everybody is a total mess (and you should be one too)

Source: everybody is a total mess (and you should be one too), exurb1a, 14:51, uploaded 2024-12-17, Watch Later position 645.

The video opens with a giraffe who has the sads. A phone call to an elephant turns into a crypto pitch, a tiger offers advice that is hard to understand, and the conversation ends with the giraffe feeling worse. The scene establishes the problem in miniature. Life is awful at times, people are often unable to explain what hurts, and the culture around them treats direct attention to those facts as unhealthy or strange. Under the polite surfaces of ordinary life, everybody is a mess.

There are about 8 billion people alive, the video says, and an average life lasts about 26,000 days. That means roughly 300,000 people are having the worst day of their lives today. The number is presented as an estimate rather than a measured result, yet the scale gives the thought its force. Anyone can have a good day now. Everyone eventually reaches a day that breaks the arrangement they had been relying on.

The famous people who could not find their way back

The video searches for examples among people whose lives are well documented. In 1876, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote to his nephew that his life had little worth and that Russian music would lose little if he vanished. The source places that despair beside his status as one of the greatest composers in history, with Swan Lake and The Nutcracker among the works that survived him.

Franz Kafka felt hideously ugly and stupid, disliked his own writing, and asked a friend to burn his work after his death. The friend ignored the request. Frida Kahlo lived in the shadow of her famous husband, Diego Rivera, and saw herself as a failure. The source turns the relationship around for a present-day audience: Rivera is often known as Kahlo’s husband. Abraham Lincoln lost his mother at nine, his sister at nineteen, and his eleven-year-old son. He wrote that he was the most miserable man alive and imagined that a world which felt as he did would contain no cheerful face.

Michelangelo, Florence Nightingale, and Beethoven join the pile. Each passed through periods that they described as a place from which they could not find their way back to themselves. Fame makes the stories easy to recover. The same experience reaches ordinary people, whose worst weeks rarely survive in biographies.

The video then gives the pain a physical dimension. It says that the brain processes physical and emotional pain through many of the same regions and struggles to tell them apart. A broken heart can therefore feel like being shot. The claim is presented without a study or clinical source, yet it explains why the language of emotional pain often sounds bodily. People hurt before they have a clear account of what has happened.

Words for feelings that English leaves loose

The source connects this difficulty to language. English has few precise words for complex feelings, especially painful ones. Other languages supply terms that let a person name a narrow experience. The Arabic ya’aburnee describes wishing to die before someone you love so that you do not have to live without them. The French l’esprit de l’escalier names the perfect reply that arrives after you have left the party. The Italian cavoli riscaldati, literally reheated cabbage, describes trying to restart a relationship that already failed.

The list also contains gentler states. The Portuguese cafuné is the act of running your fingers through the hair of someone you like. The Japanese koi no yokan describes meeting someone and suspecting that the two of you will fall in love. The German Waldeinsamkeit names the solitude of being alone in the woods. The word does not have to describe sadness. The source values the extra resolution itself, since a feeling becomes easier to share once a language has made room for it.

The woods supply a turn in the argument. There is the planned walk with a map, a large backpack, and enough supplies to enjoy the day. There is also the walk in which twilight arrives, the way out disappears, and every attempt to escape makes the situation worse. A person in the second kind of wood has no useful language for the fear. They have a bad feeling that they will stay there forever, alone in a struggle that other people cannot see.

Daoism and the limits of control

The video moves from emotional vocabulary to Chinese literature. Zhang Zongchang, a nineteenth-century warlord and poet, wrote lines that amount to insults directed at everyone around him. One poem complains that the sky god makes life difficult and threatens to demolish his temple if it does not rain. The crude verses make the historical distance short. A person surrounded by power, weather, war, and personal frustration still wants an explanation from whatever appears to be in charge.

About two and a half thousand years earlier, Laozi is said to have grown tired of the kingdom where he lived and set out to become a hermit. At the city gate, a guard recognised him and demanded that he write down his wisdom before leaving. Laozi agreed and produced the Dao De Jing, the founding text of Daoism. The video notes that Laozi probably never existed as a single historical person, while the text certainly does.

The Dao, roughly the way or path, names the universe as it unfolds. The Dao De Jing begins from the fact that people understand very little about why anything exists, remain powerless over much of history, and sometimes remain strangers to themselves. Its answer includes wu wei, which the video translates as action without striving. A person gives up the fantasy of mastering every event and stops treating control as the condition for a good life.

Birds migrate because they do. The narrator spends a Monday drinking mojitos on the floor whilst pretending to be an iggly-wiggly squid because he wants to. Those jokes serve a serious point. The universe already contains its own movement, and human beings belong to that movement. The more forcefully a person tries to impose a private plan on everything around them, the more futile the effort becomes. The Dao De Jing therefore offers lines about happiness as the absence of striving for happiness, the world belonging to those who let go, and the patience required for muddy water to settle.

Daoism takes shape in the source’s account during the Warring States period, when seven states fought through a fractured China. A society in constant war starts looking for a way to live through chaos. The video sees the same pattern across a much longer history. People reach for new ways of seeing after a private or public order has failed.

Philosophies made under pressure

Athens was being defeated by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War when Stoicism emerged as an attempt to accept a changing and unpredictable world. The video moves through later disasters with deliberately dry repetition. Rome suffered the Great Fire in 64 CE, the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, and the Antonine Plague in 165, which the source says killed around 10 million people. In 536, a volcanic fog covered the sun for almost two years and helped produce the coldest decade in two and a half millennia. Crop failures and the Justinian Plague followed.

The An Lushan Rebellion in China killed around 30 million people, according to the source. The Mongol campaigns killed perhaps 40 million and removed enough carbon from the atmosphere to leave a trace in Antarctic ice cores. The Black Death then killed millions in Europe, after which humanism placed more weight on human reason and compassion. The Spanish conquest of the Americas brought further deaths through violence and disease. The Thirty Years’ War killed perhaps 8 million people and helped inspire the Enlightenment, personal autonomy, and representative government.

The Industrial Revolution produced great innovation alongside urban poverty, and the video links that poverty to Romanticism and utopianism. The Napoleonic Wars killed millions. The First World War killed about 50 million, and the Second killed about 70 million. From those catastrophes came existentialism, deism, pacifism, and other attempts to live with a world that had lost its old guarantees.

The source treats suffering as a cost that should have been avoided. It follows the resilience that appears after it. Human beings keep inventing forms of thought whilst events keep destroying the conditions in which those forms seemed necessary. A direct look at pain can leave a person with new eyes, and perhaps with a beer.

The neighbour who had already lost someone

The narrator once lived in a block with a relentlessly optimistic neighbour. When the narrator broke his foot or had his bicycle stolen, the neighbour answered that the event was good because it would teach him something about himself. The response felt so irritating that the narrator began avoiding him.

Later, in the basement, the narrator found an old death notice. It concerned the neighbour’s wife, who had died several years earlier. The neighbour’s optimism remained irritating, yet the narrator could now see a quiet strength inside it. He had continued to meet the lift, the bicycle, and the broken foot after something far worse had happened to him.

The story changes the meaning of visible cheerfulness. A person can seem absurdly positive because they have never faced serious loss. They can also seem positive because they have faced it and learned that the world still contains ordinary things worth meeting. The video leaves the neighbour’s exact inner life unknown. It keeps the admiration and the uncertainty together.

The cave of despair

Being a child means receiving an introduction to the world from people who already know its ordinary places. There is a library, a cinema, a bakery, and, somewhere beyond them, a cave of hopeless despair where dreams are crushed for no obvious reason. Most children do not understand the last part until one morning they wake up inside the cave.

The person in the cave tries to leave. A compass spins without pointing anywhere. Digging through the rock leaves their hands bloody. Waiting for rescue brings only the distant voices of people outside, apparently having a lovely day. Eventually the person carves their name into the wall because there is nothing else to do.

The source insists that people come out again. Friends may help, or events as mysterious as those that caused the despair may change its shape. After returning to ordinary life, a person may later visit the cave out of curiosity with a torch. Their name is still on the wall, yet hundreds of other names cover it. Everyone they know has spent time there, along with millions of strangers.

The video calls a wobble almost inevitable for a talking primate that knows enough to understand its ignorance, lives beside disasters, and loses people forever. History contains chaos and suffering. The remarkable fact is that people remain capable of decency inside it. They make democracy, aspirin, and winter clothes for cats. They continue after loss, which lets a future version of them meet the present from the other side of a difficult period.

That future meeting has a name the source calls énouement: the strange sense of having arrived in the future and wishing you could tell your past self that everything will be okay. The reassurance remains temporary. Another visit to the cave will come. The person waiting further ahead will have survived that one too, allowing the present self to return to the world once again.

Evidence limits

This note reconstructs the video from its complete English automatic-caption track, metadata, and description. I have corrected obvious caption errors in names and terms whilst keeping the source’s claims attached to the narrator. The video gives no chapters, bibliography, study links, or named clinical sources. Its descriptions of emotional pain, historical death tolls, atmospheric carbon, and the effects of catastrophe on philosophy therefore remain claims made in the video here.

The description contains an author-store link, music credits, a mystery link, and a link to University Challenge-based comedy. Those links document the video’s production and promotion, so they stay out of the further reading. The Dao De Jing is the only substantive text named as part of the video’s account, and the source gives no edition or translation.

Further reading / references

• Laozi, Dao De Jing, named in the video’s discussion of Daoism. The video gives no edition or link.