I'd like to remember the me that walked to work this morning listening to this will continue to exist in that moment, long after present me forgets. If he does, I will be happy.
lmao I'm surprised there aren't more people in the comments talking about this joke. Especially considering that CJ's wearing trans flag makeup the whole time
I started thinking this way when I had a psychotic depressive episode in my teens. The ONLY thing that kept me going was knowing my future self was looking back at me, proud. I kept thinking, shes okay. She did it. She's grown so much. And she loves me. And eventually, I wasnt psychotic anymore, and wasnt as depressed anymore, until eventually I BECAME the me who is looking back at psychotic, depressed me. And I am okay. I've grown so much. And I love younger me. I'm supporting her now. And she will grow up and be so happy she knew I was there to love her now. The verb tense thing is happening - idk what tense to use. Because this whole thing is happening now, happened then, and will happen. I support myself eternally.
I remember seeing a post that went like “I’m an adult now, and I want to tell past me at 15 and everyone here who’s young and struggling: life seems hard right now, things may seem hopeless or horrible, you may be suffering daily, but I can tell you with certainty it gets better, I was a severely depressed teen who contemplated su1cide and was so sad all the time, i never thought or planned to get to the age I am, but here I am, it gets better”
@@renoia3067You’re probably crying for all 3. I know that younger me would be proud I found myself surrounded by so many amazing people because that is all I’ve ever really wanted in my life and I’m proud of them for making the decisions I made to find myself here. They were sad but hopeful and that hopefulness got me where I am.
Time is an illusion that helps things make sense, so we are always living in the present tense, it can be unforgiving when a good thing ends, but you and I will always be back then. Singing will happen, happening, happened. Cos you and I will always be back then.
One of my favourite things about Arrival and spoilers specifically is that my dad has watched the film about 5 times and each time he has no clue what happens
One of my favorite things about getting older is exactly this. Rewatching things as if its the first time I'm watching it is far, far more common than it was when I was young, where I would remember a film or a book within an inch of its life from so many rewatches and rereads.
I relate to your dad; watched the movie about 3 separate times, had multiple people explain the concept and plot to me, seen countless reviews, and it wasn’t until I watched this disorganized, completely nonsensical video that I finally understood what the heck was happened :,)
this video just reminded me of the (repeated) moment in my philosophy classes where I was like "sure i could lose myself in the idea that i am not percieving anything real and panic about the countless ways i may or may not be experiencing life. ...or i could just keep on living because real or not this is the body and the reality i have to work with"
I like your phrasing of "the reality I have to work with," it caused me to address the underlying fear that, if this is just a simulation, it can only end at the arbitrary decision of a higher being. That's a valid worry in one sense, but ultimately just a wild guess based only on the personal experience of a single person in a reality that hasn't even arrived at it's own perfect simulation. I have no way of knowing if anything I'm doing has meaning, but I enjoy thinking that it does and no evidence to the contrary, so I may as well keep at it. tl;dr I feel way better, thanks.
I watched this movie in a film theory class within a big lecture hall. The class was silent the whole time, not a damn peep like usual, but when her husband leaned in and said "You wanna make a baby?" everyone in the class burst out into laughter. 10/10 experience
As someone that speaks three languages fluently this movie truly fucked me up because I realized that every language that I speak changes the way that I see the world. If I think in English I think like a person that believes in the scary freedom of nihilism, in Italian I almost feel like an essentialist and that my life is inherently worthy because predetermined and in French I just feel lost and only care about taking days as they come. Arrival to me was a revelation because it allowed me to grasp at least partially a fourth inexistent language, I cannot see the future and past and present as one, but I know that it is impossible for me to think like a heptapod until I learn their language, and as they do not exist it is impossible for me to understand the world like they do, the movie made me accept my ignorance, I accept that I will never know if time flows linearly or in a circular manner, what matters is that I cannot change my perception of it because all the languages that I know are linear. This probably made no sense but finally I found a video that perfectly embodies how I felt about the movie and had to share my thoughts
you guys should watch or read ludwig wittgenstein even if only the youtube clips on youtube from the movie. is very good and about how language effect how you see the world.
"It happened, it will happen, it's happening right now." I remember this didn't really hit me until I was watching a youtube video that I first watched in 2013. It was a chillingly delightful thing to think "That 13 year old me is still experiencing that video for the first time." To imagine that that event is still going on for another version of me...It makes me feel oddly small, but also it imbues that moment with a lot of meaning.
The idea of "god", of a creator, is likely the effect our predisposition to view reality as cause and effect, extrapolated to the grand scale. Prime mover stuff. Probably coupled with the parent thing, which makes sense why a lot of gods act like a big angry father. It's us trying to comprehend this concept of existence using our limited experiences.
This made me think of the part in the Bible where when Moses asks God who are you he literally jus say “I am that I am” we jus give this infinity Omnipresent creator different names jus to be able to comprehend it. Even after the quote it said “I am that I am” Moses is confused and “God” essentially had to use more concrete words to to make it Comprehendible by saying “I am the God of your ancestors“ . Even in this little tangent of mine I had to use words such as God or creator jus so I can know we have a common understanding of what I’m talking about. Even me talking about this is kind of redundant bc I ultimately believe in a God (I’m Christian to be specific) but someone who doesn’t simply can dismiss the thought all together if they choose not to look into it. So yea jus anted to share bc I it was an interesting thought that jus passed though my head and language is a mindfuck.
@@bekka-_-9041 Yeah, it's conflating the idea of a creator with "truth". A clever twist, but a messy one (mostly because of the implications on "god's" agency).
Your first part about spoilers actually was really true to my personal experience of arrival: I had the twist of the movie “spoiled” for me, and then decided to read the short story. Then when I watched the movie I felt like I was living it as Louise does after she understands the heptapods - I got to see the movie unravelling and anticipate how it was playing out by remembering the story. Literally it was happening, it had happened, it was going to happen. Anyway time isn’t real.
@@FrecklesHasAQuestionMark Everything stays right where you left it Everything stays But it still changes Ever so slightly, daily and nightly In little ways, when everything stays Another month passes
I started crying in the shower at “I want to participate” realizing in the last week I’ve felt significantly less depressed and started doing things because I want to
i have OCD pretty much based around existentialism. Im constantly obsessing over my death, the deaths of my loved ones, and time. This video was really easy for me to understand and digest because I've spent hours dedicated to thinking about scenarios like these, or how...right now i feel like i am in the present, and in ten years i will feel like i am in the present and i will remember this present as the past etc etc. To me its very comforting to think that my life is like a play and this is just a role I have to fulfill. I think the true horror creeps up when I think about having free will. My life could have been different? How? Am I just not strong enough to give myself a good life? I can't think about it too long or I'll have a panic attack. Its much easier to think that this life is just something i have to experience and there is nothing wrong with me for living this life.
I have OCD as well, and the intrusive thoughts about death and existentialism are the reason i usually don't watch movies like arrival. nonetheless, i really like it, and it's a lot more strangely comforting than I'd expected?
"When I was alive, I believed - as you do - that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls. (...) You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that - then any time at all will be the right time for you." - Peter S. Beagle, _The Last Unicorn_
Saying "it happened, it is happening, it will happen" honest to god makes me a lot more comfortable whit my existence. thinking "I could have stoped [thing], it was all my fault" and shit like that is a big part of dealing whit trauma and autistic guilt. But just stopping and going "I couldn't have done *shit* " is refreshing as fuck. Everything was planned in advance, front the worst days of my life to the best ones it was all decided way before I was born, and it is also being decided right now, and has not even been decided yet by all matters and purposes. I got the chance by random to just be chucked into the time space I am experiencing rn. The bird living on my roof that got me into a panick attack thinking someone was breaking in last week, has always been there and will forever be, despite it's existence being fully debatable. time is funky and I want sprite now
I find it deeply comforting, especially as a person with depression and trauma. I'm always one step away from my happiest moment lived (or worst) because it's always still happening. Even though I can't reach it, it's there. And all present momentary suffering is unavoidable and inescapable. I lose the despair of thinking that I could have acted differently, should have made better choices, and I know that I will either move past pain or die from it, and that neither are in my control. That's a massive comfort when you're in a bad mental state, in my experience. I hope one day we all get to experience nonlinear time :) I want to be a kid again without all the fear of not knowing how my life will turn out. I want to see my mom again, like I did then.
I find this concept deeply comforting too. And I think it’s because my perspectives have changed over the years. When I was younger I used to see the concept as “everything I do and everything in this lifetime is out of my hands and I am not in control of my life.” But now I see it more so as i’m not in control of my death, I have no say over how, when, or why I will die. That’s comforting to me because I would rather not have control over my death than not have control over my life or the way I choose to live it.
Same! I wonder if trauma and depression and similar cognitive modes have an effect on our subjective experience of time as being something other than direct?
That’s quite interesting as my brain sometimes in adhd or anxiety mode I have no recollection of past or concept of future yet it’s effects linger and with anxiety it’s everything future and all it’s possibilities are happening “at once”, as in jumping from the next to the next thing and circling throughout until I ground and Arrive ;):( in the “present” where little thoughts and just intuition of time ever flowing yet the same in essence all throughout.
@@dartxni it prolly do, i know for me, dealing with some of the stuff i have, my timeline of events now feel very skewed, both in how long things feel to me and how directly i feel them.
I lost all of my friends and my close relationships with my whole family when I came out. I don't regret it, but it was and is so enormously painful. Doing the 'past and future' exercise you suggested brings me a strange sense of peace, the feeling that the love and companionship I used to have with these people who were so precious to me still exists, somehow. Thanks for a wonderful video; I'm very happy to have discovered your channel.
When I watched Arrival, I did so while at college with a group of friends. The last 10 minutes of the movie, as well as 20 minutes after the movie, I was a crying, inconsolable mess. The film resonated with me so deeply. As an Indigenous person with strong (and at times incomprehensible) ties to ancestors, spirits, and "ghosts," I have always had more of a simultaneous understanding of time. I tend to disassociate into memories that aren't necessarily mine (as in, the memories of someone else), or that are mine from "the future" (I know, it sounds crazy, but it's just how I operate). I've been a source of wisdom for my friends and even my parents since I was a child. I didn't really realize until later that this was an unconventionable way of being. I will also say that, in my perspective, the fact that I see the way I do, does not mean that events in time are "set," it just means they have already happened--you just haven't perceived them yet. They are still wholely your (or my, or our) actions. This probably sounds so wacky, but I just don't really have the vocabulary to accurately describe it. This is as close as I can get rn, lol.
This shouldn’t be relatable. But more time goes by more relatable this comment is. I get dejavu ridiculously often. And dreams have started feeling less like brain nonsense and more like a mix of imagination and future memories. I don’t have the memories that aren’t mine part, (though occasionally I’ll have dreams that definitely don’t feel like mine,) but it’s incredible that I’m not totally alone and or crazy.
Literally this has always been my experience, only I haven’t had the understanding or awareness to correctly articulate what it was. There is absolutely choice, just a heightened awareness and perception of what is.
this is so cool i want to add my own experience (im bad at articulating so bear with me): i get a lot of moments of deja vu fairly often, but they all come from dreams? i cant tell you how many times im talking with someone and stop for a moment because i swear that id experienced it in a dream. never before, never something similar, ive experienced those few seconds sometime before in a dream. absolutely wild how weird the world is. i hope you all have/had/will have a good day!
Oh man, this is exactly what I pursued studying metaphysics and determinism in college. My degree made me a physicalist and hard determinist, and I derive so much calmness and strength from it. Everything that happened before in my life was causally necessary to make me now. I'm proud of where I am, so the things I'm ashamed of don't hurt: they were necessary. I'm not anxious about the future, those things are already going to happen (within a probability distribution due to quantum mechanics). When I take a test, I've already taken the test; everything that's happened before has already determined what the result of that test will be, I'm just along for the ride. The conclusion you reach is a really important one. My mentor Manuel Vargas created a category of determinism called revisionism to bridge the gap between our experience of free will and the facts of deterministic physical sciences. Essentially, we think we have free will, so that affects how we behave (even if it's still predetermined). At that point, we might as well say we have the experience of free will, even though it's dependent on the fact that we can't see the future to know our choices are predetermined. It's a similar idea to deal with simulation theory: the value of what you're doing doesn't change because there's a higher universe. Just like the predetermined future, you can't access the layer above you in the simulation. The Stoics had a deterministic metaphysics in their philosophy: the entire universe was completely scripted and infinitely looping. The only power an individual has is the ability to assent to their deterministic situation. Resisting your role is the root of all your suffering. It's a little unclear how they specifically reconcile this resistance or assent having no affect on your behavior, but the sentiment is a good one. Everything is already going to happen, and you'll feel much better about it if you do the best you can. After all, learning about this determinism should just become a factor in your causal calculus that forces you to make better choices going forward.
i think this is my favourite video of yours thus far, they just keep getting better and better. it never fails to blow my mind how you're able to take papers and all the research and transform it into something so consumable and uniquely YOURS (it also pisses me off because I'm envious and in awe but that's a conversation for another day). this video itself has a striking intimacy to it and made me inexplicably emotional. also you don't get to be hot and have brain cells and be able to articulate yourself you can't have it all i will not allow it just choose one thing GO
@@cjthex I can't go through 1700+ comments to check, so I'll just ask: was it ever in your notes for this video to mention compatibilism? Seems like the biggest thing to talk about when trying to get people to be OK with a (super)deterministic universe and a lack of "absolutely free" will. As I understand it, the basic compatibilist argument is that _will_ itself is only meaningful in a deterministic universe where your decisions are based on what was happening around you right before you made your decision (not snap ideas unrelated to anything just popping into your head), and where decisions produce predictable consequences. "Free will" in a non-deterministic universe might be totall free, but it's practically meaningless and useless, having no specific relation to anything else happening around you prior to your decisions, *and* no ability to produce predictable consequences. So determinism-compatible will is the only will worth having anyway.
Also worth mentioning: if all particles are assumed to have a describable "position" along the time axis as they do along all space axes, so if the time axis is assumed to "work exactly like" the space axes, this leads to a concept called "block time" and to a corresponding "block universe": if everything is determined along all 4 axes you could imagine representing the whole universe for all of its existence as a 4-dimensional already shaped "block" (or in this case a tesseract, 'cos 4 dimensions - we saw them awkwardly try to represent such a thing for us in 2D in a certain movie called "Interstellar").
This movie means so much to me. I saw this movie on accident with my mom when it was in theater. We were meant to see Allied but she bought tickets to Arrival on accident. We sat there in the theater as the movie began to play and I hadn't even heard of it or seen a trailer before being immersed in the story. About 15 mins in I realize this was not a preview but rather the movie and instead of leaving We decided to stay and see how it was. We were not prepared. My mom, at the time was studying linguistics in her masters program and was fascinated by it. To our surprise we were both happy to see this movie leaning into something so important to her that is almost never talked about, language!! I remember hearing the song On the Nature of Daylight in this movie for the first time and it made me cry. Seeing the montage of Amy Adams' character's life with her daughter and the grief and joy she experienced simultaneously was incredibly moving. Flash forward about a year or so and I found myself in the same position. My mom was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. She went through several months of chemo, surgery, nothing worked and eventually in November of 2018 she passed away. I thought back to this movie we saw together on accident about the relationship between a mother and daughter and time and cancer and it was like it was all happening at once. I felt like I was experiencing my mom's presence in my past and in my future and in the present. She had passed on but her essence and love was and is eternal. I think this film really does a good job tackling the feeling of grief too. It makes us realize that when someone dies, it's like we get to experience them now for their fullness while simultaneously not experiencing "them" at all. When someone dies, we now get to see them beyond their present tense, physical form. Their energy is transformed into an eternal energy that lives on with us into the future, sits with us in the present, and comforts our perception of the past. Grief is a twisted form of eternal consciousness. On the Nature of Daylight still brings me to tears to this day, I still experience my mom's presence all around me, and I still love this film.
This is silly but when I lose something I try to think to myself "I already found it" and imagine myself finding it, instead of thinking how I lost it, then I just assume if I am able to find it I will
@@hotchipz idk if it does more than not maybe it just helps me manage my anxiety lol or like connect to my subconscious to find where it is? since my conscious mind can't remember
I decided to watch this video without reading the book or watching the movie, and I cried twice and got chills when CJ plucked the flower. This ain’t an essay this is an experience and I’m glad I participated
It makes me meditate on my relationship with memory itself… the traumatic past is happening and will be happening describes my relationship with reliving those memories, and gives me hope for the good memories in my life. They also happened, are happening, and will be happening in my mind, and remembering that during tough episodes is no small comfort.
i remember my favorite first kiss from half a lifetime ago when i was young enough to fall in love. it happened, it will happen, it’s happening right now... comforting. it’s not just a faded memory dissolving into oblivion; it’s a very real patch of spacetime practically within arm’s reach on the cosmic scale of things - i could touch her cheek if i just stretched a little harder. more tantalizingly, it’s forever _about to happen_ - those fleeting butterflies are etched into eternity :’o]
Doing the little "it happened, it will happen, it's happening right now" and I felt the urge to cry but not with happiness or sadness, but with relief.
As someone with memory issues, Arrival is infinitely comforting for me. It’s nice to see someone else be just as passionately excited about both book and movie. I’m so glad I found your channel.
wow. the simple phrase "you are to perform the play that is your life" literally instantly changed the way i think about myself. i cant express the extent of it in a youtube comment, nor would it be appropriate... i feel like my mental health just did a 180. thank you
“I remember what it will be like when you are a day old.” Is THE BEST and most accurate line in describing what looking forward to the birth of any child after your first is. This weird middle of the known and unknown taking place at the exact same time while also not existing at all beyond the thought alone. It is both physically present- like the memory of a kiss - and also an illusion. DAMN THIS IS MESSING MY BRAIN
When I condense my life to a single moment, I feel... I don't know. It's not easy to describe. A sinking feeling in the chest, like a warm, airy dread. I imagine it would be exactly like if my soul is microwaved.
Me and my mom watched this movie completely by accident! We were in the theatre to watch an entirely different movie, but we arrived late so we just chose a random other movie to watch. We had NO idea what this film was about, nor had we even heard about it. Needless to say we left the theatre rather stunned by the emotions
This reminds me of what BMO from Adventure time sang. “Time is an illusion that helps things makes sense. That’s why we are living in the present tense. We’ll happen happening happened.”
me too. it was basically the thing that lead me to realize how scientifically chaotic the universe really is it changed my world view i love it and hate it so much thank you goodbye o7
ted chiang's work is science fiction at it's best. each short story is thought provoking. story of your life... if i recall correctly, is more affecting than the movie. the movie has more 'emotion' but the short story poses more interesting/impactful questions. arrival removes one of the most affecting dimensions that story of your life asks... the daughter's death is preventable. the protagonist is living her life accepting the totality of her daughter's existence, including how her life will end. And she will accept that as well. An incurable disease removes that moral dimension etc.
This....feels super weird familiar. I grew up on the feral side and isolated. Traumatized from super young. And I rarely had _any_ control over _any_ thing (kind of the same as now, really). Because either abusers had and hoarded that control; or I had no support or finances to chose anything other than the absolute minimal that's accessible -- despite any dreams, planning, or imagination that I could muster. And I always had trouble with writing tenses. And sometimes I would use 'you' when I mean 'I', and visa versa. And trauma does that thing where it wheels and wheels in the mind, repeating. So in a way, for me, bad stuff that happened, is _always_ happening. Good stuff that happened -- simple joys and pleasures -- that people always seemed to enjoy, but then skim by and quickly forget (....because people with normal lives and brains....they just make new pleasures whenever they want...right?) ...well. I would cherish the good moments and store them up inside. And hypervigilance ....it makes the present really sharp, and makes the future something you're (sorry, I'm) _always_ thinking of and predicting, so that little really surprised me. Maaayyyybe I really am an alien. ^^; But at any rate, this vid is gonna help me parse the way other people think better, so. Thanks! 🙆🏾♀️✨🖖🏾
I connected to every word in your comment. I hope for you to get your agency the same way I hope to have it myself. And also, thank you for the perspective, it'll be interesting to look at my relationships with time and existing in it!
Reading “A Wrinkle in Time” when I was QUITE young already gave me a similar perspective. I love that the conversation continues. The way L’Engle describes time… with some events so big that it ripples through the timeline and you FEEL them in the past and the future and the present. It created a habit in me of “sending love” back through the timeline and forward in the timeline to my past and future selves. It’s brought me a lot of comfort since I was like seven years old.
Huh, I didn’t realize Ted Chiang is an atheist! “Hell is the Absence of God” is the first thing I ever read of his and it’s shocking that it wasn’t written by someone with deep deep ties into a prevailing faith. Then again, maybe that story is exactly why... Anyway, awesome video!
This idea at 20:55 has changed my life. Since I last watched this video a few months ago, this has been my mantra during both good times and bad times. Sometimes, I can't wait for a moment to come. Others, I can't wait for it to be over. Life is full of these sorts of moments, and I've started learning to appreciate them more, especially preparing while I'm preparing for big changes in my life. I've been using this phrase to "bookmark" events, whether it was when I felt awful at work or my college graduation a few days ago. I've realised that sequential time really is an illusion, but for us sequential creatures, the most important thing is to live in the moment. We have agency, and how we use it is what defines us. I absolutely loved the short story and the video you made on it. Thank you for changing my life.
This is amazing! I came here from Khadija's shoutout and stayed because you're the only youtuber I don't have to watch at 1.5x speed ;) this one was fantastic
I have a genetic quirk which will kill me the same way my mother died and her mother before her, in a way that is slow and where they lost all of themselves to the point they could not breathe. I learned about having this gene two years after having the great fortune of deciding to watch a film about experiencing all things all at once. I was always going to die of this regardless of whether I knew I was going to or not - it is my responsibility and joy to live my life the way I was always going to. It happened, it will happen, it's happening right now.
I apologize in advance for this overly-personal comment on a video that's now a month old but I just wanted to thank you for making this. This video brought me to tears and, although I'm still not entirely sure why, I think you've enabled me to look at some traumatic past stuff in a really helpful, new light. your videos are incredible man, thank you.
This movie is actually based on Linguistic Relativity which means by acquiring a new language we acquire a new way of seeing the world, which exactly what happened to the protagonist in the movie.
i remember when i was 12 i had my first existential crisis because i was at a friend's birthday and we were watching the matrix, i was really anxious and i called my brother because i thought he would be the only one to understand me, I explained to him that i was having a crisis "what if we're also in a simulation? what if nothing i see is real and im fictional?" to which he only replied "so what? what would realistically change? what effect would that have in your life? if your life is important and meaningfull to you why would it matter it was created inside a computer?" completely blew my mind then and made me never worry about that ever again, so honestly who cares if we have free will or not, we will never know and it makes no difference really if you never find out "the truth"
When going through the exercise of thinking about everything happening in the past, present, and future, I thought it was going to leave me in despair giving me an existential crisis at 4 in the morning, but it has actually comforted me quite a lot. I regret and hate my past while also being scared and overwhelmed by the future. But if everything happens in the past, present, and future then shouldn't I accept it all? Why wear myself out constantly being both scared and regretful if everything has happened, is happening, and will happen? I guess all of this is to say that letting these emotions get the better of me will never, has never, and is not worth caring about- not in some nihilist kind of way (though I can definitely see that) but more in a hopeful way where I don't have to hate myself... Idk tbh this might not make sense or even not really be the point of the exercise; I need to be getting sleep right now lol- but in my own way it has made me more comfortable. Also like many others, I have been binge-watching ur videos and I'm so glad I found this channel because it's definitely one of my new favorites!
what you describe around 21:00 is the mindset that i had during my suicidal days. i felt so detached from reality and time. it felt like the bad memory from the past was so far away yet so close. and everytime that i now dread sth in the future i find so weird to look at after it passes. just like that painful memory prior to my suicidal days.. almost as if i cant grasp time and it just passes through me
I feel this. Arrival is hard for me to watch because I feel that I flipped to the end of the book ahead of time and it is hard to engage fully in the present, and I feel like Louise where you're always a little out of step and have to decide what to tell people around you- or if it's even possible to express that feeling. The past is gone forever, but it's also still right here with me. The future is always ahead of me but it's also crushing me. And I'm here, but I'm not here. I try to be and it hurts to Be Here Now, but it hurts so be detached too. Idk maybe arrival isn't great to watch in a mental health spiral, but it also is kind of comforting so idk
I’ve felt this way too. Back during my brief stint in college, I started to fall into a bad mental spiral and it lasted until the day I dropped out. I would suddenly be thrown back into my worst days and I would have to brave the horrible storm of darkness all over again. Maybe everybody experiences that though; the ghost of the past wrecking havoc in your head. The small personal tragedies of ‘what if’s’ and ‘if only’s’. We just got to get used to carrying that weight.
i enjoy the way time works because it makes life seem much harder to fuck up, like there’s literally nothing i can do to stop my trajectory because there is nothing i can do to change my experiences and thus personality
The first time i watched this, i think i was cleaning my daughter's bottles and other dishes in the sink. I've listened to this while working, while sewing, while sitting on the couch with my husband while he scrolls through something. I just listened to this while in the shower. It still makes me think and feel and consider. Today I'm watching it while eating lunch, subconsciously preparing to contribute to the book club thread discussion today. My daughter is having a nap, and my eyes want to sleep but my brain doesn't. Now i am listening to this while i consider the nature of God, Time, and Freedom, pinging back and forth with a new friend. Thank you for this video, CJ.
I loved Arrival's existential dread of circular time, choice and autonomy and Annihilations's existential dread of self, guilt and grief. The two films had me thinking for on them for weeks after the first watch.
Ok i watched the rest of the video and ngl I had to pause it cause that part about life happening simultaneously was actually really helpful to me, I have DID and this genuinely helped reframe some things so thanks ❤
I can't love the leap of thinking of about my life in this way because I don't trust myself. For whatever reason I'm more motivated when I let myself believe that there are different endings, accepting that there's only one makes me feel like I am destined to be the most milquetoast version of myself, which I am super opposed to. Getting myself to act on empathy and faith in people, or act on anything at all, takes effort, it's not my default. If I believe in only default, what difference does it make if I don't put in that effort? If I cause suffering, aren't I just one of the villains of the play, exactly as non-culpable as the heroes, bound to a script? Does suffering matter? Is this the best script we could have gotten? Why so much murder porn and fluorescent lighting? Exercise made me feel scared, would play again.
PATRON DETECTED. ADVANCED APPRECIATION PROTOCOLS ACTIVATING. YOUR INSIGHT AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IS NOW INTRINSICALLY VALUABLE. WE APPRECIATE YOUR PARTICIPATION IN THIS PROCEDURE.
bc all stories are happening simultaneously, as a human being, you can step into any of these realities. you step into them in dreams, or fantasies. if you want to believe this, when you die you get reborn into a different story or reality. bc you are a being your consciousness is connected to all the different ways you want to be and live. you have you will experience all of these.
Recently someone I cared a lot about died suddenly and I was in such a state thinking about things I wish I had done and wishing I had spent more time with them and one of the only things that calmed me down was thinking about the past like it was no less real than the present, and imagining that that time when they were alive was in a way still happening and that probably sounds really pretentious but it was really very comforting.
I can’t believe you went this entire video and didn’t mention Slaughterhouse Five which was the og book about a protagonist who has come unstuck in time and processes their trauma thusly while hanging with some aliens.
yea slaughterhouse 5 is a great book. it definitely skews more towards nihilism from what i remember when i read it though, so that might be a little wacky to include if we're arguing that our lives have meaning in spite of our lack of agency. i remember thinking of it when watching arrival and it felt like arrival tried to take the idea of nonlinear time more seriously (or at least with more seriousness) whereas slaughterhouse 5 was more about pointlessness and absurdity, especially in regards to war. both have places in this conversation though.
I paused near the beginning of this video and watched "The Arrival" movie before finishing. Both the movie and this video are so good! I love thinking about all of these existential/nihilistic/deterministic questions. I can get overwhelmed about it but I like the way you explained that life is still worth living just for the sake of experiencing it, no matter how we got here or where we will end up.
I'm at a really big transitional part of my life right now and I'm not exactly confident about a lot of the decisions I'm making...but this video genuinely gave me a weird glimmer of hope for the future, so thank you for that
The thought that the present is the one moment where everything we will do and everything we have done collide... where in a single second our actions are becoming prophecy and history... is FUCKING AWESOME! It makes me feel powerful oh my gosh! Like even typing this right now is become something that I did. At the same times it’s something I was always going to do. THATS SO COOL!!
1) Congrats on 1000 subs!! that's really impressive and I know more people will follow you soon✨I know I really enjoy your videos 2) Time certainly is not real, but one thing that I've been thinking about more often is the way that we as a society currently think about time is very much the result of imperialist impositions of the concept that largely stem from capitalism. In so many other cultures time does not weigh down on the community as it does for people in the "west" because time is not value the same. Things get done when they get done, you live until you die and that's fine, but in societies propelled by capitalism these ideas don't work because "time is money" and your life's purpose is to push to accumulate more.
In his collection Exhalation, Ted Chiang has a couple more short stories about whether or not the future is fixed and how knowing that impacts a person. I highly recommend them. “What’s Expected of Us” and “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.”
It's comforting, really: If you're already gone, if you haven't even been born yet, if your existence isn't any different from your abscence, if you are just a story, you never really cease to exist, regardless of past and future, "you and I will always be back then". Like Janet in the good place, if time is all at once, nobody's ever gone, because there's nowhere else to go.
It’s the fear of being forgotten and that I won’t have mattered in the grand scheme of things for me. Way to give me an existential crisis (while high) and also have me laughing and thinking hard, really good video
True. But 1000 years from now almost everybody, no matter how famous they are, will have long faded into obscurity. Also, Henry David Thoreau famously stated in Walden that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Of course, they didn't have television or the internet in 1854. Everybody was desperate for entertainment. All they had were books, traveling minstrel shows, and preachers to distract them from the daily grind. It's our own fault if we cannot find something to be passionate about! But, in the end, does it matter?
I watched this video months ago. It gradually faded from my mind until I completely forgot that I had ever seen it, and then I decided to watch it today. The experience of recalling the video as I watched it, of remembering each point just before CJ made it--effectively having memories of my future experience--felt thematic as fuck.
hey i just wanna say thank you for stopping me from having that spiral of derealization aroun the 10 minute mark. thank you for like stepping right in and reminding the audience you were just having a fun little thought experiment. it really helped.
I just watching a bunch of CJ videos to cope with a recent break up, and I stop the video to laugh about what he said about the last of us 2 and the last jedi. I seriously lost my shit laughing.
I’ve listened to this four times in a row now and each time it just resonates more and more with me. And I’m curious about what this says about the nature of storytelling and how we interact with stories. When you engage with a story, especially after a first viewing, you are immersing yourself in the world. The events that play out on the screen or page are happening, have happened, and will happen. The words on the last page are going to happen, regardless of where in the book you are. And the first pages have happened, even if you start reading in the middle of the book. I used to read books by skipping around. I’d start from somewhere in the middle, skip to see the ending, and go back to the start to figure out how we got there even though I knew where things were going to end up. I can’t tell you why I did this, other than my ADHD brain had a very short attention span and didn’t like to get fully invested in a slow set-up until I knew where it was going. But it instilled in me a similar sense of time that you’ve outlined here, even if the characters in the book aren’t aware of their fate and the author probably didn’t write their book to be read the way I did. And all of that, on top of my own religious beliefs and personal existential crises, has helped shape the ethos I live my life by: fate is propelled by choice. Free will is the mechanism by which destiny occurs. And that really has made all the difference to me.
"fate is propelled by choice. free will is the mechanism by which destiny occurs" ...wow. yeah. you put in words something i've been wrestling to articulate for a while now, having recently gained a new sense of agency over my life & a better delineation (or melding) of 'my free will vs. God's Will'.
I really like the opening discussion on spoilers, I usually don’t bother watching a movie if I don’t at least know the gist of the plot and some kind of hook so having things spoiled for me increases the chance I check out a film
It happened, it will happen, it’s happening right now. The way I think of this is past tense; the moment I’d first went through that situation was in the past. It happened. A situation like that will occur in the future, I will inevitably experience those same emotions. It will happen. During this current second I am thinking about both these situations. It’s happening right now. And in future tense I think of it as, this situation will happen in the future. It will happen. This situation is one that I have thought of for a long time. It happened. This situation is one that I’m thinking of right now. It’s happening.
That joke. 😂. Dyed eggs with my family and made a bunch of them trans colors.. I was cracking (all puns intended) myself up, I had to explain eggs to them. Cis folks so clueless.
i sometimes wonder how people can stay so stagnant in their beliefs when these ideas are so readily available. idk maybe they just like feeling comfy or something i don’t blame them
I think that sometimes it’s easiest to block off emotions or ideas that might set off a change in the way you live/go abt ur day to day life. By rejecting change they find comfort in going through the same patterns that have been reinstated since they were just kids; likely thinking “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” instead of going through the long emotional process of understanding, acceptance, and lastly making a change. Basically it’s easier for them to deny something instead of going through an existential crisis b4 realization/understanding like the rest of us 💀
Who can blame them, really? What do they have to gain? Understanding? Understanding that nobody knows fuck about anything? :P Better from their perspective to believe in their self-constructed absolutes.
@@tahunuva4254 @Gabi Michelle i second these statements. for any sort of life changing decisions there has to be a catalyst. if nothing around you changes (i.e. a stable suburban life) there wouldn’t be any reason for them to question the state in which they live. i recommend you go search up “The Hero’s Journey” by Joseph Campbell. it’s a map of character development. i would say the people like this are living at the very fist stage. (the Known/Ordinary/Townsfolk’s world.)
@@insecureintellectual4783 The monomyth, yeah. Actually attempted to make a video game based around it, once.. Honestly, if our current reality is running off a similar formula, I'm pretty sure I'm the villain :P
I've never really got existential crises because they never really bothered me because it's like no matter what you say or think in the moment that I am experiencing right now is still this moment.
Wow, I am so thrilled to have found your videos. You're incredibly knowledgeable & entertaining AND your style is clearly cool as hell too? I'll definitely be marching my ass over to your Patreon in a bit here, hah. I look forward to seeing more videos as you put them out!
Arrival exactly encompasses what it means to let a story grow with you. I loved it the first time I watched it, but it was the yearning to rewatch it and then revisiting it that led to it becoming my all time favorite movie. I watched it a bunch in college and took a couple of years from it, and then rewatched it recently. I was terrified it wouldn't hold up, but instead I had chills up and down my body and nearly cried from how powerful it still was to me. This is the only movie I wish I could see for the first time again. I don't know that this quite fits the prompt you were discussing, but I also happened to find this movie after it was out of theaters, right in the middle of my grandpa dying of cancer, and I was very heartbroken and bitter and wondering if all this pain was worth it. As I rewatched this movie several times between my first viewing and my grandpa's passing, this movie helped me realize that yes, it's painful, and yes, losing people is one of the worst things that can happen. But seeing Louise still choose to have a child, even knowing that she was still going to lose her, helped me realize that I still preferred the world where I held all this pain in order to keep that relationship with my grandpa.
I think it's important to remember that just because everything is a product of the things that came before it does not make any of those things meaningless. When we discovered the stars did nothing but sparkle in the sky and could only kill us by accident it shocked the world and maybe made things feel less grand and important. But everything was important as it ever was. You are a product of things outside of your control but you are still you. Even if the actions you choose are predetermined they can come from a real place of personal investment. Time's like a book, just because you can do nothing to change the outcome doesn't mean it's unimportant
I can’t believe that we never talked about 1. How this is one of my favourite films and ... 2. I had no idea that it came from a short story which I will now read immediately
i dont understand
No one will:)
@cece jb I don't mean it as it it wasn't understandable,I meant it as it was really different than anything else I've listened to t
@cece jb 👍._.👍
Who is this child
I'd like to remember the me that walked to work this morning listening to this will continue to exist in that moment, long after present me forgets. If he does, I will be happy.
“Can an egg percieve reality? Why don’t you go check in the mirror”
And then it cracked
lmao I'm surprised there aren't more people in the comments talking about this joke. Especially considering that CJ's wearing trans flag makeup the whole time
lmao good for you
the egg or the mirror?
@@StrawmnMcPerson both both is good
I started thinking this way when I had a psychotic depressive episode in my teens. The ONLY thing that kept me going was knowing my future self was looking back at me, proud. I kept thinking, shes okay. She did it. She's grown so much. And she loves me. And eventually, I wasnt psychotic anymore, and wasnt as depressed anymore, until eventually I BECAME the me who is looking back at psychotic, depressed me. And I am okay. I've grown so much. And I love younger me. I'm supporting her now. And she will grow up and be so happy she knew I was there to love her now. The verb tense thing is happening - idk what tense to use. Because this whole thing is happening now, happened then, and will happen. I support myself eternally.
I remember seeing a post that went like “I’m an adult now, and I want to tell past me at 15 and everyone here who’s young and struggling: life seems hard right now, things may seem hopeless or horrible, you may be suffering daily, but I can tell you with certainty it gets better, I was a severely depressed teen who contemplated su1cide and was so sad all the time, i never thought or planned to get to the age I am, but here I am, it gets better”
@nessar9241 Amen! Well done. I"m proud of you, and I love you.
(this is radical love no i don't know you).
I can't tell if I'm crying for 12-year-old me or 20-year-old me or 30-year-old me but I'm crying
@@renoia3067You’re probably crying for all 3. I know that younger me would be proud I found myself surrounded by so many amazing people because that is all I’ve ever really wanted in my life and I’m proud of them for making the decisions I made to find myself here. They were sad but hopeful and that hopefulness got me where I am.
Time is an illusion that helps things make sense, so we are always living in the present tense, it can be unforgiving when a good thing ends, but you and I will always be back then. Singing will happen, happening, happened. Cos you and I will always be back then.
This is the most comforting existential crisis I've ever had
Same
i wanna like but 888 is more comforting lol
This is just cliche existential crisis to me at this point... i love it still.
All of mine are comforting. Idk.
this is the most comforting being yelled at for 25 minutes I've ever had
"Faith is being stupid enough to imagine that life has meaning."
I love this quote and I will likely be citing you at some point.
I love that there, Christian it makes it so much funnier
someone looks extra cute today
someone looked extra cute that day
someone looks extra cute today
someone will look extra cute one day
Thanks, you too :)
Thanks you 😌😉
Thanks
😏
Help
ok
No. Deal with your dread and pain and fear.
One of my favourite things about Arrival and spoilers specifically is that my dad has watched the film about 5 times and each time he has no clue what happens
real dad shit honestly
One of my favorite things about getting older is exactly this. Rewatching things as if its the first time I'm watching it is far, far more common than it was when I was young, where I would remember a film or a book within an inch of its life from so many rewatches and rereads.
Its funny, cause it's not even that hard to understand. But maybe I'm just being pretensious 😂
So…no acid in his past, present, future?
I relate to your dad; watched the movie about 3 separate times, had multiple people explain the concept and plot to me, seen countless reviews, and it wasn’t until I watched this disorganized, completely nonsensical video that I finally understood what the heck was happened :,)
this video just reminded me of the (repeated) moment in my philosophy classes where I was like "sure i could lose myself in the idea that i am not percieving anything real and panic about the countless ways i may or may not be experiencing life. ...or i could just keep on living because real or not this is the body and the reality i have to work with"
I like your phrasing of "the reality I have to work with," it caused me to address the underlying fear that, if this is just a simulation, it can only end at the arbitrary decision of a higher being. That's a valid worry in one sense, but ultimately just a wild guess based only on the personal experience of a single person in a reality that hasn't even arrived at it's own perfect simulation. I have no way of knowing if anything I'm doing has meaning, but I enjoy thinking that it does and no evidence to the contrary, so I may as well keep at it.
tl;dr I feel way better, thanks.
I watched this movie in a film theory class within a big lecture hall. The class was silent the whole time, not a damn peep like usual, but when her husband leaned in and said "You wanna make a baby?" everyone in the class burst out into laughter. 10/10 experience
Why is that funny?
As someone that speaks three languages fluently this movie truly fucked me up because I realized that every language that I speak changes the way that I see the world. If I think in English I think like a person that believes in the scary freedom of nihilism, in Italian I almost feel like an essentialist and that my life is inherently worthy because predetermined and in French I just feel lost and only care about taking days as they come. Arrival to me was a revelation because it allowed me to grasp at least partially a fourth inexistent language, I cannot see the future and past and present as one, but I know that it is impossible for me to think like a heptapod until I learn their language, and as they do not exist it is impossible for me to understand the world like they do, the movie made me accept my ignorance, I accept that I will never know if time flows linearly or in a circular manner, what matters is that I cannot change my perception of it because all the languages that I know are linear. This probably made no sense but finally I found a video that perfectly embodies how I felt about the movie and had to share my thoughts
this exactly! I know French and English and thinking in French gives me this weird confidence boost where English makes everything feel more heavy(?)
Dude. Those are the 3 languages I speak. Who are you ? Are you a clone ? AM I A CLONE ?? ARE YOU ME FROM THE FUTURE FUCK
When I speak french I feel frustrated and confused
you guys should watch or read ludwig wittgenstein even if only the youtube clips on youtube from the movie. is very good and about how language effect how you see the world.
Charles V -- Hapsburg -- once said, "He who speaks another language possesses another soul.".
"It happened, it will happen, it's happening right now."
I remember this didn't really hit me until I was watching a youtube video that I first watched in 2013. It was a chillingly delightful thing to think "That 13 year old me is still experiencing that video for the first time."
To imagine that that event is still going on for another version of me...It makes me feel oddly small, but also it imbues that moment with a lot of meaning.
How then, can we conceive of a God we named?
I came here because of you ma'am, I love him now. And I'm in love with you too.
The idea of "god", of a creator, is likely the effect our predisposition to view reality as cause and effect, extrapolated to the grand scale. Prime mover stuff. Probably coupled with the parent thing, which makes sense why a lot of gods act like a big angry father.
It's us trying to comprehend this concept of existence using our limited experiences.
This made me think of the part in the Bible where when Moses asks God who are you he literally jus say “I am that I am” we jus give this infinity Omnipresent creator different names jus to be able to comprehend it. Even after the quote it said “I am that I am” Moses is confused and “God” essentially had to use more concrete words to to make it
Comprehendible by saying “I am the God of your ancestors“ . Even in this little tangent of mine I had to use words such as God or creator jus so I can know we have a common understanding of what I’m talking about. Even me talking about this is kind of redundant bc I ultimately believe in a God (I’m Christian to be specific) but someone who doesn’t simply can dismiss the thought all together if they choose not to look into it. So yea jus anted to share bc I it was an interesting thought that jus passed though my head and language is a mindfuck.
@@bekka-_-9041 Yeah, it's conflating the idea of a creator with "truth". A clever twist, but a messy one (mostly because of the implications on "god's" agency).
historians believe the sumerians were aliens. perhaps they, too, saw time differently.
Your first part about spoilers actually was really true to my personal experience of arrival: I had the twist of the movie “spoiled” for me, and then decided to read the short story. Then when I watched the movie I felt like I was living it as Louise does after she understands the heptapods - I got to see the movie unravelling and anticipate how it was playing out by remembering the story. Literally it was happening, it had happened, it was going to happen. Anyway time isn’t real.
"Time is an ilusion that help things make sense, so we're always living in the present tense" -BMO, the King of Ooo
this comment is a month old but I want to say that I'm glad I'm not the only one who was reminded of that adventure time song
@@FrecklesHasAQuestionMark Everything stays right where you left it
Everything stays
But it still changes
Ever so slightly, daily and nightly
In little ways, when everything stays
Another month passes
@@FrecklesHasAQuestionMark yeah. the lyrics "will happen, happening, happened." is literally just what they are saying
My immediate thought
it seems unforgiving when a good thing ends but you and i will always be back then
So glad Ted Chiang is getting the love he deserves for the way he writes, not just what he writes. Exhalation an amazing collection
I started crying in the shower at “I want to participate” realizing in the last week I’ve felt significantly less depressed and started doing things because I want to
i have OCD pretty much based around existentialism. Im constantly obsessing over my death, the deaths of my loved ones, and time. This video was really easy for me to understand and digest because I've spent hours dedicated to thinking about scenarios like these, or how...right now i feel like i am in the present, and in ten years i will feel like i am in the present and i will remember this present as the past etc etc. To me its very comforting to think that my life is like a play and this is just a role I have to fulfill. I think the true horror creeps up when I think about having free will. My life could have been different? How? Am I just not strong enough to give myself a good life? I can't think about it too long or I'll have a panic attack. Its much easier to think that this life is just something i have to experience and there is nothing wrong with me for living this life.
I have OCD as well, and the intrusive thoughts about death and existentialism are the reason i usually don't watch movies like arrival. nonetheless, i really like it, and it's a lot more strangely comforting than I'd expected?
"When I was alive, I believed - as you do - that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls. (...) You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that - then any time at all will be the right time for you."
- Peter S. Beagle, _The Last Unicorn_
One of my favorite quotes from my favorite book. More than a few essays have probably been written about its perspectives on time and illusion.
I absolutely love this. Thank you for sharing.
And now I have a new book to find and read. Thank you and thank search algorithms!
Seriously, thank you.
I've watched this video so many times and somehow never seen this comment. Thank you so much; I will be adding this to my reading list :')
I love this so much
Saying "it happened, it is happening, it will happen" honest to god makes me a lot more comfortable whit my existence.
thinking "I could have stoped [thing], it was all my fault" and shit like that is a big part of dealing whit trauma and autistic guilt. But just stopping and going "I couldn't have done *shit* " is refreshing as fuck.
Everything was planned in advance, front the worst days of my life to the best ones it was all decided way before I was born, and it is also being decided right now, and has not even been decided yet by all matters and purposes.
I got the chance by random to just be chucked into the time space I am experiencing rn. The bird living on my roof that got me into a panick attack thinking someone was breaking in last week, has always been there and will forever be, despite it's existence being fully debatable.
time is funky and I want sprite now
I find it deeply comforting, especially as a person with depression and trauma. I'm always one step away from my happiest moment lived (or worst) because it's always still happening. Even though I can't reach it, it's there. And all present momentary suffering is unavoidable and inescapable. I lose the despair of thinking that I could have acted differently, should have made better choices, and I know that I will either move past pain or die from it, and that neither are in my control. That's a massive comfort when you're in a bad mental state, in my experience.
I hope one day we all get to experience nonlinear time :) I want to be a kid again without all the fear of not knowing how my life will turn out. I want to see my mom again, like I did then.
I find this concept deeply comforting too. And I think it’s because my perspectives have changed over the years. When I was younger I used to see the concept as “everything I do and everything in this lifetime is out of my hands and I am not in control of my life.” But now I see it more so as i’m not in control of my death, I have no say over how, when, or why I will die. That’s comforting to me because I would rather not have control over my death than not have control over my life or the way I choose to live it.
Beautifully said!
Same! I wonder if trauma and depression and similar cognitive modes have an effect on our subjective experience of time as being something other than direct?
That’s quite interesting as my brain sometimes in adhd or anxiety mode I have no recollection of past or concept of future yet it’s effects linger and with anxiety it’s everything future and all it’s possibilities are happening “at once”, as in jumping from the next to the next thing and circling throughout until I ground and Arrive ;):( in the “present” where little thoughts and just intuition of time ever flowing yet the same in essence all throughout.
@@dartxni it prolly do, i know for me, dealing with some of the stuff i have, my timeline of events now feel very skewed, both in how long things feel to me and how directly i feel them.
I lost all of my friends and my close relationships with my whole family when I came out. I don't regret it, but it was and is so enormously painful. Doing the 'past and future' exercise you suggested brings me a strange sense of peace, the feeling that the love and companionship I used to have with these people who were so precious to me still exists, somehow. Thanks for a wonderful video; I'm very happy to have discovered your channel.
Hello, two years ago You. I hope that you’ve found peace and comfort and community and acceptance.
When I watched Arrival, I did so while at college with a group of friends. The last 10 minutes of the movie, as well as 20 minutes after the movie, I was a crying, inconsolable mess. The film resonated with me so deeply. As an Indigenous person with strong (and at times incomprehensible) ties to ancestors, spirits, and "ghosts," I have always had more of a simultaneous understanding of time. I tend to disassociate into memories that aren't necessarily mine (as in, the memories of someone else), or that are mine from "the future" (I know, it sounds crazy, but it's just how I operate). I've been a source of wisdom for my friends and even my parents since I was a child. I didn't really realize until later that this was an unconventionable way of being.
I will also say that, in my perspective, the fact that I see the way I do, does not mean that events in time are "set," it just means they have already happened--you just haven't perceived them yet. They are still wholely your (or my, or our) actions.
This probably sounds so wacky, but I just don't really have the vocabulary to accurately describe it. This is as close as I can get rn, lol.
This shouldn’t be relatable. But more time goes by more relatable this comment is.
I get dejavu ridiculously often. And dreams have started feeling less like brain nonsense and more like a mix of imagination and future memories.
I don’t have the memories that aren’t mine part, (though occasionally I’ll have dreams that definitely don’t feel like mine,) but it’s incredible that I’m not totally alone and or crazy.
Literally this has always been my experience, only I haven’t had the understanding or awareness to correctly articulate what it was. There is absolutely choice, just a heightened awareness and perception of what is.
This is exactly what I was trying to articulate in my head
this is so cool i want to add my own experience (im bad at articulating so bear with me):
i get a lot of moments of deja vu fairly often, but they all come from dreams? i cant tell you how many times im talking with someone and stop for a moment because i swear that id experienced it in a dream. never before, never something similar, ive experienced those few seconds sometime before in a dream. absolutely wild how weird the world is. i hope you all have/had/will have a good day!
This probably doesn't mean anything, but I often find myself laughing at a joke, only to realise that the joke was said after I laughed.
Oh man, this is exactly what I pursued studying metaphysics and determinism in college. My degree made me a physicalist and hard determinist, and I derive so much calmness and strength from it. Everything that happened before in my life was causally necessary to make me now. I'm proud of where I am, so the things I'm ashamed of don't hurt: they were necessary. I'm not anxious about the future, those things are already going to happen (within a probability distribution due to quantum mechanics). When I take a test, I've already taken the test; everything that's happened before has already determined what the result of that test will be, I'm just along for the ride.
The conclusion you reach is a really important one. My mentor Manuel Vargas created a category of determinism called revisionism to bridge the gap between our experience of free will and the facts of deterministic physical sciences. Essentially, we think we have free will, so that affects how we behave (even if it's still predetermined). At that point, we might as well say we have the experience of free will, even though it's dependent on the fact that we can't see the future to know our choices are predetermined.
It's a similar idea to deal with simulation theory: the value of what you're doing doesn't change because there's a higher universe. Just like the predetermined future, you can't access the layer above you in the simulation.
The Stoics had a deterministic metaphysics in their philosophy: the entire universe was completely scripted and infinitely looping. The only power an individual has is the ability to assent to their deterministic situation. Resisting your role is the root of all your suffering. It's a little unclear how they specifically reconcile this resistance or assent having no affect on your behavior, but the sentiment is a good one.
Everything is already going to happen, and you'll feel much better about it if you do the best you can. After all, learning about this determinism should just become a factor in your causal calculus that forces you to make better choices going forward.
i think this is my favourite video of yours thus far, they just keep getting better and better. it never fails to blow my mind how you're able to take papers and all the research and transform it into something so consumable and uniquely YOURS (it also pisses me off because I'm envious and in awe but that's a conversation for another day). this video itself has a striking intimacy to it and made me inexplicably emotional. also you don't get to be hot and have brain cells and be able to articulate yourself you can't have it all i will not allow it just choose one thing GO
I pick being hot
@@cjthex Priorities
@@cjthex I can't go through 1700+ comments to check, so I'll just ask: was it ever in your notes for this video to mention compatibilism? Seems like the biggest thing to talk about when trying to get people to be OK with a (super)deterministic universe and a lack of "absolutely free" will.
As I understand it, the basic compatibilist argument is that _will_ itself is only meaningful in a deterministic universe where your decisions are based on what was happening around you right before you made your decision (not snap ideas unrelated to anything just popping into your head), and where decisions produce predictable consequences. "Free will" in a non-deterministic universe might be totall free, but it's practically meaningless and useless, having no specific relation to anything else happening around you prior to your decisions, *and* no ability to produce predictable consequences. So determinism-compatible will is the only will worth having anyway.
Also worth mentioning: if all particles are assumed to have a describable "position" along the time axis as they do along all space axes, so if the time axis is assumed to "work exactly like" the space axes, this leads to a concept called "block time" and to a corresponding "block universe": if everything is determined along all 4 axes you could imagine representing the whole universe for all of its existence as a 4-dimensional already shaped "block" (or in this case a tesseract, 'cos 4 dimensions - we saw them awkwardly try to represent such a thing for us in 2D in a certain movie called "Interstellar").
This movie means so much to me. I saw this movie on accident with my mom when it was in theater. We were meant to see Allied but she bought tickets to Arrival on accident. We sat there in the theater as the movie began to play and I hadn't even heard of it or seen a trailer before being immersed in the story. About 15 mins in I realize this was not a preview but rather the movie and instead of leaving We decided to stay and see how it was. We were not prepared. My mom, at the time was studying linguistics in her masters program and was fascinated by it. To our surprise we were both happy to see this movie leaning into something so important to her that is almost never talked about, language!! I remember hearing the song On the Nature of Daylight in this movie for the first time and it made me cry. Seeing the montage of Amy Adams' character's life with her daughter and the grief and joy she experienced simultaneously was incredibly moving. Flash forward about a year or so and I found myself in the same position. My mom was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. She went through several months of chemo, surgery, nothing worked and eventually in November of 2018 she passed away. I thought back to this movie we saw together on accident about the relationship between a mother and daughter and time and cancer and it was like it was all happening at once. I felt like I was experiencing my mom's presence in my past and in my future and in the present. She had passed on but her essence and love was and is eternal. I think this film really does a good job tackling the feeling of grief too. It makes us realize that when someone dies, it's like we get to experience them now for their fullness while simultaneously not experiencing "them" at all. When someone dies, we now get to see them beyond their present tense, physical form. Their energy is transformed into an eternal energy that lives on with us into the future, sits with us in the present, and comforts our perception of the past. Grief is a twisted form of eternal consciousness. On the Nature of Daylight still brings me to tears to this day, I still experience my mom's presence all around me, and I still love this film.
This is silly but when I lose something I try to think to myself "I already found it" and imagine myself finding it, instead of thinking how I lost it, then I just assume if I am able to find it I will
is that a jojo reference?????
big same lol
@@aryarego8205 is this blorbo from my shows?
@phosphenevision does it work tho??
@@hotchipz idk if it does more than not maybe it just helps me manage my anxiety lol or like connect to my subconscious to find where it is? since my conscious mind can't remember
BMo taught me before Arrival ever did. "Will happen, happening happened" "You and I will always be back then"
I love that line so much
I'm obsessed with the wrinkles you put in my brain 🥲
I decided to watch this video without reading the book or watching the movie, and I cried twice and got chills when CJ plucked the flower.
This ain’t an essay this is an experience and I’m glad I participated
love the fact that while listening to u talking about the simultaneity of time we see the sun set troughout the whole video
It makes me meditate on my relationship with memory itself… the traumatic past is happening and will be happening describes my relationship with reliving those memories, and gives me hope for the good memories in my life. They also happened, are happening, and will be happening in my mind, and remembering that during tough episodes is no small comfort.
i remember my favorite first kiss from half a lifetime ago when i was young enough to fall in love. it happened, it will happen, it’s happening right now... comforting. it’s not just a faded memory dissolving into oblivion; it’s a very real patch of spacetime practically within arm’s reach on the cosmic scale of things - i could touch her cheek if i just stretched a little harder. more tantalizingly, it’s forever _about to happen_ - those fleeting butterflies are etched into eternity :’o]
Not gonna lie man that kinda made me tear up
I love this. thank u for writing it and sharing
@@helila me too.. 'when I was young enough to fall in love'
this was very beautifully put
Doing the little "it happened, it will happen, it's happening right now" and I felt the urge to cry but not with happiness or sadness, but with relief.
As someone with memory issues, Arrival is infinitely comforting for me. It’s nice to see someone else be just as passionately excited about both book and movie. I’m so glad I found your channel.
wow. the simple phrase "you are to perform the play that is your life" literally instantly changed the way i think about myself. i cant express the extent of it in a youtube comment, nor would it be appropriate... i feel like my mental health just did a 180. thank you
“I remember what it will be like when you are a day old.” Is THE BEST and most accurate line in describing what looking forward to the birth of any child after your first is. This weird middle of the known and unknown taking place at the exact same time while also not existing at all beyond the thought alone. It is both physically present- like the memory of a kiss - and also an illusion. DAMN THIS IS MESSING MY BRAIN
“Faith is being stupid enough to believe that life has meaning” is a beautiful and metal quote that will stick with me for awhile
as an epistemic anti-realist linguistics major, arrival (and in turn this video) hits DOUBLE HARD
DAMMIT CJ THIS VIDEO IS SO GOOD
@@CameronBaba
When I condense my life to a single moment, I feel... I don't know. It's not easy to describe.
A sinking feeling in the chest, like a warm, airy dread.
I imagine it would be exactly like if my soul is microwaved.
Me and my mom watched this movie completely by accident! We were in the theatre to watch an entirely different movie, but we arrived late so we just chose a random other movie to watch. We had NO idea what this film was about, nor had we even heard about it. Needless to say we left the theatre rather stunned by the emotions
so, all set in motion by yall's UNTIMELY ARRIVAL :O !?
This reminds me of what BMO from Adventure time sang. “Time is an illusion that helps things makes sense. That’s why we are living in the present tense. We’ll happen happening happened.”
"New Text Layer" at 26:10 sent me, idk why lmfao
0:01 ahhh real coffee
Listening to them ramble for like 30 minutes is ✨ therapeutic ✨
Them? Are they enby?
@@blake-cf4lh ah ok.
I come back to this video year after year, it has made a significant impact on my life.
This is genuinely one of the most deeply affecting movies I've ever seen. No other movie has ever made me feel anything like what this one does.
me too. it was basically the thing that lead me to realize how scientifically chaotic the universe really is it changed my world view i love it and hate it so much thank you goodbye o7
ted chiang's work is science fiction at it's best. each short story is thought provoking. story of your life... if i recall correctly, is more affecting than the movie. the movie has more 'emotion' but the short story poses more interesting/impactful questions.
arrival removes one of the most affecting dimensions that story of your life asks... the daughter's death is preventable. the protagonist is living her life accepting the totality of her daughter's existence, including how her life will end. And she will accept that as well. An incurable disease removes that moral dimension etc.
This....feels super weird familiar.
I grew up on the feral side and isolated. Traumatized from super young. And I rarely had _any_ control over _any_ thing (kind of the same as now, really). Because either abusers had and hoarded that control; or I had no support or finances to chose anything other than the absolute minimal that's accessible -- despite any dreams, planning, or imagination that I could muster.
And I always had trouble with writing tenses. And sometimes I would use 'you' when I mean 'I', and visa versa.
And trauma does that thing where it wheels and wheels in the mind, repeating. So in a way, for me, bad stuff that happened, is _always_ happening. Good stuff that happened -- simple joys and pleasures -- that people always seemed to enjoy, but then skim by and quickly forget (....because people with normal lives and brains....they just make new pleasures whenever they want...right?) ...well. I would cherish the good moments and store them up inside. And hypervigilance ....it makes the present really sharp, and makes the future something you're (sorry, I'm) _always_ thinking of and predicting, so that little really surprised me.
Maaayyyybe I really am an alien. ^^;
But at any rate, this vid is gonna help me parse the way other people think better, so. Thanks! 🙆🏾♀️✨🖖🏾
I connected to every word in your comment. I hope for you to get your agency the same way I hope to have it myself. And also, thank you for the perspective, it'll be interesting to look at my relationships with time and existing in it!
You've got a really great way of looking at & engaging with the past & present (I guess that means the future too). All the best to you 🫶
oh god i just spent like 4 hours watching this channel in one shot this is gonna be so big
Reading “A Wrinkle in Time” when I was QUITE young already gave me a similar perspective. I love that the conversation continues. The way L’Engle describes time… with some events so big that it ripples through the timeline and you FEEL them in the past and the future and the present. It created a habit in me of “sending love” back through the timeline and forward in the timeline to my past and future selves. It’s brought me a lot of comfort since I was like seven years old.
One of my favorite books!!! It definitely made existing make more sense
Huh, I didn’t realize Ted Chiang is an atheist! “Hell is the Absence of God” is the first thing I ever read of his and it’s shocking that it wasn’t written by someone with deep deep ties into a prevailing faith. Then again, maybe that story is exactly why... Anyway, awesome video!
This idea at 20:55 has changed my life. Since I last watched this video a few months ago, this has been my mantra during both good times and bad times. Sometimes, I can't wait for a moment to come. Others, I can't wait for it to be over. Life is full of these sorts of moments, and I've started learning to appreciate them more, especially preparing while I'm preparing for big changes in my life. I've been using this phrase to "bookmark" events, whether it was when I felt awful at work or my college graduation a few days ago.
I've realised that sequential time really is an illusion, but for us sequential creatures, the most important thing is to live in the moment. We have agency, and how we use it is what defines us.
I absolutely loved the short story and the video you made on it. Thank you for changing my life.
This is amazing! I came here from Khadija's shoutout and stayed because you're the only youtuber I don't have to watch at 1.5x speed ;)
this one was fantastic
I'm also here because of Khadija and I'm so happy I watched this
Me too, I feel like I'm in on a secret now😌
Khadija gave him a shout-out? I just recently found both of their channels, but I had no clue about that. Nice! 💜
@@CalThePanPal i actually got them on my recommended before I got khadija, but I love them both
I normally watch most vids at 2x, but for these I have to bump it down to 1.5x XD
I have a genetic quirk which will kill me the same way my mother died and her mother before her, in a way that is slow and where they lost all of themselves to the point they could not breathe. I learned about having this gene two years after having the great fortune of deciding to watch a film about experiencing all things all at once. I was always going to die of this regardless of whether I knew I was going to or not - it is my responsibility and joy to live my life the way I was always going to. It happened, it will happen, it's happening right now.
I apologize in advance for this overly-personal comment on a video that's now a month old but I just wanted to thank you for making this. This video brought me to tears and, although I'm still not entirely sure why, I think you've enabled me to look at some traumatic past stuff in a really helpful, new light. your videos are incredible man, thank you.
I love the profound sense of "and?" I feel to living in a simulation
This movie is actually based on Linguistic Relativity which means by acquiring a new language we acquire a new way of seeing the world, which exactly what happened to the protagonist in the movie.
i remember when i was 12 i had my first existential crisis because i was at a friend's birthday and we were watching the matrix, i was really anxious and i called my brother because i thought he would be the only one to understand me, I explained to him that i was having a crisis "what if we're also in a simulation? what if nothing i see is real and im fictional?" to which he only replied "so what? what would realistically change? what effect would that have in your life? if your life is important and meaningfull to you why would it matter it was created inside a computer?" completely blew my mind then and made me never worry about that ever again, so honestly who cares if we have free will or not, we will never know and it makes no difference really if you never find out "the truth"
Honestly, Idc if I have no control over my life. Tbh I'm just tryna vibe n be happy.
very true
When going through the exercise of thinking about everything happening in the past, present, and future, I thought it was going to leave me in despair giving me an existential crisis at 4 in the morning, but it has actually comforted me quite a lot. I regret and hate my past while also being scared and overwhelmed by the future. But if everything happens in the past, present, and future then shouldn't I accept it all? Why wear myself out constantly being both scared and regretful if everything has happened, is happening, and will happen? I guess all of this is to say that letting these emotions get the better of me will never, has never, and is not worth caring about- not in some nihilist kind of way (though I can definitely see that) but more in a hopeful way where I don't have to hate myself...
Idk tbh this might not make sense or even not really be the point of the exercise; I need to be getting sleep right now lol- but in my own way it has made me more comfortable. Also like many others, I have been binge-watching ur videos and I'm so glad I found this channel because it's definitely one of my new favorites!
@UCRvbNWlZvwutJZxtN2EPOwQ Exactly! To be consumed by those memories/thoughts is so draining. Glad I wasn't the only one with these thoughts :)
what you describe around 21:00 is the mindset that i had during my suicidal days. i felt so detached from reality and time. it felt like the bad memory from the past was so far away yet so close. and everytime that i now dread sth in the future i find so weird to look at after it passes. just like that painful memory prior to my suicidal days.. almost as if i cant grasp time and it just passes through me
I feel this. Arrival is hard for me to watch because I feel that I flipped to the end of the book ahead of time and it is hard to engage fully in the present, and I feel like Louise where you're always a little out of step and have to decide what to tell people around you- or if it's even possible to express that feeling. The past is gone forever, but it's also still right here with me. The future is always ahead of me but it's also crushing me. And I'm here, but I'm not here. I try to be and it hurts to Be Here Now, but it hurts so be detached too. Idk maybe arrival isn't great to watch in a mental health spiral, but it also is kind of comforting so idk
I’ve felt this way too. Back during my brief stint in college, I started to fall into a bad mental spiral and it lasted until the day I dropped out. I would suddenly be thrown back into my worst days and I would have to brave the horrible storm of darkness all over again. Maybe everybody experiences that though; the ghost of the past wrecking havoc in your head. The small personal tragedies of ‘what if’s’ and ‘if only’s’. We just got to get used to carrying that weight.
i enjoy the way time works because it makes life seem much harder to fuck up, like there’s literally nothing i can do to stop my trajectory because there is nothing i can do to change my experiences and thus personality
The first time i watched this, i think i was cleaning my daughter's bottles and other dishes in the sink.
I've listened to this while working, while sewing, while sitting on the couch with my husband while he scrolls through something.
I just listened to this while in the shower. It still makes me think and feel and consider.
Today I'm watching it while eating lunch, subconsciously preparing to contribute to the book club thread discussion today. My daughter is having a nap, and my eyes want to sleep but my brain doesn't.
Now i am listening to this while i consider the nature of God, Time, and Freedom, pinging back and forth with a new friend.
Thank you for this video, CJ.
I loved Arrival's existential dread of circular time, choice and autonomy and Annihilations's existential dread of self, guilt and grief. The two films had me thinking for on them for weeks after the first watch.
my god same, watching those two movies side-by-side was truly something else
Ok i watched the rest of the video and ngl I had to pause it cause that part about life happening simultaneously was actually really helpful to me, I have DID and this genuinely helped reframe some things so thanks ❤
I can't love the leap of thinking of about my life in this way because I don't trust myself. For whatever reason I'm more motivated when I let myself believe that there are different endings, accepting that there's only one makes me feel like I am destined to be the most milquetoast version of myself, which I am super opposed to. Getting myself to act on empathy and faith in people, or act on anything at all, takes effort, it's not my default. If I believe in only default, what difference does it make if I don't put in that effort? If I cause suffering, aren't I just one of the villains of the play, exactly as non-culpable as the heroes, bound to a script? Does suffering matter? Is this the best script we could have gotten? Why so much murder porn and fluorescent lighting?
Exercise made me feel scared, would play again.
PATRON DETECTED. ADVANCED APPRECIATION PROTOCOLS ACTIVATING.
YOUR INSIGHT AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IS NOW INTRINSICALLY VALUABLE.
WE APPRECIATE YOUR PARTICIPATION IN THIS PROCEDURE.
@@cjthex best bux I've ever spent! Thanks I love it, my purchase of validation!
Great vid
bc all stories are happening simultaneously, as a human being, you can step into any of these realities. you step into them in dreams, or fantasies. if you want to believe this, when you die you get reborn into a different story or reality. bc you are a being your consciousness is connected to all the different ways you want to be and live. you have you will experience all of these.
Recently someone I cared a lot about died suddenly and I was in such a state thinking about things I wish I had done and wishing I had spent more time with them and one of the only things that calmed me down was thinking about the past like it was no less real than the present, and imagining that that time when they were alive was in a way still happening and that probably sounds really pretentious but it was really very comforting.
I can’t believe you went this entire video and didn’t mention Slaughterhouse Five which was the og book about a protagonist who has come unstuck in time and processes their trauma thusly while hanging with some aliens.
Omg I spent the entire video thinking of the connections with slaughterhouse five. It’s my favorite book in this entire planet.
@@lanabadan439 SAME.
yea slaughterhouse 5 is a great book. it definitely skews more towards nihilism from what i remember when i read it though, so that might be a little wacky to include if we're arguing that our lives have meaning in spite of our lack of agency. i remember thinking of it when watching arrival and it felt like arrival tried to take the idea of nonlinear time more seriously (or at least with more seriousness) whereas slaughterhouse 5 was more about pointlessness and absurdity, especially in regards to war. both have places in this conversation though.
Yesssss I love that book, and it’s so interesting how it has such a similar plot to this story, but they still have wildly different tones and themes.
I paused near the beginning of this video and watched "The Arrival" movie before finishing. Both the movie and this video are so good! I love thinking about all of these existential/nihilistic/deterministic questions. I can get overwhelmed about it but I like the way you explained that life is still worth living just for the sake of experiencing it, no matter how we got here or where we will end up.
I'm at a really big transitional part of my life right now and I'm not exactly confident about a lot of the decisions I'm making...but this video genuinely gave me a weird glimmer of hope for the future, so thank you for that
The thought that the present is the one moment where everything we will do and everything we have done collide... where in a single second our actions are becoming prophecy and history... is FUCKING AWESOME! It makes me feel powerful oh my gosh! Like even typing this right now is become something that I did. At the same times it’s something I was always going to do. THATS SO COOL!!
1) Congrats on 1000 subs!! that's really impressive and I know more people will follow you soon✨I know I really enjoy your videos
2) Time certainly is not real, but one thing that I've been thinking about more often is the way that we as a society currently think about time is very much the result of imperialist impositions of the concept that largely stem from capitalism. In so many other cultures time does not weigh down on the community as it does for people in the "west" because time is not value the same. Things get done when they get done, you live until you die and that's fine, but in societies propelled by capitalism these ideas don't work because "time is money" and your life's purpose is to push to accumulate more.
Pro tip: If you wait long enough, you just forget the spoilers.
In his collection Exhalation, Ted Chiang has a couple more short stories about whether or not the future is fixed and how knowing that impacts a person. I highly recommend them. “What’s Expected of Us” and “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.”
I dont even want kids, but this movie made me weep.
Ok
BUT WHY DO YOU ONLY HAVE LIKE 15 VIDEOS!!!! 😭😭😭😭
Seriously, I LOVE your poetic energy and analysis.
This is the most hopeful way I've heard this existential realization described. Also very amusing! Glad I clicked on this video!
You're one of my favorite creators on here and all of your videos are such a delight to watch and wonderfully enlightening!
It's comforting, really: If you're already gone, if you haven't even been born yet, if your existence isn't any different from your abscence, if you are just a story, you never really cease to exist, regardless of past and future, "you and I will always be back then". Like Janet in the good place, if time is all at once, nobody's ever gone, because there's nowhere else to go.
It’s the fear of being forgotten and that I won’t have mattered in the grand scheme of things for me. Way to give me an existential crisis (while high) and also have me laughing and thinking hard, really good video
True. But 1000 years from now almost everybody, no matter how famous they are, will have long faded into obscurity.
Also, Henry David Thoreau famously stated in Walden that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Of course, they didn't have television or the internet in 1854. Everybody was desperate for entertainment. All they had were books, traveling minstrel shows, and preachers to distract them from the daily grind. It's our own fault if we cannot find something to be passionate about! But, in the end, does it matter?
I watched this video months ago. It gradually faded from my mind until I completely forgot that I had ever seen it, and then I decided to watch it today. The experience of recalling the video as I watched it, of remembering each point just before CJ made it--effectively having memories of my future experience--felt thematic as fuck.
hey i just wanna say thank you for stopping me from having that spiral of derealization aroun the 10 minute mark. thank you for like stepping right in and reminding the audience you were just having a fun little thought experiment. it really helped.
I just watching a bunch of CJ videos to cope with a recent break up, and I stop the video to laugh about what he said about the last of us 2 and the last jedi. I seriously lost my shit laughing.
I’ve listened to this four times in a row now and each time it just resonates more and more with me. And I’m curious about what this says about the nature of storytelling and how we interact with stories.
When you engage with a story, especially after a first viewing, you are immersing yourself in the world. The events that play out on the screen or page are happening, have happened, and will happen. The words on the last page are going to happen, regardless of where in the book you are. And the first pages have happened, even if you start reading in the middle of the book.
I used to read books by skipping around. I’d start from somewhere in the middle, skip to see the ending, and go back to the start to figure out how we got there even though I knew where things were going to end up. I can’t tell you why I did this, other than my ADHD brain had a very short attention span and didn’t like to get fully invested in a slow set-up until I knew where it was going. But it instilled in me a similar sense of time that you’ve outlined here, even if the characters in the book aren’t aware of their fate and the author probably didn’t write their book to be read the way I did.
And all of that, on top of my own religious beliefs and personal existential crises, has helped shape the ethos I live my life by: fate is propelled by choice. Free will is the mechanism by which destiny occurs. And that really has made all the difference to me.
"fate is propelled by choice. free will is the mechanism by which destiny occurs"
...wow. yeah. you put in words something i've been wrestling to articulate for a while now, having recently gained a new sense of agency over my life & a better delineation (or melding) of 'my free will vs. God's Will'.
I really like the opening discussion on spoilers, I usually don’t bother watching a movie if I don’t at least know the gist of the plot and some kind of hook so having things
spoiled for me increases the chance I check out a film
It happened, it will happen, it’s happening right now.
The way I think of this is past tense; the moment I’d first went through that situation was in the past. It happened.
A situation like that will occur in the future, I will inevitably experience those same emotions. It will happen.
During this current second I am thinking about both these situations. It’s happening right now.
And in future tense I think of it as, this situation will happen in the future. It will happen. This situation is one that I have thought of for a long time. It happened. This situation is one that I’m thinking of right now. It’s happening.
Thank you for saying the thing I've been saying about spoilers for like ages
The egg joke I'm yelling how r u d e I'm a full grown tran thank uuu
SAME. lmao
That joke. 😂. Dyed eggs with my family and made a bunch of them trans colors.. I was cracking (all puns intended) myself up, I had to explain eggs to them. Cis folks so clueless.
I AM a girl, I WAS a girl, I WILL BE a girl again. Time is an illusion fuck you transphobes
that comment was a vicious attack on my personhood, 10 d10 psychic damage. never before have i been so blithely called out
look at my username im still a sad little egg oh God 😔
i’ve watched this a bajillion times and it never gets old thank you Mx. The X
i sometimes wonder how people can stay so stagnant in their beliefs when these ideas are so readily available. idk maybe they just like feeling comfy or something i don’t blame them
I think that sometimes it’s easiest to block off emotions or ideas that might set off a change in the way you live/go abt ur day to day life. By rejecting change they find comfort in going through the same patterns that have been reinstated since they were just kids; likely thinking “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” instead of going through the long emotional process of understanding, acceptance, and lastly making a change. Basically it’s easier for them to deny something instead of going through an existential crisis b4 realization/understanding like the rest of us 💀
Who can blame them, really? What do they have to gain? Understanding? Understanding that nobody knows fuck about anything? :P
Better from their perspective to believe in their self-constructed absolutes.
@@tahunuva4254 @Gabi Michelle
i second these statements. for any sort of life changing decisions there has to be a catalyst. if nothing around you changes (i.e. a stable suburban life) there wouldn’t be any reason for them to question the state in which they live.
i recommend you go search up “The Hero’s Journey” by Joseph Campbell. it’s a map of character development. i would say the people like this are living at the very fist stage. (the Known/Ordinary/Townsfolk’s world.)
@@insecureintellectual4783 The monomyth, yeah. Actually attempted to make a video game based around it, once..
Honestly, if our current reality is running off a similar formula, I'm pretty sure I'm the villain :P
@@tahunuva4254 BAHAHHAA lmao
I've never really got existential crises because they never really bothered me because it's like no matter what you say or think in the moment that I am experiencing right now is still this moment.
Something so unique is that this person is just screaming how time isn’t real and I’m like crying now
The first 5 seconds of this video, is always the start of my daily conversations.... with myself.
Will happen, happening, happened. This video just triggered me to go on adventure time binge good video.
Immediately heard this song when I saw the title
Wow, I am so thrilled to have found your videos. You're incredibly knowledgeable & entertaining AND your style is clearly cool as hell too? I'll definitely be marching my ass over to your Patreon in a bit here, hah. I look forward to seeing more videos as you put them out!
Arrival exactly encompasses what it means to let a story grow with you. I loved it the first time I watched it, but it was the yearning to rewatch it and then revisiting it that led to it becoming my all time favorite movie. I watched it a bunch in college and took a couple of years from it, and then rewatched it recently. I was terrified it wouldn't hold up, but instead I had chills up and down my body and nearly cried from how powerful it still was to me. This is the only movie I wish I could see for the first time again.
I don't know that this quite fits the prompt you were discussing, but I also happened to find this movie after it was out of theaters, right in the middle of my grandpa dying of cancer, and I was very heartbroken and bitter and wondering if all this pain was worth it. As I rewatched this movie several times between my first viewing and my grandpa's passing, this movie helped me realize that yes, it's painful, and yes, losing people is one of the worst things that can happen. But seeing Louise still choose to have a child, even knowing that she was still going to lose her, helped me realize that I still preferred the world where I held all this pain in order to keep that relationship with my grandpa.
I think my favourite thing about this video is the changing lighting that literally signifies the time of day. 10/10 4-D chess level manoeuvre.
Obsessed with how you started and ended the video with the same sentence
I think it's important to remember that just because everything is a product of the things that came before it does not make any of those things meaningless. When we discovered the stars did nothing but sparkle in the sky and could only kill us by accident it shocked the world and maybe made things feel less grand and important. But everything was important as it ever was. You are a product of things outside of your control but you are still you. Even if the actions you choose are predetermined they can come from a real place of personal investment. Time's like a book, just because you can do nothing to change the outcome doesn't mean it's unimportant
I can’t believe that we never talked about 1. How this is one of my favourite films and ... 2. I had no idea that it came from a short story which I will now read immediately