find out that's going to be impossible for you to proceed with all your career plans everything you assumed based on that university program it's not going to work out um whether that's your own fault or it's no fault of your own you know you have that kind of crushing disappointment you know someone in that position they've probably already told their parents they may have already told their best friend or something before they told you they've told number people probably every single one of those people said oh you poor dear you feel sad you should feel happy like oh you should drink alcohol or you should go to disneyland or you should get a massage like you should you should do something to feel happy you should do something to feel good about yourself and that's not what i'm saying to these people at all right i'm saying you should take on work and responsibilities so meaningful right of such intensity of such scale of such importance that it makes this tragedy of life seem like no big deal then i'm often saying to them again whether they're young or old try to imagine yourself just five years from now so if you're 25 think about when you're 30 years old and looking back on this what are you gonna think what are you gonna feel you know like yeah your girlfriend cheated on you you know you're going to be a guy in your 30s yeah you once had a girlfriend that cheated on you so what you know it's it's going to be like a funny story to tell it's going to be something you look back on and probably laugh about just five years from now not even 10 years like right now you're so close to this this seems like an overwhelming tragedy it seems something you can't handle right but just five years from when you look back on it how are you going to calibrate this right so again it's an overused simile in english like think about what we mean when we say to somebody see it try to see it in perspective when you see something in perspective you distinguish between something that's large some that's actually enormous in scale as opposed to something that's just close up to you right when you don't have any perspective you can't tell the difference between something that's huge and something you just happen to be too close to like a tree is up close to your face but if it were further away on the horizon you judge its size differently given your sense of perspective i'm going can give you a real quick plausible example and again nobody wants to hear this like i completely accept like i i think my advice is good i think it's sound i think it's helping people but i also totally understand in our culture in our time this is not what anyone wants to hear so let's say i've got this friend and he's completely heartbroken uh he's going through some kind of personal tragedy this kind and i say look you know i have a research project i can bring you in on we're going to do a survey of the literature on cancer research we're going to go through thousands of articles on you know the cure for cancer so to speak and what we're going to do is we're going to write an article about what hasn't been researched yet the areas of research that have been neglected the gaps in the research is already going on and we're going to go through and compile every single paper that said we don't know this here's something we don't know there's something we don't understand further research is needed and then we're going to investigate and see if that further research was ever done and if it wasn't done our essay our survey our analysis that's gonna highlight that now i'm giving you so much detail of this because it would be it would be a bit too vague i just said oh yeah yeah let's find the cure for cancer well what does that really mean okay i'm not talking about something so intangible and far off and distant and removed by decades or centuries let's find the cure for this is a research project and we're going to wrap it up in less than a year and then we're going to publish it it's going to be really meaningful and we're going to go out and promote it and say hey guys we did this analysis of what is the research that isn't being done what are the gaps in the current research effort you know why what needs to happen next for cancer research and you can be a part of that project i want you to be a part of something i want you to take on responsibility for something right so enormous so meaningful so rewarding and something you're engaged with so intensely that now this tragedy in your life you know whatever it is you see it in a different perspective and i think a great deal of the brittleness of middle-aged people in our society and our culture is that they still live like teenagers where they have nothing meaningful in their lives and they never have had anything meaningful life not even like they were committed to slang in the past and now they've lost it they never developed those muscles in the first place and you know look i'm talking about middle-aged people you you probably have known some teenagers like this whether it's your cousin or you know somebody you're your little sister somebody you related to like you've probably known a teenager who's so upset and so furious because she had a crush on a guy and she went on two dates with him and then he said on twitter or he said on instagram that she's she's just a dumb [ __ ] anyway and he doesn't ever want to talk to her again it's something some real teenagers about this and she is bereaved and she is weeping and she's not going to school anymore she misses a week of class and like she's like in because like for a lot of teenagers this these kinds of things i mean middle-aged person the kind of shrug they have whatever kind of attached attitude if if you haven't really been around teenagers you may have forgotten you know just how deeply these things cut them and it's easy to say oh like think about the the kind of coping strategy agriculture oh uh it's because of hormones it's because they're immature like you know we have all these ways to to deflect it right well you know like again something you can say to this teenager is how do you think you're going to look back on this five years from now but they can't imagine that yet when you're 30 you know what it's like the difference between something at 25 and 30 and now you can think about it between 30 and 35 what kind of detached perspective you have people like if you're talking to someone who's 15 they only know the difference between 10 and 15. but you you can try to talk think about the things that really upset you when you were 10 years old and how you look back on them now you can try to talk them through that try to get them to think that way but that's that's probably not going to work and the reality is they have never had something in their life like finding the cure for cancer something they're really committed to that's really rewarding that puts these other things in perspective right because it's not nothing it's not trivial you're not upset for no reason and you're not going to solve the problem by doing something to make yourself feel good you knock and i think some parents would i think i've known parents who sit down and drink whiskey with their kid oh come on let's let's have a drink let's feel better about it drink whiskey let's watch a movie together or let's go skiing or something do something they consider fun distress let's do something it'll take your mind off it think about that it'll it'll take your mind off it right and this is like the diametric opposite of the advice and people was like no no you don't need to take your mind off it you don't need to feel good you don't need to counteract feeling sad by feeling happy you need to pour your energy into something that's really challenging really meaningful and really rewarding and and this is the insulting part that's why people don't want to hear this on some level anyone who hears this advice will know that if they had something this meaningful in their life they never would have been so upset about this tragedy in the first place right and guys so like melissa was with me when my father died okay i'm just i'm just being real i don't think i cried once i don't think i was upset once i remember my when my grandmother died too right like you think you're the only person whose father died like you think this is new like you know there are two types of people in the world there are people who live long enough to see their father die and there are people who die tragically young and then their father has to bury them these are the two [ __ ] options which do you prefer like we all know sooner or later our father's going to die we all know we're going to go through right like what do you want me you want to act like this is some kind of tragedy i can't handle and look guys i do i do criticize myself on this the problem with my strategy is that when you have something in your life that's so meaningful like you're researching the cure for cancer right then when you're separated from that then you really cry then you really have an experience of you know profound sorrow because that was what you're putting all of your uh all of your time and talent and energy into right uh and you know that that example alone may stand but i mean you guys know just to give an example i uh i committed to learning the cree language it's a first nations language an american indian language whatever you know obviously i can give a whole bunch of examples here but i have this whole plan for what i'm doing with the next 10 years of my life and i care so much about the politics and i care so much about helping these people because no offense in canadian politics it's really a kind of altruistic humanitarian thing to do um it is it's a big it is self-sacrificing to go into korean ojibwe rather than greek or latin or any other language that's going to be more rewarded in in every other way but it's like well this is my country and this is my country's history of genocide and this is the political policy crisis we're facing now and these people need the help and who's going to do it so you have a sense of mission and purpose it's meaningful it's rewarding and right and then it's taken away from you okay so that's that's then tremendous sorrow and how are you going to cope with it you know and i'm just being real with you this is part of my tradition i cope the same way i pour myself into something else that's meaningful and rewarding and enormous and intense so i'm going to read you this um and what's your way guys it's not perfect it's not okay it's horrible it's terrible and you know i've done my share of weeping right but the tragedies in my life right like i i calibrate them in this sense you know whatever you have a you have a crush on someone and they don't have a crush on you back like that's i know i get it that's devastating i remember i got a detailed account from this guy his sister his younger sister was going to go on a date and she had one zit she got acne right there on her she got one zit and she was weeping and screaming and she refused to look in the mirror without putting a band-aid a full set over her chin right and i think she was 16 you know from from memory and he and his mom like they spent like hours like trying to console her and talk like look it's one zit you know they said whatever they they said to her right but that's you know whatever she was a vain pretty teenage girl and she has never thought in this long term when she doesn't have anything else in her life and it's just devastating for her to look in the mirror and think she's ugly i think there's a there's a problem with her face she's totally you know torn up about it um and you know i'm sorry but most of the tragedies you experience in your life just five years later they're going to seem that ridiculous to you like what so sorry when she goes from 16 to 21 that's probably become a funny story she tells to a friend now like oh yeah i remember the first time i had a zit before going on a date with this guy you know probably she and her mom will look back and joke about it five years later remember that time you were screaming and weeping and you refused to go outside the house if you didn't have a band-aid over your chin and no now think about the things you you've been through in life right um but look you know what i'm suggesting here it's not perfect all right um i do have to deal with my own heartbreak with my own tragedy in life and um you know you can't compare it to perfection you have to compare it to the coping strategies that are actually dominant in our culture and society right now which is people drinking whiskey all right so i'm going to read this this email it's the reason for the title of the description this video um you know i got this detailed account from a police officer just over the radio here did this radio show and they interviewed a series of police officers i think they were all diagnosed with something like ptsd they were police officers who'd gone for psychiatric help after after cracking up and it was a female police officer and she had a case that involved this is a long story short obviously she saw a dead baby all right this is a there was a dead infant and the same night it happened she went home to her apartment with her husband and she was weeping and and shaken up and her husband responded this i guess he's a loving husband he canceled everything he was doing he got out a bottle of whiskey sat down with her at the table face to face and they drank the whole bottle of whiskey together as she was weeping and shaking and blubbering about how disturbed she was to see this baby i don't think that's the last bottle of whiskey right and surprise didn't solve the problem she ends up in a psych ward she ends up not being able to do her job she ends up not coping or not recovering at all like dude i get it sorry this this issue specifically like the link between death and alcohol i was thinking about this the other day for very very different reasons i'm studying lotion again now i'm studying the lotion language and i remember a guy he was genuinely a tough guy and he'd been in a he'd been in and out of prison in the united states he'd done a prison set in the united states so he dealt with all kinds of tough situations in his life um he was very proud to say that he had never been a gang member he had from my perspective he'd been a career criminal but he worked alone and he was proud of that he had relatives who were members of gangs he was like no no he never sent him again he worked as an independent gangster a freelance a criminal you know but he'd really been a tough guy so this is an american he goes to cambodia he watches this woman die and again for americans this is very disturbing in different ways in a country like cambodia somebody dies nobody calls the ambulance nobody like there's there's no government they just start preparing the body for a funeral you know and a lot of these family buddhist families you take the body you roll it up and for a lot of americans it's very disturbing it looks like a barbecue it's i'm vegan but it doesn't look that different from taking a cow or a pig and putting it on a barbecue you take a human body and you put it on a pile of wooden sticks that you light on fire defense there's more than one way to have a buddhist funeral but like third world conditions in the buddhist country cambodia they don't they don't there's no paperwork to fill up for the government like oh you know they're dead roll them up and put them on a put them on my funeral boat anyway so this is an american guy and he was a tough guy but he was so shaken up by watching this woman die and everyone else all the cambodians around there were completely cool with it they all had detached buddhist attitudes they're all people who grew up with this doctrine all is impermanent life is suffering that's good they're expecting death to come for them and so on they've probably done it before they've probably dealt with relatives dying in this way and um it's very taboo in that culture to drink alcohol in that context different cultures are different that way like when you can encountering alcohol you're not supposed to drink alcohol in cambodia when death and funerals and things are involved you know and uh this american guy he slinks away and he gets himself a bottle of whiskey and he's trying to without offending anyone get drunk because nobody else is is drinking you know this is cambodian culture i don't know any other culture in the world where people would do this to you a cambodian guy who speaks some english walks up to him and says in broken english you drink you drink alcohol you coward you afraid afraid to die afraid of death that's why you drink alcohol i got this story from the american guy he said this cambodian guy just stood there and denounced him it wasn't for a short time they weren't busy [Laughter] and you know and like obviously at first other people weren't paying attention but then the other people come over and they're like yeah yeah that's true he's a coward he's getting drunk he's afraid of death other people like yeah good point you know like yeah that's true so he feels even more [ __ ] humiliated uh i'm not gonna digress into that but like if you're used to japanese culture before you go to cambodia it's shocking how blunt the cambodians are with you if you're used to thai culture of use to ocean culture cambodia it's a real contrast just the adjacent or surrounding cultures in asia i don't think anyone in china would say that to you you know even though china also many many millions of people china are buddhist i don't think anyone in china would really insult you that way i didn't put on a cambodian accent for that for that story um we have some questions coming into the audience i will i will get your questions in a second if anyone has something intelligent to say you can type it now if anyone wants to hit the thumbs up button you can there are 41 people listening to this and you're afraid to hit the thumbs up you are not hitting the thumbs up button because you're a coward you're not hitting the thumbs up button because you're afraid of death okay you're afraid of your name associated with the horrifying advice in this video so um there's a link in the description i left this advice on another youtube channel a guy called the retro bro and his youtube channel it's been 98 about video games right i would guess he's the same age i am approximately you know he's grown man and it's it's a retro video gaming channel and he made a video where he was really down bad about the way in which the tommy talarico and television controversy had ruined his channel and to some extent ruin his life okay now you could already repeat what i've said in the first half of this video and apply to the situation how is that going to seem just five years from now when he looks back on you you can talk some of those things through you know but here is what i said to him and again it's not nothing he's not upset for no reason he's not broken down or upset for no he's not one you can change your youtube channel at any time you can delete every single video prior to this one if you want to two you can change your life at any time you can change who you are and then your youtube channel can reflect that i'm studying lotion right now a language that not many people study i can live stream that i can start making friends on that basis you can too you can study languages study history study politics you can start doing something more meaningful than video games both on and off youtube and then the intellivision debacle will seem like a minor footnote in your life now again i don't think i need to describe here what the intellivision tobacco is it is upsetting he was personal friends with this guy tommy talarico tom tellery goes project that this guy got involved with and roped into and was promoting he did a podcast for it he made all these videos where he was it became a big thing in his life certainly his youtube life and so on and you know now everyone on the internet is is denouncing it as a scam i totally totally understand the sense in which he's crestfallen and disillusioned and depressed and upset by that right um [Music] five years from now and i can i can combine these two pieces of advice at fault how pathetic and meaningless would your life be if five years from now you look back and this is still a big deal you know and like again sorry if it's your love life and a lot of you are i've got a friend right now she went through divorce like five minutes ago of course it's subsidy of course it's horrified i've got i've got male friends who are really upset and disappointed by the experiences of women i got female friends who are really disappointed and upset with experience in men but like if you're talking to a 25 year old and they're heartbroken about this love affair like well what what would you have done with your life between 25 and 30 if this is still such a big deal to you when you're 30. like if in those five years you're leading a really meaningful really rewarding highly motivated life you're finding the cure for cancer you're learning lotion you're studying the politics of the cree in the ojibwe whatever it is you're doing you're pouring your energy meaningful right it's it's not possible to think of that person living that life for those five years whatever it is we want that meaningful life who's still going to feel overwhelmed still going to feel the emotional he's going to feel emotionally devastated by this looking back in five years now and now hypothetically let's talk about the opposite let's talk about someone for the next five years live such a pathetic life like there's no new love that comes into it there's no new experience there are no no ambitions no initiative no attempt to make the world a better place no attempt to make yourself a better person no attempt to learn yourself right that person after five years maybe they're still overwhelmed and devastated by this thing and guys again i'm sorry but i've even if your father died everybody's father dies the only way you can not experience your father dying is if you die before your father and then he's got to bury you instead right like that may seem like the most overwhelming terrible thing in your life when you're up close to it but it's not um and and yeah like again i'm not trying to misrepresent this or oversell it that commitment to leading a meaningful life it entails its own sorrows it entails its own tragedies my commitment to studying korean ojibwe my commitment to studying pali ancient buddhist philosophy before that my commitment to doing humanitarian work in cambodia and laos right like things i've tried to do positively they entail their own sorrows their own tragedies don't disappoint even so melissa's here melissa and i having this plan to open a bakery all right may sound like a small thing some of you right but actually if you go to cambodia and do humanitarian work that can be short term you you do it for two years two years five you know this was a plan this for the rest of our lives we're gonna go into baking right that's it's really a big deal we're going to open a vegan bakery and a friend of mine just called me a couple days ago uh asking me to go into business then because he remembers he was like hey look would you be going to own and manage your bakery uh in this part of this larger complex he's gonna he's gonna want to operate um okay well that that's actually something that's gonna change your life for the rest of your life and you're gonna be waking up at five o'clock in the morning every day to roll dough to make the bread you know what i mean if this is going to change every day your life it's a big deal like even if you think it's shallow compared to finding the cure for cancer it's a big deal for me in my life to commit to becoming a baker and then you have the agony and the sorrow of that the heartbreak of the disappointment of that not working out of that proven to be impossible in my case impossible just because the quality of the college uh the college system uh here in canada was so bad was so terrible so that's that's why we quit it's you know totally unexpected tragic thing so yeah leading a meaningful life does entail sorrow it doesn't tell suffering right but it's meaningful suffering you're miserable you're heartbroken about something that's really worthwhile that's really meaningful to be heartbroken about you know it's not a trivial difference as opposed to you know weeping over things that are that are really meaningless and yeah the you know so i've given this somewhat convoluted uh example or allegory of talking about perspective what's really big as opposed to what's close to you like what's big but it's far away on the horizon and what's small but it's so close to you you don't have the detachment you don't have the distance to see how big it truly is to see how small it really is right that issue but the other thing that changes in scale is you you become a bigger person you become a more substantive person you become intellectually ethically and emotionally more massive to this point where finding out your father died it's really not that big to deal to you the point where finding out your girlfriend cheated on you is really not that big a deal to you where not just having acne on your face is not that big deal to you but like you have a car accident that really changes your face and it's not that big a deal to you right and for someone else it's it's totally devastating because they they themselves haven't increased in size relative to these tragedies both of these disappointments so we got some donations i normally turn to melissa and say melissa gets the first the first crack and ask the question but i'm going to answer the questions from charlie first uh he's donated some money to support the channel which i want to say donated some money to support me frankly um charlie says quote what is something you consider meaningful to dedicate your life to gal read the rest question one sec but already there i want to answer that okay so look guys there's what's meaningful to me so it's meaningful to you and then there's a separate challenge of can you explain to your own mother that it's meaningful can you explain to your own grandmother that's me i'll just brief digression into this at one point i was totally passionate about studying this set of languages language history culture politics all comes together but the language is a lot of the work right in southeast asia so this involves cambodian lotion sinhalese burmese right pali right and i go to see my grandmother this is face to face in my grandmother's apartment this wasn't via skype or something right go to see my grandmother and i show her my handwriting like i opened up say look this is what i'm studying and you know to show her that because you know i'm not going to show her the textbook i'm sure the work i'm doing you know so she gets a sense also just how many hours it is i'm filling up pages with all this work and research and she doesn't get it at all she doesn't get it at all you know it's completely incomprehensible to her what is meaningful or rewarding about this but like her reaction to this is like why would you want to study laos or cambodia or sri lanka or myanmar and i'll always remember this i'm sorry just very memorable me take take take it to my grandmother i'll take this with me to the grave you know she responds to this by kind of starting saying well why would you learn that instead of say french you know like as if it would be more rewarding for me to study french there's your friends now you know okay i'm not saying this to keep scoring on my grandmother right but like this is meaningful to me um and i've had this experience the librarian when i go to the library to get these books may scoff at me may insult me i've had that you have librarians who are people with no level of intellectual sophistication they think you're a loser like really it's ridiculous but it's true like your own mother your own grandmother right okay but this is the thing in that case there's something tangible i can show my grandmother i'm doing i can also like show her i remember on a separate visit i remember showing my grandmother i brought her a series of um like coffee table books illustrated photograph film books that showed her laos in cambodia like look this is the stuff i'm doing these are the places i'm going like i could show her what this was what was meaningful about it like in some sense i can't really show you what's meaningful about it but i can i can get your imagination wrong i remember it was also a bizarre comment from her because some of the photographs were showing they showed like starvation and poverty like they showed the social problems i was there to research and deal with and she said oh well this was her wording i can remember the exact wording well i think it's good that you chose to work with a handsome people like obviously it's possible to show photographs that are of like sexy uh singers or actors or something but like i'm like these are pictures of people like in refugee camps and whatever poverty conditions so you know and also i think i had some i might have had some photographs of buddhist temples or something i was like and you know i think she was she was basically saying that they were they were better looking than africans i think it was like well you know compared to going to ethiopia and helping some attitudes are best left behind in the 1930s people anyway ladies and gentlemen my grandmother you know okay but there's something i can show her i can say so using charlie's wording this is something meaningful i'm dedicating my life to right now again you can imagine if it were math if it were chemistry if it were physics like hey you're doing rocket science and you show your grandmother look this is the type of work i do with rockets maybe you can't visually right your mother your grandmother the hardest thing of all is when all you've got to show was a blank piece of paper all right i had a night recently so i've i've gotten my caffeine tolerance down to zero i've quit caffeine many many times but i had gotten my caffeine tolerance down to zero i'd quit for enough days that my my caffeine was zero and then there was one day where i went with melissa i had about two ounces of coffee this is less than a third of a full-size cup of coffee and then i had a whole cup of decaf i think was the decaf that killed me because you know decaf is never really decaf decaf always has some caffeine and i was awake till 6 a.m i did that first thing in the morning right 9 a.m 10 all right i had this coffee a whole decaf and this much calf i wrote the first chapter of a new book that's a book none of you guys know about it's not the books you know started working on it started working it was well i'm awake anyway okay do first chatter start a new book okay how do you go to your grandmother and say yeah here's a stack of blank paper and i'm going to write a novel i'm going to write a comedy that's going to change the world that's what voltaire did right and like look i'm not i'm not a fan of voltaire i'm not a fan of walt disney either right but like you can really say people like voltaire and people like walt disney they have james you know whether you're talking about fiction or non-fiction to say to your mother to say to your grandmother and obviously good luck your work colleagues or if you sleep around you might have three or four girlfriends but none of them love you that much and i don't respect you that much it's not how i live my life but you could be sleeping with people who don't really love and respect you and you say to them yeah yeah i think i've got what it takes to take this blank piece of paper and really turn it into something whether that's fiction or non-fiction whether that's based on research or humor or what have you right so my point is in this sense we're dealing with an easy example when you talk about dedicating yourself to something meaningful in life that already exists whether that's cambodia egypt laos physics any of these things that are tangible and visible and the hardest thing of all is where you're dedicating yourself to something meaningful that doesn't exist yet it's still a blank sheet of paper it's still a blank canvas it's still a blank chalkboard okay so his next question is question is for example what advice would you have for your daughter growing up this whole youtube channel is my advice to my daughter growing up every single video including this one is my advice there's no plot twist there what do you think you think you think i give my advice diff but do you think i'd give my daughter advice different from what i'm giving you charlie come on um oh god so look uh for me this is an easy question answer charlie asks what is the biggest tragedy that you've experienced in life how did you cope with it do you consider death a tragedy so i think it's already clear i don't think death is a tragedy but you know um something i say my friends you know melissa's heard this but friends who've known me facebook all the time is you know you might assume that like my divorce from my first wife is my big strategy might assume that my separation from my daughter is the biggest strategy of my life but no the biggest tragedy in my life is the canadian education system and that's because it's a tragedy i've never been able to disentangle myself from the reality of university education in canada college education in canada you've already heard a bit about that in this video the way in that which that has ruined my life again and again and again um you know like uh i mean i think you can tell i'm not upset about it like not in this moment but that's something i could never get away from and i could never get over and you know sorry if you guys don't know i looked at all the alternatives i looked at going to university in germany and taiwan and japan and basically everywhere on the planet and there was no way for me to move forward with formal education so that is in brief uh the biggest strategy of my life and it's not it's not a disappointment attraction that happened just one time again and again again over so many years with so many university programs yeah so um okay shout out to gen x gamer you're gonna have to start the beginning of this video unfortunately there's no way you can understand what we're talking about by joining in the middle so charlie also asks quote some vegans claim the planet would benefit with humans not being here less pollution etcetera do you agree so i think i have made videos discussing this before in my critique of anti-natalism so i have a playlist of videos called anti-anti-natalism so you can you can talk about that um be very suspicious of solutions to problems that rely on subtraction rather than addition um i have known many people who said that the way to improve africa was to depopulate it and it's it's always africa it seems you know there's a lot of latent and implicit racism and you know back in the 1990s there was the boom of hiv aids in africa you hear all the time you're all the time white people middle class or wealthy white people saying how happy they were that supposedly the population would decrease in africa and all that those people knew about africa was what they saw on the tv news they saw fundraisers for starvation in ethiopia and so on and by the way ethiopia is a wonderful country it really is it's the most misrepresented country on earth you could have a great life in ethiopia you'd have a great vacation there i um ethiopia has a lot going for it as an ancient continuous culture going back thousands of years that isn't built on genocide and so on they really have a lot of advantages as a country and by the way ancient language and very interesting language so on and so forth and literature and music and everything else um anyway ethiopia actually has a lot a lot of advantages starting you can read about it in herodotus read about a great place you know but you know whatever you think the problem with africa is and africa has problems why do you think the solution why do you presume would be subtraction because obvious in a very shallow and insincere level you can argue that any problem would be solved if human beings didn't exist to endure it to perceive it to to experience it and i think many people are too stupid to to really recognize how fundamentally wrong their their reasoning is now i'll give you another example that touches me directly that i deal with still deal with all the times i'm saying when you talk to people about first nations languages first nations genocide the disappearance of korea ojibwe inuit inducted right many people will say to you white white people middle class people but frankly black people too uh you know black americans black canadians they will they will say it would be better if that just didn't exist if those people didn't exist you know and you know they don't realize how close to adolf hitler they are really coming in there in their in their views so you know um how do we live with problems how do we solve or overcome problems when it is in this sense subtraction that people are talking about you know hey guys do you want a cure for tooth decay we could pull out everybody's teeth we could have a country where everyone is wearing dentures where there are no teeth in the whole country where at birth you eliminate people's teeth so the teeth never even grow in in the first place think about the savings no more wisdom teeth removal no more dentists everyone in the country is literally toothless just pull out all the teeth coast to coast for millions of people people and everyone can just wear dentures their whole lives you know um tooth decay is a problem dentist the cost of dentistry is a problem right um the cost of taking care of elderly people in hospitals is a problem do you want to eliminate all the elderly people um to me it's obviously outrageously stupid but what it is that's so stupid about it is not obvious no melissa do you want to exercise your privilege as our our prime audience member do you want to offer a question right right so the one the one top well you if you want to you can reply to some of these questions i got from that but the topic here is dealing with tragedy and dealing with heart rate from a nihilistic perspective and i'd say i haven't even gone into that yet but obviously i could now add on a whole extra hour-long monologue about the fact that the way most people in christian culture in jewish culture and muslim which the way most people respond to tragedy is to say believe believe believe right and also another really sick and twisted thing in religions that's broader than the judeo-christian in christianity but also in hinduism and buddhism right believe believe believe sacrifice sacrifice sacrifice the way to deal with sorrow is to be self-sacrificing right to be repentant some of these things you want god i wasn't even i wasn't intending to be on camera so i'm sorry if i look a mess um so i can relate to what you're saying about the biggest tragedy in your life being the education system in multiple ways um but in one really uh close in one way this that was really close to me and took me a long time to fully understand the implications of it in my life and why i responded the way i did when i was 19 and 20 when it was when i was going through it um so i had always thought of myself as like a perfect student you know like i had a 4.0 in high school and i got into the school that i wanted to go to the top school in my state just for me that was that was part of just who i was i was like i'm i'm somebody who does all of her class work all of her homework right and and succeeds in in school you know if if nothing else like i'm going to be a good student right um why am i i feel like i'm out of breath um but yeah um and it was just a complete shock to me when i failed one of my classes in university i failed organic chemistry and that same semester i was taking a physics course and a neurobiology course so these were difficult science classes for anybody to take but it just i didn't anticipate that i could actually fail a class and it was like the this it's it's partly because of the grading system of that class it was just terrible at my university the only grades were like three exams so i did okay on the first exam but then i didn't do well on the second i didn't do all the third and then i failed you know i filled the whole class and um i got put on academic probation because i did poorly in the other classes too and it just like totally shifted what my identity was because you know at that time i was like i'm a good student this is proving that i'm not a good student or there's something um i i've failed you know and i just couldn't i couldn't handle it um and only like years later have i like uh understood the impact of that in my life and and how that impacted what what i chose to do this would this would be 18 or 19 or something yeah yeah yeah i was um 18 and 19 at that time so yeah i was just like you know at that time i was planning to um uh i was hoping to go to medical school like i was i was planning to be um a professional in in some sense in the medical field and then you know i also major in violence but this is about the coping i'm sorry but i don't want to go to the career side but what yeah i failed i just i just couldn't cope with it i didn't scroll like i said i something that i knew i could do i knew i could get a degree in english like i i knew for me that would be it so i like chose the easy route and like if i ever felt bad about it like the person that i was involved with at the time would would say like you know you're stressed out you should smoke weed you know you're stressed out you should get drunk with me you know and that's why i thought this might be going yeah there was marijuana alcohol yeah absolutely watching tv shows on dvd yeah i said i don't know exactly this kind of distraction and self-esteem trying to feel good yeah feel irrelevant exactly what i was saying earlier in this live stream what what generally in our culture what is used as a coping strategy is what i did it obviously didn't work for me and i yeah yeah of course not because it's not going to solve problems no it didn't solve the problem so yeah i i just personally um i really do appreciate what you've you know the uh basically your strategy here is to have something so meaningful in your life that you know whatever it is that's that's upsetting you whatever tragedy that you're going through the time it seems small in comparison to the bigger things and if you don't have something that meaningful you got to go and get it um i would just say you know this kind of thing sorry i'm not trivializing uh what melissa went through it's just that i don't want to get to the details of uh an education in organic chemistry because some of this is but you know um you know my father wanted to be a baseball player you know there are all these myths built up about who my father was and i really pisses me off that that tells you a lot about who he was you want to be an athlete now one of the reasons i think he liked baseball was that he didn't really have to exercise he was not athletic you know it's one of the always be kind of stand there you know you can look like babe ruth and be a baseball player you couldn't you could in those days and my father barry he always said he would have been happy in life he would have never gone to university he would have never had any other problems if he could have just played the lowest level of local baseball so not national not talking about being a star on a huge scale but he said if you could have played sandlot baseball if you could have played triple a baseball if you could play low level crappy baseball he would have devoted his life to that never looked back he wanted to be a baseball player now what percentage of teenagers who have that dream are disappointed 95 99 like you know it ended in failure and not most things in life are not like that like sir we just had someone saying they're going to learn russian in the next two years what percentage of people who try to learn russian in two years are disappointed you know like some but it's not a 99 failure rate right you know you you can do it you know um you want to be a pro baseball player you know but in what did my father do right he threw himself into acting what percentage of actors failed right that inevitably led to disappointment also for him okay if not inevitably you know and um it was on my mind before making this video i know a middle-aged woman who wanted to be an actress and it shaped her whole life like you know from i assume from childhood but at least from her teenage years what she did in college and what she did there after and so on right she was trying to be an actress okay what percentage of aspiring actors fail you know i'm just being with you my father was not a tremendously handsome man i would describe him as plain in his youth you know not ugly but certainly plain when he walked into the room no one gasped and said who is that no one said that's a guy with movie star quality i've met i've met quite a few movie stars it's not that meaningful to me but i will always remember sigourney weaver she wasn't presented as beautiful in her films she wasn't made into that let me tell you if you met sigourney weaver back in the day if you met her facebook she was a really beautiful woman she was a very striking one very commanding presence and if you didn't know who she was when sigourney weaver walked into the room who was that you know wow and she was she wasn't even considered a beautiful actress like compared to the women who were really on the cover of vogue magazine or whatever she wasn't presented as a beauty icon for her generation you know she wasn't a sex symbol as we as we say you know so you know my father was plain you know this this young woman i'm thinking of she is also plain not ugly but she's not beautiful she's not gonna stand up she's not gonna have that that going for her and you know this is the problem okay even if you say you're prepared for that failure like even you say okay you're going to go into little league baseball you're going to go to the baseball you're going to start getting into the tryouts and then what have you you know um and you say you know 99 of people fail right do you have something more meaningful in your life right now when the failure comes like do you already have it you know are we going to do what melissa described are you going to start smoking marijuana drinking alcohol and watching the family guy yeah playing video games watching the family guy on dvd or something you know watching some comedy like what okay you can say that you're prepared for failure right but i'm suggesting you the only way to prepare for failure is actually to have something so meaningful in your life something so enormous that this disappointment seems small by comparison and you know again i'm not saying this to to denigrate either person i think my father never got over it you know and i think this middle aged woman i'm thinking of i think she never got over she never will get over it and like she doesn't know any other way to be happy you know she doesn't have some other source of of meaning in her life so when that one fails and again it's kind of like what i said about the failure of university education it doesn't just fail once it fails again and again and again you go to another audition you go to another you know right um yeah you know that's the kind of tragedy you to live with so yeah you know um so a lot of intelligent sympathetic comments here generation x gamer says quote a goal-driven life is always more productive and fulfilling uh there will be mountains of problems in research uh field trips yeah um you know it's a little bit like youtube though right i think that most people have a lot of difficulty being honest with themselves about what their hopes are what their desires are what their expectations are and then they have difficulty dealing with the disappointment dealing with you know if that doesn't happen because like sorry you just said it's great you've just said having a goal-filled life is is fulfilling and and your example is research i've known so many people who have phds and a career in research and they're they're suicidal they're totally miserable totally hopeless and you know um i know why i'll just be able to i know why they don't know why i think those are people who really were not honest with themselves but what they wanted what they were enrolling in that phd program for in the first place someone says they were fascinated with ethiopia as a child and ask if i've never been if i've ever been to ethiopia no i've i've never been to ethiopia wasn't my was in my field was my area of research but yeah ethiopia is fascinating um so totally fine question someone asked did you ever try to get back into learning cree again and again sure even during the time i've been with melissa she's seen me emailing and phoning up universities that had programs for first nations languages or something like that she's seen me looking at the program so for many years again again i tried uh to get back in degree and um both in canada and in the united states there's one program that exists on paper in france but i don't think it exists in the real world but yeah i really made a survey of voice to get back in that field for many years we got a question asking melissa what is your biggest strategy in life how did you cope with it but i think you've yeah you've coincidentally you've already answered the question i don't know if you see that in before or after yeah okay so coming back to the comment that started this all you know i i made this comment with completely good intentions or what i'm saying is you know you can study languages you can study history you can start study politics you can start doing something more meaningful than playing video games both on and off youtube and then what you're doing on youtube is going to reflect what you're doing off youtube and these tragedies your sense of disappointment with your career as a video game youtuber it's going to seem like a minor footnote now i'll just say two more things about this one this guy the retro bro he put a lot of work into his youtube channel to my knowledge he completely renovated this basement into a studio he had a level of commitment and work ethic for this i've never known a single vegan who had that level of commitment work ethic not even the guys who were making millions of dollars out of it you know um it is remarkable how much he was committed to the dream and i don't know if he'd be honest with himself about the dream it's very easy for youtubers to say they don't care about the size of their audience they don't care about views they don't care about the money etc but you know probably he was hoping he would be the next pewdiepie that he would be a big success that this very considerable effort he put into building up the studio and probably building up his own collection of video games and effort going into that probably he was hoping it would be rewarded with at least having a considerable audience if not a certain level of fame a certain level of affluence income money that that comes uh from that success and again part of coping with tragedy is being honest with yourself with what it is you want it what it is you can't have now that you wanted before um so on and so forth now you know you get to choose what you want and you get to choose what it is you're willing to do to get it and you may not realize that in making those choices you are deciding who you are going to be five years from now so early in this response i said look you can change your life at any time you can change who you are and then your youtube channel will reflect that your your life won't change in one week who you are it might not even change in one month or one year right if i learn spanish and i move to los angeles and i'm speaking spanish every day i maybe i'm making youtube videos in spanish or talking about learning spanish i'm starting to think about politics and talk to people politics in spanish and from a latino perspective or from a you know my life will change who i am will change with something as simple as that i'm using that example because it's obvious it's going to change me not today not tomorrow but soon you know and you know i get it most people are making these choices even at the best of times just in terms of what will make them happy and that's why it's so crushing for them it's so tragic when the choices they've made don't make them happy anymore but the challenge i'm putting to you is to instead make these choices about what is it you want and what is it you're willing to do to get it not in terms of what will make you happy but what will make you a better man what will make you a better woman what will turn you into the person you want to be five years from now or ten years from now and when you're talking to a 15 year old kid they only know the difference between being 10 and being 15 right they can't imagine they can't visualize what kind of person they could be at age 40 not unless you help them right and i've known kids who grew up on an indian reservation a first nations reservation whatever you want to say this you know sorry that's the term still used as indian reservation they have grown up on an indian reservation where they don't have positive role models of what a 40 year old man is like you know i've i've said this before when i grew up i knew my parents were weird i knew they were abnormal but who it was i could look to as examples of normalcy what it was to be a middle-aged person you know to have a career and be accomplished they were pretty weird too right so you know you can grow up in a neighborhood where you don't have positive examples in front of you you can grow up on a reservation where you don't have that in front of you and of course even if you do have those examples in front of you right you may not be able to understand them and those people may not explain to you this is this is the path in life that they're on and these are the steps you'd have to take to be on a path like that um so on and so forth so that's the challenge and yeah it's a challenge for everyone at 15 but for a lot of us it's still a challenge at age 20. it's still a challenge age 25 still a challenge stage 30. people who play video games want to imagine that they're learning how to be james bond by holding a controller and pressing the buttons and manipulating a little three-dimensional puppet that represents james bond right and on some level when you watch a movie you may also think you're kind of participating in or practicing that these talents these instincts and so on you know that you are in your way living the life of james bond uh so on and so forth by watching the movie and you're not you're not training yourself to be a hero you're not training yourself to be a spy you're not training yourself to be a sophisticated intelligent well-informed worldly person which is part of what james bond represents he's one of the few symbols of erie addition and sophistication james bond doesn't drink beer he has a martini extra dry shaken not stirred right james bond wears a three-piece suit for many men the way they dress head to toe from their necktie to their their shoes is influenced by james bond and the makers of those films know that you know they have a wardrobe department you know what's really linked to those things he is an image of sophistication and so on in a way that spider-man is not you know it's a different kind of cultural uh symbol okay when you get up off that couch whether it's playing the video game or watching the movie of james bond all right no you haven't been learning to live like james bond how to become a better person or become more like you spawn you have been training yourself to become a couch potato what you're doing is fundamentally passive not active and here's the greatest tragedy of all if you enroll in a university program and you sit down in that little desk the chair with them what you're doing is much more similar to watching a movie to watching a tv show than you want to think it is what you're doing at university too it's a lot in common with a video game when you're preparing for and filling out that test that in fact most of the models for self-improvement we have in our society are much closer to passive forms of entertainment than really active forms of self-improvement things that involve your initiative your innovation your imagination um things that would lead you to walk in the footsteps of your idols your heroes to become a heroic figure yourself