How many sides does a piece of paper have? I’ll give you a second…
Two?
No.
It's actually six. You don’t realize until you start stacking it.
There’s a lot of things in life that take us by surprise, a lot of things that aren’t really as
they seem. Like elephants being herbivores: they’d be a lot more scary if they were carnivores.
Your parents told you not to talk to strangers, yet, here we are. When you’re
talking or conversing with someone online, a lot of times you don’t really know much about them.
The nice thing about not knowing anyone's age on the internet is that
you can pretty much get in an argument with an 8-year-old and leave feeling superior.
That serotonin boost can be exactly what you need some days.
A lot of us could use a boost of those happy chemicals to help make our lives a lot easier.
When you experience depression, your brain refuses to produce, let’s call it a “happy
hormone,” as a reward for your brain cells for doing what they're supposed to do.
And, as a result, your cells go on strike, refusing to work for no pay, and the whole
system comes crashing down, benefiting absolutely nobody involved. Sounds… strikingly familiar.
History repeats.
And speaking of history, it must have been really awkward being the first historian
to have ever existed. I can just imagine that conversation happening. It’s like:
“So, what are you doing?” “Just writing down everything
that’s been happening.” “Why?”
But the way we view “history” is now changing.
At some point, the internet will be older than all humans alive,
and future generations will have tons of high quality video footage of so many extinct animals,
old civilizations, and where Santa used to live before the arctic melted and disappeared.
That might make you feel like an old doomer,
but remember, the number of people older than you never increases, it only decreases.
It’s like a lifelong race to be ranked #1, except the prize for winning is just death.
And out of the billions of people who ever lived, just one of them suffered the most
agonizing death of us all. So far. But maybe that happened hundreds of years ago. Until trains were
invented in 1804, every human who ever lived that experienced a speed upwards of 56 mph,
was falling to their death. Normally the floor is what stops gravity from killing us,
but if we get too far away from it, gravity uses the floor to kill us.
Life is short, so they say, but life is only short if you love your life.
Otherwise, it is very, very, painfully long. It’s like playing a game. In this case,
it'd be more painful to lose the game by 1 point than by 100 points, you know what I mean?
But enough with being morbid.
Good dreams are basically a free trial of a life you could have been living.
But in a way, if there are an infinite number of universes, then our dreams actually aren’t
dreams, they’re clips and previews from another universe that we can see into.
But our universe isn’t so bad.
Being able to go to sleep without worrying that you’ll get eaten by some random animal is probably
the most privileged thing about our modern world. It wasn’t always like that, so we should really
appreciate it. We really don’t appreciate a lot of free things in life, like taking your health
for granted all the time… until you’re sick, only then do you actually care… oh, and email.
We take our own planet for granted almost daily. National parks are
a perpetual reminder of what the world would look like if it weren’t for humans.
Ironic how we enjoy them so much, isn’t it?
I just blinked, and most of the time, we barely even notice how often we blink. Characters in
first person video games never blink, if you think about it. It doesn’t feel like much, it’s just one
of those manual processes that our bodies do for us that we just forget about. We really
take for granted how smooth the insides of our eyelids are, imagine if they were like sandpaper.
Us humans can barely live with one another without trying to kill each other, so the fact that people
can convince themselves that meeting aliens would go smoothly is nothing short of pure hopium. If
they got upset with us, they’d just throw another one of those big rocks at Earth and we’d be toast.
And speaking of big rocks, the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs' reign on
Earth was technically the highest ratio of killing birds to one stone
in Earth’s history. From all the life on land to all the life in Earth’s oceans,
99% of everything was wiped out in an instant. We are part of that remaining 1%.
I liked that quote so much I put it on a hoodie, you can get it here.
Still, the deep ocean is terrifying. People will swim in the ocean at beaches, even though there
are definitely many corpses in it. People will not swim in a pool with a corpse in it though,
so therefore, as weird as it sounds, humans all have a corpse:water ratio
that is acceptable for them to swim in. You can see why people don’t like oceans now, huh?
Water makes fabric a darker shade even though water is clear.
I guess I probably should’ve taken my clothes off before I got in the shower.
After I shower, I normally brush my teeth,
and I’m super grateful to be able to do that. Most animals have never seen their own teeth,
let alone be able to clean them. As much as you’d like to believe it, wisdom teeth aren’t useless,
they’re actually the reason some oral surgeons are able to make a living. It’s quite the career.
It’s weird, we choose our careers when we’re worst informed about what they’re actually
like. Some people will work the same job for their entire life,
wondering what life could’ve been like if they had taken a slightly different path.
Who knows, you could’ve ended up like Jeff Bezos and have more money than brain cells, literally.
200 billion is a massive number. There is a certain point in everyone's life where
"How high can you count?" changes from a matter of knowledge to a matter of will,
and I wouldn’t attempt this one. Counting to 200 billion would take you over 6… thousand years.
Our brains just aren’t capable of even comprehending things that large. It’s strong,
but not the strongest. Yes, the brain did indeed name itself, but it also recognized that it named
itself and was surprised when it realized that, so are we actually as smart as we think we are?
We can’t see into the future, unfortunately we aren’t psychic.
But always remember, psychics that don't accept walk-in appointments
aren’t real psychics. They’d be expecting them, right? But although we can’t see the future,
we do remember the important events that happened in our lives in the past. Some
stranger somewhere still remembers you because you were kind to them when no one else was.
You’ve made an impact in their life. You made them feel something no one else could. However,
almost universally, you can instantaneously stress out any person just by shouting “hey, catch.”
That was uncalled for, and I’m sorry for that. Getting hit in the face by a ball at that speed
would most definitely have you in the hospital. The hospital is simultaneously the building where
most people leave without entering and also the building most people enter without leaving. We're
born against our will. We also die against our will. But regardless, we’re here, we’re alive.
Kids don’t really enjoy sleeping, it’s always seemed like a hassle to get them
to finally go down. It’s probably because they haven’t gotten bored of life yet.
They’re young and may be here against their will, but there’s still so much to see, so much to do.
Kids are all different, but they all have one thing in common: they’re brutally honest.
The easiest way to tell if you’re obese is to ask a kid to draw you.
If they draw your stick figure with a line for the body, you’re probably fine.
However, if they draw you with a circle… I got some bad news for you.
You can be underweight or you can be overweight, but you can’t be weight.
We all change as we age. We grow, we mature. This can be seen in many ways.
There was a moment where your mom or dad picked you up as a baby and put you down,
only to never pick you up again. You got big, you grew up.
If you’re still decently young, the odds are that you still haven’t met the majority of people who
you’ll befriend in life, and those are the same people who will inevitably be at your funeral
when the lights go out one last time. As sad as it sounds, most guys will receive their first
bunch of flowers at their funeral. Go buy your friend a flower, I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.
If you happen to be older however, and you go to college at an old enough age,
the odds of you taking a history class that are simply life events you experienced
is actually quite high. If you happen to be in an English class however,
I wish you the best of luck. I understand how English can be difficult to learn,
I’ve always said this. Though only one letter apart, creation and cremation are
two very opposite things. And somehow the “old” you is actually your “younger” self.
It can sometimes seem like it’s completely backwards.
It reminds me of passwords. Passwords have probably stopped more people from getting
into their own accounts than hackers, having the opposite effect that it was intended to have.
Protecting your belongings is important, even if you’re protecting yourself from you, apparently.
Funny enough, there are locks in a police locker room to prevent theft. These are the people we
call when our houses get broken into, and yet they can’t even stop themselves from
stealing from each other. If a cop gets caught stealing, does he, by law, have to arrest himself?
Hopefully they’d be on house arrest, because people who were sentenced to
house arrest in 2020 really lucked out timing wise, because we all were too.
Luck would have been on your side, and for most, luck is hard to come by. Gambling is
only considered an addiction if you’re bad at it, otherwise you’re considered a lucky degenerate.
At least you’re rich though. But if someone tells you, “you look like a million bucks!”
don’t get an ego. It’s less and less of a compliment every year because of inflation.
Regardless, plenty of people have struck it rich based purely off of coincidence and luck.
Sometimes, it doesn’t take that much. A lot of Google’s revenue comes from
people that are just too lazy to type “.com” after the end of their search.
Coincidences can either make us look really, really good or really, really bad. For example, a
guy walking around with one crowbar is a lot more suspicious than a guy walking around with three
crowbars. School zones have a very specific speed that you need to be driving at. Drive too slow and
you’re really creepy, but drive too fast and you start wondering why the speed bumps are screaming.
Okay, sorry, that was a pretty distasteful joke, it’s a guilty pleasure. We all have
guilty pleasures, but to be honest, every pleasure is a guilty pleasure… if you’re anxious enough.
Anxiety sucks. We’ve all experienced it at some point or another, and it can really
get in the way of so many things in life: your work, your free time, even your relationships.
It doesn’t matter how many fish there are in the sea if you don’t know how to fish,
you know? The night before you have a day off is like 100x better than the actual day off itself,
because you’re already worrying about the next day when you have to go back.
Anxiety gets in the way of everything.
But no matter how anxious or lonely you get, just know that somewhere out there,
there's a lonely piece of paper that's been in the same printer tray for years and years on end,
simply because new paper is always loaded on top of it before the rest runs out.
Everyone and everything has a purpose, except that piece of paper. So don’t let it get you down,
you’ve survived every battle you’ve gone through. You’re undefeated.
In the end though, we’re all losers in the race of time. Time is limited, so make the most of it.
Me personally? I’ll be seeing if I can make a slinky go down an escalator forever.
It might be a waste of time.
Actually, it is a waste of time.
But I’ll be happy, and that’s all that matters… I think.