Kind: captions
Language: en
I'm not sure what I expected to find
when I went to
Chernobyl I mean it's been so long since
the nuclear reactor there melted down
and spewed radioactive atoms across the
land so for almost 30 years this place
has been virtually
abandoned these days workers are allowed
into the Zone but only for 2 weeks at a
time and that's not because the
radiation levels are are too high it's
actually for psychological reasons more
than 2 weeks in a place like this will
apparently make you think strange
things and I was only here for 4 days
but I started to think about
rocks yeah
rocks rocks appear to be permanent I
mean I know that they aren't mountains
are constantly eroding and in places the
crust is melting back into the mantle
Rock obviously isn't permanent but on
the scale of a human life it
is and people have recognized that fact
rocks are permanent for thousands of
years and I think that's what makes them
important to us I mean a diamond is
forever we build these monuments out of
rock because they will Outlast us and
virtually every other material we can
think of our modern structures of metal
and glass are just rock refined by our
Ingenuity rocks are both practical and
symbolic we seek to identify ourselves
with rocks we carve Our Heroes in stone
because we want them to last
forever and there's a way in which we
want that kind of permanence for
ourselves too I think it's at the core
of the desire to scratch your name into
stone and put your initials in wet
cement really man made rock or fasten a
padlock to a
bridge in this way we try to push our
impermanence from our minds The
Monuments statues Bridges they give us a
sense of continuity stability that this
is the way it is and the way it's always
been like the way we first conceived of
stars static unchanging
Eternal and this way of viewing the
world helps us maintain our greatest
delusion the thought that we are in any
way
Eternal we want to believe that some
part of us our Consciousness or our soul
will last
forever but what do you make of it then
when you see stone is not even so
permanent walking around Chernobyl I
think it's understandable that I started
contemplating not only the permanence of
rocks but also their Decay and by
extension our Decay death what the world
would look like without
people you know the closest I can come
to imagining true nothingness is to
picture the universe running really fast
in reverse all the galaxies squeezing
closer together Stars expanding back
into gas clouds and everything getting
hotter and denser compactifying until
the whole observable universe could fit
into a room and then shrinking further
into a tiny point and then
nothing not the nothingness of empty
space but real nothingness which has no
size and no
time to me that is probably what death
looks like a nothingness so complete you
wouldn't even miss it for that you'd
have to be
there but just as soon as I can form
this thought it evaporates like avoid in
nature the world rushes in to fill
it and this makes sense because the
hardware I'm running has been developed
over billions of years with the only
requirement being that it frequently and
accurately makes copies of itself and it
would help not in the slightest in the
goal of making copies if the hardware
could accurately simulate its own
non-existence when we do acknowledge our
impermanence it is often through insipid
catchphrases like YOLO or it's in art
projects like Damen hurst's the physical
impossibility of death in the mind of
someone living which is uh just a huge
shark in a tank of formaldahyde a sense
of our mortality should strike fear into
us like the sense I have when I'm
swimming hundreds of meters offshore and
the water below is deep and dark and I
can picture the shark swimming beneath
me the same kind of Fate stalks us daily
but not in this visceral way just in a
trivial ignorable way hence the delusion
you're permanent like Stone always were
always will
be so we are left hardwired for denial a
selected inability to imagine true
nothingness an ephemeral sack of
particles that thinks itself
Eternal this delusion is comforting and
it makes living easier might drive you
crazy to be confronted with the ultimate
meaninglessness of everything all the
time what we call
nihilism but the same delusion I'd argue
is also
debilitating it lulls you into a false
sense of security in action like a due
date a long time in the future there's
always tomorrow so we procrastinate
living the life we truly
desire and we live in more fear the
sense that your soul is eternal makes
you cowardly because failure would stick
with you forever for really ever shame
embarrassment disappointment they would
never leave you a distant Horizon
encourages you to play it safe live to
fight another day for after all there is
always another
day and this is why I find nihilism
liberating and
emboldening if you can really picture
the nothingness that awaits you then
what is there to be afraid of errors and
humiliations will be forgotten but great
achievements may
not we may have no meaning in the cosmic
context of the universe but we make our
own meaning daily with each other and
this is the thought that leads to action
your days are numbered you don't know
what that number is but it's finite so
get busy with what it is you want to do
time is running out
[Music]