Within Reason - #50 Sisyphus 55 - Nihilism and the Manosphere

Episode Date: January 7, 2024

Ben Thomas, better known online as Sisyphus 55, is a philosophy YouTuber with one million subscribers. His videos cover topics including nihilism, existentialism, love, relationships, and political philosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hungry now. Now? What about now? Whenever it hits you, wherever you are, grab an O'Henry bar to satisfy your hunger. With its delicious combination of big, crunchy, salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel and chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating. Swing by a gas station and get an O'Henry today.

Oh hungry, oh Henry! Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. Ben Thomas is best known online as Sisyphus 55. He runs a philosophy YouTube channel with nearly a million subscribers, whose most popular videos cover themes including suicide, depression, and nihilism, but he also gives overviews of famous philosophers and thinkers, including Nietzsche, Slavo Gijek, Jordan Peterson, and the Unabomber. In this episode, we talk about the manosphere and masculinity and its relationship to philosophy. We also take a strange detour into the philosophy of sport and cover something which I'm labelling the football team of Theseus. We then talk about nihilism. What is it? Is it a

philosophy? Or is it the rejection of philosophy? And what does it really look like to live like a nihilist? Is nihilism just a euphemism for depression? And does a nihilistic worldview cause depression? Or does depression cause a nihilistic worldview? I've enjoyed Ben's videos for a long time now, and it was a pleasure to sit down with him. I hope you enjoy the following conversation. with Ben Thomas or Sisyphus 55. What are you doing with your YouTube channel? Sisyphus 55? And by the way, Sisyphus, I get where that part came from, but what's the 55?

I've, you know, I get that, I get, I get asked that question a lot. And I think in just keeping with continuity, I'll just never, I'll never disclose it. That's just a, that's a secret. Oh, is that right? Okay. Yeah. Do you know, I should have, I should have thought that you get asked that all the time. I think the one rule of good podcast interviewing is don't ask a question that can be Googled

and don't ask a question that somebody's been asked in another podcast. And I think I probably just broke both of those rules. I don't think publicly people ask me that too much. But I have like on my, there's like a chalkboard in my kitchen and people have like, everybody that comes over, they try to like guess what the 55 means. And so, so it's at least among people that I know they. So don't worry about that. So, I mean, I'm not going to press you for an answer, but there is a reason then.

It's not just like an arbitrary number. There is something, but like the explanation for suffering in the benevolent, God, we'll just never know what it is. I mean, maybe. It doesn't have to be like a potentially overly pretentious, a philosophical question. It really came from the brain of a 17-year-old who was procrastinating. making YouTube videos in his bedroom so um but yeah funnily enough i do know the feeling actually um i'm i'm glad that we're sitting down together i've been i've been following your stuff for for a long time and uh yeah i i i that's why i'm interested having seen what you've been doing

and and you've sort of been doing some podcasts as well um and i guess more regularly recently but you've been doing that for a while and your videos cover a lot of different topics and so So, yeah, I'm sort of wondering when you sort of give a job description, when you tell people what it is you do and they say, oh, what's the YouTube channel about? What is it that you tell them? I mean, like, because it's usually like a wide demographic of people, especially if I'm meeting them at like a party or some sort of like public place. I just say that it's like a YouTube channel that delves into like philosophy and psychology

and sometimes more personal topics. but you know I still feel like that doesn't quite capture it like it is really I think it initially started as an excuse for me to just read the books and and research the topics that I was intrinsically interested to learn about and thankfully my own intrinsic interests aligned with a lot of the interests of other people so it was a nice kind of a relationship there I think more recently, it's, you know, maybe in the last year or so, I started to kind of wake up to the idea that there were like, you know, I get a lot of messages and stuff regarding mental health or people in not great positions in life. And, you know, they're telling me that, you know,

these videos helped in some way. And not that I set out to make these videos to specifically help somebody. It was really out of my own trying to figure things out. But I did realize that there was some sort of social utility in making these videos and also having some sort of influence. And then, you know, more and more it just kind of felt like sharpening a blade in a bit in terms of where directly I should, I should concentrate that sort of social utility. So I've been a bit more politically focused. And I think especially in a video that I'm making now that's coming up as soon. It's very much a concentrated effort to use this specific influence I have in order to enable some sort of genuine social action or, you know, steps instead of,

you know, like, I do have some sort of a love-hate relationship with a lot of the streaming and commentary channels that they engage in a lot of kind of policing and back and forth regarding this person said this and then this person said that and a lot of the, you know, attention is finite and they have a lot of influence and a lot of this attention that they direct their viewers to. And it is inspired by the viewer's interests also, but a lot of it is directed towards this kind of bickering within the room and kind of the idea of, you know, of talking about accountability and stuff like that. And a lot of it doesn't really direct towards any sort of genuine social action. And I'm looking at myself also because I've talked about a lot of things.

things. And then I kind of by the end, we'll propose some sort of abstract solution to them. And, you know, at the end of the day, you're a video essayist. You can only do so much and you are kind of partially doing it in order to generate revenue. But I am becoming more interested in actually helping in some way to change things in some sense. So kind of getting out of that, just I'm making videos for fun or for myself and maybe actually instead looking towards some more actionable outcomes yeah I mean the videos that you make some of the more popular videos that I've seen on your channel they're about things like absurdity absurdism they're about depression they're about nihilism they're about Camus they're about existentialism this kind of this kind of stuff and

I wonder if you're going into making a video about these kinds of topics whether you're thinking in your head okay I'm I know that a lot of people struggle with these issues so I want to make a video to help them. Or if you're going in thinking, I want to make a philosophical overview about this and you find that in doing so now, you know, I mean, you said originally this was sort of not your intention, but now when you're setting out, like, is that the, is that more of a motivation now than just sort of philosophical interest in general? Um, I think it would be disingenuous for me to start like exploring topics or advocating for certain topics if I don't have some sort of personal interest or emotional stake, because then you can kind of, you know, you can kind of end up just, you're, you're kind of being controlled by your audience and the way you're being controlled by what you think the audience exactly would be interested in. I took like a, you know, I think a somewhat of a leap quite a few times with regards to discussing more like progressive issues out of my own kind of personal path politically.

knowing that there was a certain amount of my audience that was more right-leaning. And I could have, I guess, maintain some sort of apolitical slant or just kind of fully just focused on, you know, self-motivation or individual responsibility, but I decided not to do that. And that's out of my own, you know, my own personal values, my own kind of life experiences and stuff like that. and then knowing that a certain amount of my audience would be shed, I guess. So I think at the end of the day, it's usually topics that I'm still personally

interested in or invested in. Like things will, I get quite obsessive and certain issues or things will kind of pop into my mind and like I'll be thinking about them a lot. Like when there was the whole Andrew Tate Manosphere saga that was, quite interesting to me. And then there were other YouTubers that had made videos that I found were quite insightful coming from different angles about it. And then I, you know, started reading masculinity studies and, and then in my own kind of personal experience with masculinity, it all kind of developed into, I'll make like a video series about masculinity in the manosphere and,

you know, have some experts on and talk about it. So I think, I think at the end of the day, it is still fueled by my own personal interests. And I think that that is to the benefit of the content because it comes across as more genuine. Yeah. Talk to me about the manosphere. How should a philosopher react to this increasing popularity of, I don't quite know how to describe it, but it's something a bit male, it's something a bit testosterone, it's

something a bit gym, it's something, it's also something a bit like, you know, get outside and get some sunlight on your face and eat healthily and drink athletic greens and this kind of stuff like what's what's going on here in your view yeah i i mean it would be incorrect to completely dismiss every piece of advice or you know content a piece of content from what would be considered the manosphere it's definitely not a monolithic category uh you can see kind of two pillars of it would be maybe just general, apolitical

supposedly apolitical or a, you know, not surfaces, not on the surface ideological content regarding gyms or working out or something like that. And then there's, you know, you dive into more, I guess

at the most intellectual level, you would have like Jordan Peterson who's talking about Carl Jung and and psychological studies to justify certain hierarchies and differences in gender, or on kind of the lower rung of the intellectual ladder, you would have an Andrew Tate who's kind of using a lot of that gym advice and embedding it in this discussion on, you know, a lot of kind of misogynistic takes regarding, you know, women just want this and men have to kind of go their own way. it's in the sort of solitary stoic advice so those are the two it would be the two kind of major axioms of it and there's a lot that falls within it I'm more interested in kind of the how do these online groups form and then how do they like over time kind of

end up devolving from reality and then in doing so they end up informing real-life actions and behaviors. And I always appreciate Baudriard's use of hyper-reality when discussing these kind of online movements that it can begin with an initial sort of truth that kind of informs the simulation or the digital spaces. After a while, the digital spaces then become, or these virtual spaces become more real than reality.

itself, you can see that across men and women online is the discussion of the other gender can end up being very vitriolic and dehumanizing. And in doing so, you kind of create, you know, it's a cycle of dehumanization that's a widely studied psychological phenomenon where if group A dehumanizes group B, group B in turn will dehumanize group A. And this can actually cause kind of an exponential kind of level of prejudice against each other. And I think you see that with these groups that they really hate the other gender. And I think men, it's a particularly interesting case because a lot of hegemonic masculinity is based on access to women's bodies.

But then at the same time, they kind of paint women as the enemy. So there's, Jijic talks about this too. There's sometimes blatant contradictions or almost every time there's an ideology. There's blatant contradictions within the ideology. And that's where you kind of mind for the truth or kind of like what's actually going on underneath. But long story short, I think it's just, it's an example of hyper-reality in terms of there's certain social codes, customs regarding masculinity, which is a relatively unstable social concept across cultures, but still stable enough that, you know, within, Western society. We have certain ideas of what it is to be a man.

And then this goes online, and then you have a lot of men, I think, due to socioeconomic inequalities and material issues, they feel as I think it's called like an aggrieved entitlement because they're unable to signify their masculinity in terms of, you know, resources and wealth. And they've been told that that's what a man is growing up. And then that kind of, they can go in these online spaces and they can, you know, they get kind of a double-edged sort of they get maybe sometimes practical advice, like good advice is, you know, going out, getting some sunlight, working out, sometimes just learning how to talk to girls. And then it's like also with it is packaged this entire worldview about women and about sex.

And there's a really good author, Rachel O'Neill, who hopefully I get the chance to interview her. But she did a book called Seduction, and it's a sociological analysis of pickup communities. And she kind of paints a picture of these seduction communities and men's view of sex in these communities as very much similar to neoliberal logic in terms of it's about, the quantity of sex rather than the quality of sex. So sex is used as kind of capital to be traded. I think that at the end of the day, that is really kind of what characterizes the manosphere, is that it's a bit of an extension of neoliberal logic.

It's using the Fordist model of production to teach men how to be men by kind of giving them a specific blueprint and also how to tell them how to seduce people and stuff like that. That was a rants, but that was generally, I guess, my idea of what the manosphere is. You talked about men being aggrieved and that a lot of this interest seems to be sparked by a feeling of insufficiency. That is something's not quite right with my life and maybe this can fix it. That's certainly the appeal of someone like Jordan Peterson. It's very much the character that you have in mind when you think of Peterson is somebody whom a young man,

might come up to him in tears saying you fixed my life or you helped me to get out of bed in the morning and this stuff about you know getting your exercise in and getting sun on your face is often thought of as a remedy for people who do spend their lives indoors sleeping in feeling a bit depressed feeling a bit nihilistic it's often suggested that you know men feel a lot of the time as if purpose is embedded in having some kind of um well feel philosophical purpose is rooted in practical purpose for men. That is, if you have a family to provide for, if you have a job that you have to get up for, if you have some manual labor that you have to complete, that having those tasks and feeling compelled to complete them is what provides meaning in a man's life. And we live in a culture now where a lot of that is less reliable. You know, families are less. valuable or less valued as a social idea, I think, today. A lot of jobs have moved online.

People are working from home. You can do it from a laptop. Even the role of men has seen to shift. It's no longer obvious that men are the firefighters and the police officers and, you know, women stay at home. This has obviously completely changed as well. Do you think there's any truth to that? And if so, to what extent do you think essentially,

essentially nihilism in men is to blame for the rise of the mannosphere. That's a good question. I mean, I guess it's kind of characterized by a sort of general disillusionment brought on by the fact that most people, they derive their identity primarily, or at least historically speaking, primarily derive their identity from their gender, which is a statement that doesn't seem readily apparent, but that's because it is so kind of inherent. We don't even consider it.

When you're growing up, you're generally going to, if you're a, you know, a boy at birth, you're going to hang out with other boys. You're going to do certain things that boys do. Same thing with girls.

It's like just a very normative, like a unquestionable, um, dynamic that occurs. And, uh, I think I used in a video, idea of Thronus by Heidegger that you're thrown into the world, like that, just that sort

of sense of you, you know, you didn't ask to be here. And you then kind of have to really quickly, you know, rustle up some sort of way in order to survive and to make sense of your existence. And gender is one of the initial mechanisms in which to form your identity and your sense of you know who you are and I think you know one of the things that has disrupted this for people that would be considered like gender essentialists is the existence of trans people and they you know show that there's like some some some differences some I guess anomalies within this this comfortable worldview and I mean that's also why you see the Manistphira attack trans issues a lot. And also I think why, you know, Peterson aligns postmodernism a lot

with nihilism because he kind of sees just that sort of just general like, oh, well, if this traditional fact is potentially ruptured, then, you know, it's nihilism, it's bad. And we need to go back to kind of a more stable set of things, which I find also just strange because he's a huge advocate of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, in many ways, would be considered like a kind of proto postmodernist in terms of deconstructing values. But going back to nihilism with men is that, you know, they grow up and they realize that in terms of the checklist that they need to hit in order to prove themselves masculine because, you know, and there is something kind of almost Judith Butler-like about the

Manosphere. And Beauvoir talked about this too, is that, is that, you know, men need to perform their gender. It's not something that you're necessarily born with to a certain degree. Like, you're, you're afforded certain privileges off of the fact that you're a man. But then within especially circles of men, you need to really prove your status. And Rachel O'Neill talks about this in seduction is, once again, access to women's bodies is considered capital in a form of currency within these, you know, pick-up artist communities where men will kind of trade stories of sexual conquest in order to prove their level of masculinity. So if you are, you know, unable to have access to women's bodies, if you're unable to show that you have some sort

of sexual experience or skill, or if you are unable to provide in some way, or if you were unable to really assert yourself, like, if you're just, you know, bullied a lot as a kid for being, like, skinny or something like that, you are going to feel a sense of serious, like, identity misalignment. If you were brought up as a, as a boy, you're going to feel that sense of nihilism, and you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to think, man, this is like, maybe this is all my fault. Maybe I'm not really like a man. Maybe I'm not, you know, who I should be. And you can see in really dark cases, they've done studies with school shooters, and there is that sense of aggrieved entitlement, which is kind of like,

I should get those things because I'm a man and I'm not getting them. And out of all of the sort of traits of hegemonic masculinity in terms of sexual dominance, kind of material wealth, and aggression, aggression, is the easiest. form of masculinity to perform in terms of access. You can just be really angry. You can beat up your partner. You can go get a gun. It's like very, it's the simplest form in which men can express that they are masculine in

some way. And it's kind of a last resort. And then there's people like Peterson that they go, it's not your fault. It's, you're also not entirely entitled to these things. things. So it's a somewhat more subtle message. And it's, you know, they'll say that it's actually more of a political issue. It's more of a social issue that there are these nefarious agents such as the Frankfurt School or postmodern neo-Marxists that are out to kind of recreate a sort of Stalinist state. I mean, they won't say this outright. They'll say this over

and it's, you know, Tate wouldn't exactly say something like this. It would be a lot more simplified, but to use the example of Peterson, it's very much attached to politics. It's attached to values. Your personal nihilism, your personal issue that you're dealing with is actually one that is born out of a rupture in historical necessity. There are antagonistic forces that are trying to infringe on something that is truth. in its absolute form that's actually good for human flourishing and that is this kind of notion of traditional gender roles and um and you know what it means to be a man for example and there's kind of a few ways to take that message in itself because in in one sense it's

i think blatantly incorrect because if you were to just take the the notion of liberalism as it is you know especially you look at John Stewart Mill, it is advocating for pluralism and for democracy and for a general equality amongst people. And we should be happy that it's not just men that are, you know, firefighters or men that are in executive positions or anything like that. We do want to see some general level of diversity that kind of transcends, you know, gender or race or anything like that. So to make that antagonistic is a bit, I think, backwards. Then at the same time, it's like they're almost there in terms of, you know,

recognizing that these men have material deprivations and they're unable to provide for people and they feel very down and out. That's true. And that's what really speaks to the emotional resonance of figures like Peterson. is they can, you know, they can go, it's okay to feel bad about this. Like, this sucks because, you know, you're poor or you're, you know, you're working a job you don't want to,

or you're not really getting a lot of romantic attention. But it doesn't go all the way because at the end, it just, like, places all of the responsibility on the individual, which I think would just lead to more frustration and aggression, Like the whole idea of cleaning your room, which is famous in his lectures, it's, you know, you could be, you could be really poor and you could go and clean your room. And then you have to go and work your shift really early in the morning. And then after a little while, you're like, I can't really clean my room because I'm so tired all the time. And it's, it's, and then you kind of just like, give up. and you're not very, you don't really feel like this might have been useful. Maybe it is. Maybe you do have that capacity to do so. But the issue there might not actually be cleaning the room. The issue there might be the fact that you are working insane hours and getting like almost

unethical amount in terms of wage or money. And that, you know, maybe the issue isn't actually your fault entirely or maybe it's not your fault or your responsibility in this regard in terms of self-improvement. It's actually, you know, maybe you should be focused on social improvements. Maybe you should organize in your workforce and, and, you know, maybe talk to other people. And it's like, hey, maybe they're kind of overworking us. Maybe this is why a lot of our lives aren't going great. So it's like, it's more subtle. And I do think that in terms of there are, you know, especially Peterson's ability to get people to, to take action is good. but the action that he prompts is usually one that retains the status quo and the systems that

actually enable and cause a lot of the material inequalities that lead men to feel that nihilism to begin with. Then there's a whole other thing with regards to, you know, I think that overall people are over-identifying with their gender, and it is just healthier on a personal level to see gender more as an aesthetic than as, you know, this deeply essential integral component to who you are. And I think when you talk to trans people, ironically, you do get the sense of that, this sort of genuine pretending of playing with gender of, you know, they do feel right in their gender, but they're also, and I'm not trying to speak on behalf of all trans people, but I'm looking at like Julia Serrano, for example, who's a trans person and

also a biologist and developed kind of like a gender theory that there's just multiple variables going into what makes a person really feel their gender, and it is somewhat biologically based, somewhat socially based, and it's too blurry to really just completely pin a worldview on you need to be this exact gender for like the good of the world or anything like that. We need to pull back from that a little bit. I don't know if that last part is totally clear. You said that people were over identifying with their gender. I mean, we've been talking in the context of the manosphere, but is this something you think women do as well? Yeah, I think. I think. I mean, I'm not speaking on behalf of, sorry.

Well, I was just going to ask what it means to over-identify with your gender in the way that you use the phrase. I think I would use it in a clinical sense of, is your, you know, in moments in which you are experiencing some level of distress in regards to not living up to gendered expectations in your society? is that causing, you know, severe distress in your life and existential burden and, you know, that sense of nihilism or meaninglessness, you know, to tell boys that it's not, it's not a huge it's, it's, it's, you're not a lesser person if you can't provide for people or if you cry or if, you know, that girl in school doesn't like you or something like that, you know, and, you know, reversely with with girls if if you know you're not a lesser person if you're if you're not you know considered objectively pretty or if you you know like sports or you know just just any

sort of reversal um i think that's important and i think that that still allows people to i think gender expression is important i don't think i would align with like full on gender absolutism but or sorry, abolishment, but I think that there should be just a general socialization of kids to realize it's not a huge deal if you can't, if you feel like you're unable to express these things because, or if you're unable to prove your gender identity towards people. And I do think that the fact that the outlet for men is aggression, whereas for women, It's usually, oh, my God, there was a study on this. This is a while back.

For women, it's usually kind of either caretaking or withdrawal, like affection or withdrawal. It speaks to the fact that I think for men it should be emphasized, especially because the repercussions of men feeling angered about the inability to prove that they are men is much worse for themselves and I think like the world in general, whether it's a romantic part. or do you think there's anything wrong with identifying with your gender in this way in that I think when somebody says in a conversation like this that people are strongly basing their entire identity on their gender that this is this is just assumed to be a bad thing but if it is something sort of deeply rooted in our psychology and our biology and you know the fact that men are more aggressive, for example, that if we take an approach of trying, rather than trying to find, like, healthy outlets for that aggression and saying, no, own your masculinity, yes,

you are a man, and that is crucial to your identity, that is going to mean you're more aggressive, but, you know, take up boxing or something like that, you know, do sports. This seems to be sort of the opposite to the approach that I think we've been institutionally taking in the West. I mean, there's obviously a big culture clash on this issue. But I think, you know, certainly like the government in the United Kingdom, I don't know what it's like in Canada, but I think it's fairly similar. And to a certain extent, the United States as well, the approach seems to be more something like, no, no, like masculinity actually isn't important to your identity. And even if it is, masculinity isn't about being aggressive or anything like that. And so why don't you try doing more traditionally girly things?

This is how we solve the problem, you know. It seems to me that if it is actually the case that men feel, and indeed women feel strongly identified with their gender, and this is causing some kind of problems, that if some kind of cultural force or, you know, a political force comes along and says, well, have you considered the fact that being a man isn't that important at all? and have you tried, you know, acting more like what's traditionally associated with the other gender, wouldn't that potentially just make the problem worse, if you see what I'm saying? Yeah, and I mean, I don't, I hopefully, hopefully it didn't sound like I was advocating for that stance. No, I don't think that's what you're doing, but I think that's probably what are something like what our institutions are leaning towards. Yeah, I think that that's the natural next step in this discussion is, you know, as I said, I don't really... I don't totally agree with the idea if we can completely abolish gender.

And Judith Butler, who's like a significant gender theorist, they even state that, you know, they are, and I can find the passage afterwards. I wish it was quoted more, but it was, you know, basically they were saying that my work should not be taken as a disapproval or rejection of those who feel super strongly towards their gender. Butler's take on gender is that it's a performance, but the extent to which people feel strongly towards that performance differs. For some people, it does not matter at all. For other people, it is extremely important. It's extremely significant to who they are.

I do think that there's a certain limit where it starts to matter so much to them that they can start damaging other people. That was kind of my, or they could start to feel really bad. And that's where I mean, like, people are over identifying with their gender. I don't think broadly that it's that big of a deal because there's just a normal distribution of, you know, people that they identify as cis men or cis women. And I completely agree with the idea of what are healthy channels in which, you know, a man, for example, who is dealing with not feeling great in certain areas. And they do feel that sort of aggressive energy. and they do want to still feel masculine,

where can they channel that? That's super important. I don't think that at an institutional level, we should just start aligning everything that is bad is masculine and everything that is good is feminine. I think that that will just, it goes back to that cycle of dehumanization that I was talking about,

where it is just dehumanizing one group. And for the most part, this group, if they're not, you know, liberally educated, you know, of a high socioeconomic status and they're being told by academics and institutions that, you know, masculinity is bad in a blatant sense. They're going to feel dehumanized and they're going to dehumanize the other group and it's, it doesn't lead to any sort of effective change. It doesn't help anybody, I think. So, yeah, we do need to, I think we do need to find healthier outlets also. that's why I love, you know, sports, for example, for men. I think that's an extremely

healthy outlet for men that are, you know, in some ways dealing with feeling inadequate in other areas. You can stick to a specific skill set that you can develop and master, and it's usually within a community of other people, and it's also usually you're entering an arena in which you have to be emotionally vulnerable. You can't really, you know, in terms of competition, you, your true colors show, so you have to learn conflict resolution. I think that that, you know, as an example, when you said boxing, that's an extremely productive form of curtailing this potentially aggressive group of people or people that

are not doing too well. Yeah, and it's not just playing sports as well, but also even just. just being a fan, I mean, entering into a football or soccer stadium and hearing these crowds roaring at each other. And an interesting thing about football in the UK, I don't actually know. I don't know much about sports, certainly not in North America, but it might be the same that people support teams that are not where they're from. You know, I sort of grow up in Oxford and my friends are supporting Chelsea FC and they're supporting Arsenal and they're supporting Leeds.

And I've always been a bit confused by this. I mean, I assume it's probably got something to do with people moving cities. I mean, there must be some origin for this, but it seems mostly it's inherited from parents. But some people get into football for the first time in their generation. They're the first generation of their family. And it seems like they almost just would have to arbitrarily pick somewhere. If they don't pick their own city, that is. And then I see these stadiums, these stadia of people, screaming at each other.

It's like one of the loudest environments imaginable produced by human beings. Because there's a team in front of them that represents a city that most of the players probably aren't from. Most of the supporters probably aren't from. But this idea of this team has come to represent something of which, all of your masculinity can be thrown behind, you know, men pitted against men in a battle, someone's going to win, someone's going to lose, and it feels like it's a good outlet for an expression of the kind of thing that we're talking about, which might be why it's a sort of masculine, dominated sport. But it does seem just quite interesting to me that, I mean,

I've always wondered about this question. I thought to myself, okay, suppose your football team is It's kind of a ship of Theseus that you can do with football in that players move around, right? And so if a player moves from your team to an opposing team, you might still respect the player, but you don't support that player anymore. You support the new player who's coming to replace him. Well, what if your favorite team are playing your enemies? And half time comes, and due to some freak business deal in half time, every single player on one team is swapped for every single player on the other team. And so everybody comes back on the pitch, and they're actually stood on the same side as the third. pitch because, you know, they've swapped, but now they're sort on the other side. The only

difference is that they've changed which t-shirts they're wearing and they go to play football. Who are you cheering for? Do you just suddenly cheer against the very people that you were just cheering for because they're wearing a different t-shirt? The whole thing sort of amuses me. I don't know if you're into sports and if you can relate to this kind of thing. I mean, yeah, firstly, like I cheered for the Toronto Raptors when I was a kid and it It was out of the arbitrary, no one in my family liked basketball, but it was out of the arbitrary fact that I really liked dinosaurs, and so it was a cool mascot, and then they were the only Canadian team, so I always cheered for them. So yeah, there is, it's usually just out

of like some random, you know, whatever, but that's also a very interesting point in terms of a lot of psychology studies are used to this. They use this paradigm of just randomly assorting people into red shirts and blue shirts and then they do all these tasks and you can kind of see quickly the kind of in-group, out-group dynamics. It's how they study a lot of like out-group psychological phenomena.

And I've never thought of the idea of how it would relate to spectators. I don't know. I'm thinking that in terms of if I really identified with the personalities of the team, it usually takes me, there is in sports, it usually takes a little while if a player was playing on my team

and you develop some sort of I guess affection towards them or loyalty that when they go on to another team you're still going to cheer for them for a little bit even if they're playing against your team you're not going to feel that bad because they are beating your team because you're like ah well they kind of used to

it kind of takes a little bit of time on an emotional level so I don't know if in half time it would be enough for players or for fans to really a switch in terms of loyalty based off of just a shirt. But I do also think that maybe

the whole point of sports is I don't know if you've ever seen the show community, but there's a good little bit where the character Jeff, he has a pencil and he holds up the pencil to the group and he goes, this pencil's name is

Blinky. And the end gives a bunch of facts about Blinky. He's like Blinky really likes to likes when people use him to draw nature and he's really uh really likes using his eraser and stuff like that and then he just snaps and like and all that everybody goes like awe and then he snaps the pencil he goes blink he's dead and then he'll in awe and he's explaining that like a lot of everything we do is is in some way especially

when it comes to like sports is we need to find things to give meaning and and relevance to and when we kind of identify ourselves or identify it with like a sort of some level of emotional then it's already gone. It doesn't really matter in terms of trying to grasp it on like an empirical level. We just seem to like to do that in general. And I think sports is like a good example of that. Well, I mean, we can talk a bit more about the philosophy of sports here. What is it that's being supported by a supporter? There are sort of a few options that you might, that you might consider. By the way, I think that the, so to speak, objectively correct answer to the question is that you continue to support the team. That is, you support the other players, because I imagine it would be confusing, but if you were here interview people outside of the stadium, they'd probably say something like, well, this is obviously very weird and I feel very conflicted, but, you know, my team is my team and that's who I'm here to support. Okay, so what is the team? What's being supported? Like, you might say something like, if all the players switch out, the only thing that's left is maybe,

be the owner or the manager. It feels weird to say that you're like supporting the manager or certainly supporting the owner and, you know, owners can change. So the players change, the manager changes, the team colors might change, the uniform changes, the owner changes, you know, the team changes hands. And yet still there are people who will be there saying, but, you know, Tottenham, Arsenal, yeah, that's my team, that's what I support. What is it? that's being supported. It's not the place because most of the players aren't from the place and the supporters aren't from the place. It's not the players because they can switch out. It's not the owners or the managers. They can be switched out. What is it that's represented

by this, you know, the logo for Arsenal FC? What is that thing? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think sports teams are almost the quintessential kind of presentation of essentialism. Like you are, you, you believe that there's some sort of essence about this team in some way, that it's, there's this, this idea about it that can't be touched by any sort of external influence. And that kind of, I remember when the pandemic happens and how important it was for sports to come back. And it makes sense because it grounds people. It has that essentialism to it that no matter, you know, which players are traded or. Or, like, you know, even sometimes they change the cities of the team. Sometimes the name of the team changes.

And sometimes the team is doing absolutely terrible and people are still cheering for it. It's none of those things matter. It's that it grounds us in some way that there's some sort of truth to it that we assign to it. And thereby identifying with it, we can stabilize aspects of ourselves, no matter if you're going through a divorce or you're getting fired. you are a fan of Chelsea or you're a fan of FC Barcelona like that's a that's going to be a consistent trade of yours and you know it sounds absurd and ridiculous if you're not a sports fan but you know I think it explains the sort of at times primal associations that people have with it but what what I mean yeah that it can be a consistent part of your personality that you are a Chelsea

supporter but what is what is that what is chelsea what is chelsea i mean i'm i guess i'm just struggling to understand even like as an idea like obviously it's not a material object but even like in the abstract realm i i i just don't see what it is that the concept is attaching itself to you know what i mean i i think it goes back to the the pencil idea it's less it's or the pencil example it's it's it's less about what actually it is there's nothing there and i mean that in terms of the idea like the the the The idea itself can be completely empty. It's the effect of the idea. I think we just, I was recently reading this book called Cruel Optimism,

and it's about, in general, this psychological phenomena where people will gravitate towards certain objects of desire or salvation or hope. And those very things will actually be impediments or the downfall to their flourishing. I think this author specifically is talking about the idea of the good life in post-war U.S., kind of like the sort of consumerism and general kind of up and up progress going on. And, you know, that led to a lot of environmental degradation, a lot of mental health issues, greater material progress. but there was never actually a clear idea of like where it was going or what was what it was going to amount to. It's, it's, I think there is no idea behind these things. I think these things are empty. It's, it's a, it's a completely empty container. But what's important is that there is a container and we can like grasp it and it and it grounds us in some way. But I think at the end of the day when you deconstruct these things, there's, there's nothing to them. It matters very little if the Toronto,

no raptors end up ever winning another title or not in the in the grant scheme of things um and at the same time it would it would hurt me a lot if that was the truth so you know i i'm just thinking about it now i think there's an obvious option which i completely neglected to consider which is that the the the football club consists not in its players not in its managers but in its supporters It's the supporters themselves who make up the thing that they're supporting. And I think that's something like what you're saying, what you're saying too. But you're just sort of creating out of thin air this relationship to thousands of other people. And that's what it is.

Because even if the team changed, it doesn't actually matter which side everybody starts clapping as long as everybody's doing it. And supporters can have problems with their players. They can start to hate one of their players. They can hate the new owner. They can think the manager. is a bad decision, but very rarely are they sort of turning against each other. And in fact, most of their anger is not directed at the opposing players, but the opposing supporters as well.

So I don't know, maybe everything else is just a proxy for, you know, something like a, I guess something resembling a national identity or a community identity, but this microcosm of it within a stadium. Yeah, no, like I made a video a while ago called the Case Against Santa Denialism. it was like a video about people that are, you know, they deny Santa in some way. And all of it was kind of just to say at the end, and it was a bit of like a, I'm atheistic or agnostic, but I fully understand why people are religious. I understand that like the whole point of faith or hope. I find that it's an extremely interesting thing to talk about. But the, you know,

the whole, the video ends on this kind of interview from Donald Glover and he's talking about, you know, the spirit of Christmas isn't like, you know, it isn't Santa or it isn't like the gifts necessarily. It's in like the belief of the kids. Like that's like growing up is when you realize like why you should lie to your kids about Santa pretty much. That's the whole point is like that's the most magical part of it is because by them believing, by them kind of endorsing this, this magic, you kind of enter into that space. Even if you're like logically aware of it, it's like it gives a little bit of something special to your life. There's a sort of goodness to your life that I think is on an affective level,

crucial for us to keep going, like as a society in some way. Like, we do need to hold on to these like strange objects of ritual and hope. We've mentioned it a few times now in passing. What is nihilism? hmm yeah i mean i in in my uh like knowledge of it it is the belief that there is no intrinsic or inherent value to things or reality um that is the my that's that's my i think when people start to say it's a it's an embrace of nothingness or the void or it's like like when

they start kind of giving it normative, like almost as if it's a project. I don't think that's true because, you know, if there's no intrinsic value to anything, I think it's more compared to something like existentialism. It's a metaphysical claim. Existentialism also has metaphysical claims, but it's attached to certain kind of practical, more ethical steps. Like, okay, there's no inherent meaning, so we should make our own meaning. Nileism is, I think, just torn down simply the fact that there is no meaning. There is no intrinsic value to things. I'm sure there's a more articulate or like more fully fleshed out definition of it, though.

Do you think that nihilism is a position? I mean, it's often described as just negating. It's like negating value, negating ontology, negating essence. And so to sort of reword or repurpose an old joke of Bill Mars is nihilism of philosophy at the way that abstinence is a sex position? Is it actually an example of a kind of thought? Or is it more like a rejection of all of the options on the table? Because I mean, okay, you look at like the atheist movement.

There is a portion of it that you would consider it kind of just a rejection. of, and I think on like a strictly kind of objective level of how you would define atheism, it is just a rejection of the existence of God. And then it enters into human brains and human discussions and egos. And it becomes, I think, a lot more ideological. I think when you talk about like the atheist movement and you're bringing up Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, there's like a particular like, you know, they seem to very concerned about certain issues as a result of this base claim.

And so it's hard to parse that. I think in the same sense, nihilism, you know, there's this kind of just general claim in terms of there is nothing with intrinsic value. And then you see, you know, I think, for example, people that are accelerationist or, you know, the doomer where they from that they extract some sort of even though they think that inaction in itself is is aligning with it inaction is still a sense of action or accelerationism where it's just kind of like let things go so everything will eventually get destroyed and you know or you know on a very base level the idea of like joker or just this person who just destroys everything

in the name of nihilism that it's I think that that's giving it you know that's a more ideological and more ethical it becomes a project it goes from a claim to a project and I guess it's the

is aught when Hume's talking about it that just because they're saying something is this way it doesn't ought to result in some sort of action necessarily I guess that would be my general take I mean, you've talked about nihilism a lot on your channel.

It's sort of a consistent theme. Do you consider yourself a nihilist? No, no. I would consider myself a, you know, I would consider myself maybe of the belief that things might not have intrinsic value. But I don't, you know, I guess it's an agnostic. position in terms of, I don't know, there's no way to actually prove that. We have to do basically the best with what we have in front of us. And, you know, that's, that's, as good as it gets. I don't, you know, especially when people would say like Nietzsche was a nihilist or something

like that. Just because Nietzsche entertained the idea and, you know, explicitly claimed, I think several times with regards to there's certain things that really don't. matter or just, you know, this general idea of nihilism and nothing matters, that there are still things that he believes should matter. You know, he advocated for like the Ubermensch, for example, and he advocated for the creation of new values. Somebody that's nihilistic wouldn't do that. Somebody that's nihilistic would, first of all, not write a book. They would, you know, they would lie in bed and they, like, I would think that they would just kind of let things pass over and it would nothing matters their hunger wouldn't matter their thirst wouldn't matter

I don't I don't see how a genuine promotion of nihilism would actually amount to any sort of action at all I think it would be the the most extreme sort of passivity that you could possibly even imagine but there's and there's there's a I was trying to find it but it's I guess my stance on nihilism is it comes from Kamu but in the rebel he says but if nihilism if it does not exist tries to do so

that is enough to make the world and that is enough to make the world a desert so it's more of like as a human being would you want the world to become a desert out of whether or not nihilism does exist there's certain social factors that do promote a sense of meaninglessness

and intolerable suffering and do, out of your own interest, just as an individual, could you psychologically, like, live with that fact? And I can't. And so I wouldn't consider myself a nihilist, I guess. I've seen a lot of people, or I think there's a common intuition that nihilism goes hand in hand with passivity. That is, if you're a true nihilist and nothing matters, the person you're picturing is, like I say, the guy that sort of doesn't get out of bed.

the guy that maybe just doesn't even eat because although he's hungry he doesn't care that he's suffering but I don't think to say that there's there is no value or there is no purpose or meaning means that you will even be able to ignore your your drives you can just see them as essentially meaningless that is I can imagine the the happy nihilist as somebody who imagine like a wolf of Wall Street type character just orgies and cocaine, spending all the money in the world, ripping off other people just and so motivated, wakes up every day at six in the morning, just can't wait to get in the office, make more money and, you know, spend more time partying on his private yacht.

And yet he says, yeah, I'm doing this because nothing matters. The reason why I'm just screwing around like this with my life is because none of this matters. You know, all of this money, all of these boats, it doesn't matter. I'm just having a good time. And so I don't think there's anything in his behavior. although he's like the polar opposite of the kind of person you've just described, that would somehow entail belief in value. It just means that there is some kind of psychological drive within a person to get up and do things. But that's not the same thing I think is imbueing them with meaning.

Yeah. I mean, like I've also thought of that with regards to like hedonism where is it, you know, there's, you're not, you're not, you're not. stating that there's any sort of extrinsic or intrinsic value towards things. You are, I think, still in your actions and in your motivations valuing pleasure. So I think that kind of tosses it up in the air that there is still some sort of project, even if it doesn't seem like a very, you know, a lot of people wouldn't consider it a very like an admirable project, but it's like, you know, it's a project nonetheless that they are oriented towards some sort of action. um that you know i could see somebody considering themselves nihilistic and living a very hedonistic

life um yeah i mean hedonism might be a form of nihilism in that like yeah you value your pleasure but that's not to say that it is intrinsically valuable i mean i think that like if we're looking for something like purpose and and me like if you ask somebody who is thinking they might be a nihilist And you say, why is that? And they say, I just, I just don't sort of know why I'm doing anything. And I say, but like, you're here. You're having a conversation with me. You know, you got out of bed this morning. You decided to bring this up. Like, you must value something. And the whole paradox of it is they might say, well, yeah, I know. But even then, like, when I analyze why I'm following this desire to come and speak to you or this desire to watch TV or anything, I just, I don't even know why I feel that. And I think I'm just essentially just a slave to my, biological and psychological functions. That makes me more nihilistic because, yeah, I have all these drives to do things, but that is what's driving my behavior. It's almost as if I'm not doing it, it's just like, I just have these drives and I'm being, I'm being sort of motivated by them. You know, the concept of the will might be, might be important here. And you might

think of Schopenhauer, who is in many, many ways, a poster boy for nihilism, but would never deny the idea that human beings are constantly motivated to get up and do things. I think in terms of the mechanism of pleasure, especially, and especially if you look in the Buddhist tradition when they talk about pleasure, pleasure and suffering or desire and fear, these are very related. And it would be maybe not impossible, but for the kind of this nihilistic person who is fully just, kind of following their drive towards pleasure, it would be, I think, difficult for them to not eventually reach some sort of suffering

that would then make them question why they're doing anything at all. They would, you know, I could see somebody dying really quickly of an overdose, which would be perhaps the most, in a sense, intellectually honest form of performing nihilism because you were just simply trying to experience as much pleasure as possible and then dying. But then there's people that, you know, they do a bunch of drugs, and then they start getting a tolerance and then maybe they're having a lot of sex but they start developing a tolerance

like there is just like the hedonic treadmill of you know you would have to you'd have to reach higher and higher levels of pleasure and the only way to do that is that you would have to start like kind of engaging in some level of discipline or something and then I would kind of question if this individual would have that level of discipline

to you know they would become very utilitarian and they would have to think okay well if I'm giving this amount to this project, then later on I'll have even more pleasure here, which isn't entirely guaranteed. And then I'm starting to, I would start to think logically this person isn't the most nihilistic person, at least on the outside, looking in terms of their actions. It's like, oh, they're actually like, they're working quite hard. I'm thinking of like, you know, as you mentioned, like Wolf of Wall Street.

And, you know, he suffered certain, you know, pitfalls due to his hedonism, I guess. but you know it's not always the case but but i do think that it is it is tricky for um somebody who is totally invested in pleasure just based off of the fact that we adapt to pleasure after a while uh for them to like sustain that well also not having any sort of like higher ambitions really i mean i i guess what needs to be teased apart is the fact that somebody values something from their assessment that the thing valued is, is valuable in an objective sense. It's like the way that people talk about morality. If somebody is a sort of moral subjectivist who says, look, I, yeah, well, of course,

I think that, you know, killing babies for fun is wrong and all. But, you know, I don't think morality is objective. I think it's relative. I think it's subjective, this kind of thing. They're not denying that they feel the moral motivation and that they will essentially act in accordance with. it. They just say that whatever this thing is that I'm feeling doesn't have any grounding in reality. And I guess that's sort of what's going on in the hedonistic nihilist. Like, yeah,

there's a sense in which they must value something. You must value, you must have some assessment of, I don't want to use the word goodness and badness, I mean in an amoral sense. You must have some assessment of things not being the way you want them to be in order to do anything. It's the only reason you would do anything, lift your arm, pick up a glass of water or something, is because there's a situation that you know could obtain that's different from the one right now that you would prefer. So yeah, there's a preference, there's a value. But I think that needs to be teets apart from, as I say, this idea that that means that the cup of water is objectively valuable. That would be a weird thing for me to say just because I value it in that instance.

And I think maybe something like that's going on. I mean, what does it mean? You said that you're sort of an agnostic about this question. And so wouldn't call yourself a nihilist for that reason. That means that it must remain open to you, this idea that there is, such thing as meaning, as purpose. And I, it's, you know, notoriously difficult to offer a definition of meaning. What does meaning mean? Ha, ha, ha, you know. But I think that a, an approximate definition is something like a non-contingent reason to act as, or to be, you know, a reason to do something that isn't reliant upon some more fundamental premise, because otherwise that just makes it totally contingent. It's like, okay, so I don't know if you agree with that

definition, but however you define purpose, if that option remains open to you, being an agnostic about nihilism, and you've also said that you're an atheist slash agnostic, you don't believe that there's a God. What might this look like? Like, what could it be that provides this weird element of our otherwise seemingly material universe that bestows value upon at least one thing, objectively speaking? Yeah, I mean, I think there's two things. And I think that what is being parsed here is basically, and for completely taking the nihilist claim of there's no intrinsic value to

anything, then it is what we're talking about is all of human behavior basically instinct or is it thought. And I do think that if there was a person, and there probably has been quite a few times throughout history that was nihilistic and purely just kind of functioned off of instinct. I'm kind of thinking like animals in a sense, like they don't necessarily, I mean, we can assume perhaps they do, but a lot of animals, they just function off of instinct. They don't function off of, you know, thinking and deliberating on things. There might be a certain group of individuals that are able to just operate purely off

of instinct. They're, you know, I would believe that this would involve some level of anti-social behavior in some way, where they just kind of are only looking for pleasure and they never question anything, which is possible. But at the same time, if they were truly nihilistic, that's to hold these claims and to then nonetheless engage in, you know, a life of pleasure. I think that's hard because you're engaging in both thought and instinct, which is like you would have to somehow disassociate. You'd have to kind of to really enjoy these things.

You know, I think there is a certain level of going back to how pleasure functions, that it would get kind of tiring after a while and they would, you know, but this is talking about specific individual psychologies and I can't really say if such a person could or could not exist. fathom it, you know, might be possible. Um, with regards to, to your definition of meaning, um, yeah, I, I, I agree. It was like a non-contingent reason for action is what she said. Yes, something, something like that. Okay. Um, a non-contingent reason for action. Or reason to be or something like that, maybe. Um, I think with regards to, my agnosticism and my like opening my mind up to the possibility of there being some

sort of meaning is is you do look at just I would consider it a fact maybe that you know the human mind is is throughout history a process of the intellectualization and therefore fragmentation of our reality so it's like constantly we're just trying to conceptualize things break things down into specific categories in order for us to survive and to function the more you start to get into this process, the more you realize how difficult this is, that there is a lot of categorical issues, there's a lot of conceptual issues with constantly trying to find separation and things. There's so many different anomalies and exceptions, and there is just this general sense

that the boundaries are blurred between things or entities. And that there is a sort of union amongst things that exist, at least, you know, were made of the same material that was around during the Big Bang and perhaps even before then. And there is just a, this is where I'm, you know, scared to drift too far into subjects that I have no idea about, but you look in the case of interpersonal neurobiology, for example, where you can see at the neural level we're affecting each other by mirroring each other's behavior in terms of where our brain is being activated in order to understand each other's

emotions. There's a sort of, it's a field where it's that connection between people can actually be seen at an empirically valid level. And I think that's where we start. start to get the sense of, you know, without making any claim of what this would end up entailing, but if everything is somewhat connected, or there is some sort of just general unity in terms of existence, that would at least give hope to there being some sort of meaning to it, or I think a better way is some sort of constructive flourishing that could develop out

of these, all of these supposedly separate entities functioning, you know, as one in a sense, but also in their own unique capacities, which sounds very abstract. But I hope that makes sense. That would be my, I guess, like my, I'm open to it. There's just like a Spinoza's like pantheism, which is that sort of very abstract belief in God is kind of just entailing everything, which I would generally, yeah, I would probably agree with. C.S. Lewis wrote the words, if the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning, just as if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know that it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. Do you think there's any wisdom in this? I think it does presuppose some sort of like still like a metaphysical claim of we don't actually know

like whenever it gets to this point it's like well we would have to look at a a reality where that did not happen which is like kind of impossible to wrap your head around so I don't I don't know in that sense but it is like there are enough things. I don't know if it's not a very like logical backing, but there's just enough things going on. And there's just this fact that human beings especially have just made such a mad scramble and use of energy

in terms of doing things and creating things and making things and have just expressed so many feelings that, you know, it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility that it would, that it would be amounting to or representative of something larger or of something that has some sort of intrinsic value. And I don't think that this intrinsic value would be of such an alien nature. I don't think it would be like a god or something.

I think it is, it is, you know, found in these moments of connection or unity or it's getting studied a lot more in psychology, but like the study of awe, like feeling like, you know, there's a sort of beauty that's both like horrific and insightful and kind of makes you smaller and kind of can change your worldview. Yeah, like experiences like that, I don't know. It's literally impossible to talk about sometimes. I think that's why I'm agnostic in that sense. So I just kind of focus on the psychology.

I mean, I'm really just more interested in lowering suffering and increasing human flourishing in whatever ways that looks. And if that helps lead to some, you know, greater intrinsic value that we're not aware of or can't quite grasp, I'll probably never know. so on a from a philosophical perspective what gets you out of bed in the morning coffee

um on a philosophical perspective I I mean that would be by the way the uh the nihilist's unironic answer yeah um I I

I do think that it's a it's a lot of it's based off of I think previous experiences where I do kind of just always remind myself that there's there's been enough times in my life that have justified living this life and each day is just another opportunity for something like that to happen and you never really know what could happen for better or worse. So there is just a sort of, I mean, it's on a philosophical level as somebody interested in philosophy and maybe not in the more academic sense, is that there's just a basic curiosity that I think fuels existence of just not, of never fully knowing. And whether that's in terms

of knowing yourself or knowing the world or, or in relation to the two, that is, I think, what generally fuels my life, my existence, and a lot of my decisions. And would you have any recommendations or advice, given that you're somebody who receives a disproportionate number of emails from people who are struggling with nihilism and that you've probably seen countless comments under your videos from people who are in similar situations, I imagine you'll have spent some time thinking about this, what advice you have for such people who are struggling with nihilism, which I think sometimes is just a euphemism for depression, but it seems to be something like a depression with a distinctly philosophical tint or a philosophical motivation. I mean, I think it's probably true that they go hand in hand, but it's difficult to tell whether it's a philosophically nihilistic worldview that leads people to be depressed, or if it's depression that leads people to adopt a fully nihilistic worldview.

Which way around it is, and maybe you have an opinion on that matter, what would you recommend somebody do in that circumstance if, like you, they have an interest in philosophy? I think it's, yeah, firstly, it's interesting. I saw something on Twitter where he said like the reason why men, it goes back to our previous discussion, the reason why men gravitate towards philosophy so much is just because they were never able to actually express their emotions vulnerably. So it's like a kind of an intellectual way to explain why they're depressed a lot of the time, especially existentialism and stuff like that, nihilism. But it might be, look, it might be right. It might be right. I mean, it's like a way to legitimize talking about sadness and bleakness and, you know, my life doesn't have any

purpose or meaning, but instead of doing it through, you know, tears, you're doing it through philosophical essay writing. Like, I mean, it's a joke, but I think, you know, it's, all good jokes contain an element of truth, right? Oh, yeah. No, I did feel personally attacked when I read that, so it's a, um, I actually, I think I would, I'm going to quasi- refer to Zizik, who you had on previously, his book's surplus enjoyment,

where he kind of discusses the Khan's idea of subjective destitution. Because I think this is a extremely useful method of discussing the different ways in which we tackle

nihilism or even heartbreak or radical change or you know just any any form of suffering um but subjective destitution generally comes in in four different forms and there's like a fifth lacanian version but the the four different forms is let's say to use I'll use like political terms here is uh you've just realized that the world is like it's like shit and it's just like a lot of despair so a certain group of people will disassociate.

They will make sure that their subjecthood has been relinquished in some way by simply forgetting about it, you know, diving into social media, doing drugs, just kind of like ignoring it, kind of brave new world vibes. Jijik in the book, he talks about disassociation in terms of Buddhism, but I don't think that that's quite the correct interpretation of Buddhism. I think the Buddha didn't disassociate from his emotions. It's more so he was able to live with them, and it's a lot more nuanced. So that's my little personal addendum here.

But yeah, the first one is dissociation of the subject from reality, from the world. And then the second one is a sort of. of subjecthood with divinity or something spiritual, something larger than oneself, where you kind of correlate your own enjoyment with the enjoyment of this larger divine being. And I think that's why a lot of people, when they're in despair, they will turn to some form of spiritualism. I notice on TikTok, if I'm ever not feeling that good, and because the algorithm is so effective, it will just start, it will begin showing me kind of spiritual TikTok and kind of like tarot card reading. And I find that a little bit interesting. But that's very comforting. And that in itself is kind of

another form of dissociation in a sense because it doesn't actually lead to any sort of action. And there's a third form, which is the kind of destitution of the subject in order to sacrifice oneself for historical necessity. So, you You've realized the world is shit and you've attached yourself to some sort of like ideological cause or political cause. You can look at Marxist-Leninism or something like that where you are just fully committed or, you know, the January 6th capital riots. Like you are, you are, regardless of whether you live or die or what happens, you believe that this thing will be, it will enact some sort of truth and this will solve the problem. And then the fourth version of subjective destitution is kind of what we were talking about before is, is, you know, a lot of people would consider the nihilist, somebody who aligns personally with the darkness. And, you know, they will create a lot of chaos. They will, they want things to suffer as much as they suffered. They want a lot of institutional issues. So at the level of like the depressed person or the person who's nihilistic, you have somebody who they tackle depression by basically, ignoring it, pushing away the feelings. You have somebody who finds God in a sense. You have

somebody who gets really heavily attached to a certain ideology and kind of believes it's the end all be all. And then you have somebody who basically goes, you know, the world messed me up and now I'm going to mess the world up. It's kind of like an eye for an eye. And the third one regarding an ideology is very interesting because it's aligned with I think the manosphere when talking about depressed people, where Peterson is giving effective advice under the gaze of, or under the, this overarching historical necessity that you improving yourself as a man under these specific checkmarks is actually part of a larger historical project of solving the crisis of masculinity and repairing Western moral degradation and so

for it. So just as an aside, that's what I find interesting, because he has a lot of depressed fans also. But then Jujik talks about another form of Le Ceynian subjective destitution, and I'll try not to misinterpret this too much, but it is a transversal of the fantasy, what we're talking about before me, cruel optimism, or that object of desire, that thing, that maybe things will finally be resolved. It's a genuine embrace of hopelessness. It's where you've accepted. that you don't know what's happening. Like, you need to accept the sort of nihilism or the, you know, in Buddhism, everything is burning. You know, change is constant.

Nothing's permanent. You're going to die. Who you think you are as a person isn't a stable reflection or isn't a stable essential component. But nonetheless, you are doing... what is necessary in the moment. You were not acting out of historical necessity, but present necessity. And this sounds very, like, it sounds very abstract and like, oh, only like, you know, this sounds very, like, kind of, what does that mean?

Zijadak actually uses the example of healthcare workers during COVID. And I think this is really reflected also in the plague by Camus, because it's a very absurdist idea of you, of these people were confronted by a horrific situation. They were not given any sort of idea of how this would end. They were obviously not given the correct resources or enough resources a lot of the times. They were under a lot of despair. They were under pretty bad conditions. And a lot of them were simply functioning off of a day by day, I'm going to do what I need to do, what I feel I need to do in front of me, without any sense of historical necessity. For the most part, I can't speak for all healthcare workers. But the general

stereotype of it, of the events, like portrayed in the media. I mean, it was kind of awful to see because you're just like, wow. Like, I couldn't imagine actually being in that position. And there is a sort of, it's the absurd hero in that sense, because they are, they're still pushing forth despite the darkness or despite knowing that this might not turn out well. They're still just kind of doing it, giving their all. And it's funny because it also relates back to once again, I think why Peterson's message is effective, is the idea to clean your room, obviously has some credence because he's not telling you to change the world or do anything big. He's telling you to operate on a very personal level to fix the environment right in front of you. What needs

action right now? What can you do right now to fix it? Now, my amendment with that is that sometimes it doesn't mean cleaning your room. Sometimes there's genuine social issues that need to be confronted that you can actually do that, you know, whether it's workplace unionism or unionization or, you know, maybe going to see a therapist or maybe, you know, reflecting on, you know, there's a lot of examples that wouldn't just be cleaning your room and sometimes would actually involve some sort of social change also. So it's not just like this idea of like think global, act local or something like that. Like there are certain things that that are impacting your depression or your nihilism from

the top down. To what extent can you affect those things right now without any sort of idea that this is going to, you know, lead to any specific thing in the future? It's this idea of valuing truth over information, truth being, you know, truth hurts, like truth is something painful. Where is the pain right now? What is specifically causing the pain? If you can centralize that and attack it, then that's good. If you're just getting information, you know, all, you know, on news, like just constant, just so many things are going bad and everything's unstable, you're just going to get this general sense of nihilism and despair and it gives you paralysis. And you do, you should be informed, but you should really, like, gravitate more towards what is a, kind of durable

pains in your life that you can actually have some effective changeover in the moment. That would be my advice, and I think that it, at least for me, whenever I've dealt with anything involving despair or pain, that's usually, maybe not consciously what I was going for, but that's usually the most effective kind of state that I'm in in order to get past that. And I think it's, in my opinion, it's pretty realistic advice. Well, Ben, it's been a wide-ranging conversation. We've done everything from the manosphere to nihilism to sports. I almost forgot that we had that little diversion.

And thank you for clarifying that you do not speak on behalf of all. I think it was women, trans people, and medical professionals. I'm just trying my best, yeah. I'm presuming, since you have more subscribers than I do, that most people listening to this will already know who you are. But just in case they do not, Sisyphus 55 is the way to find you on YouTube. You have a podcast as well, which goes on the same channel. But I presume you probably stick it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Can you find it that way?

Yeah, yeah. I tend to listen on YouTube myself. But I really appreciate you taking the time, man. I'm glad we finally got to sit down together. Like I say, I've been watching your videos. a long time and I think it's um you know overdue that we that we finally got to meet. Yeah no thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure talking.