One of my favorite things to do is people watch.
It always makes me go: "God, we're such strange animals."
We're always doing such strange things.
And I find it particularly interesting to observe older folks,
to look at their faces and see, how they interact with the world.
It's fascinating to me, the gap in the things that I see.
You know, sometimes I see people that are cynical bitter and paranoid.
But I also see almost the exact opposite. People that even into old age,
somehow don't ever stop asking questions.
I guess I'm interested in those people, because I've always said that I want to be like that.
You know, I want to be the 87 year old man. That's still going that still has a life
The alternative scares me, like, I don't even want to imagine it. So why does it happen?
I'm not entirely sure.
I'm trying to figure that part out and I consider this a subject of grave importance.
I think life can feel hard and confusing and unfair
and I've mentioned in the past the mind-games, that I play on myself.
From an emotional perspective particular life can feel
extremely turbulent.
And the crazy thing about all this is that for the most part
it's not other people, that are doing this to me.
It's me doing this to me.
These are all things that live in my head.
So much of what's out there.
So much material and so many products
are marketed to prey on and profit off of the fears, that we have about ourselves.
And I don't think more productivity is the answer to these problems or feelings of inadequacy.
I'm speaking for myself here. I pretty regularly don't feel very motivated or productive or inspired
for sometimes rather long periods of my life,
because there's always shit that's happening.
That's life and things almost never go exactly according to plan
and I think I feel like we're in denial about the fact,
that we're emotional irrational creatures.
The amount of cognitive biases that we have,
because of the way that we've evolved
It's just clear proof of that in my opinion.
And as we've all seen, the messiness of life is particularly obvious this year,
but it has always been the case and it always will be.
Now, there are a lot of people out there, that are willing to
sell you the answers to success or the dream
and this ranges from the obviously scammy to the subtly manipulative.
I can't help but think that if all the advice out there just worked,
then the self-help industry wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar business.
Maybe it's the way it's presented
or maybe it's just a me problem,
which could be the case,
but sometimes it feels entirely unattainable
and maybe we're trying to find answers to unsolvable problems.
We've created impossible standards
and are playing into a system
that doesn't really value many of the important things in life.
Fortunately, I actually think there's another way
and I'm presenting all this,
as if it were some sort of new technology coming out of Silicon Valley,
when in reality nothing could be further from the truth.
In a capitalistic world, that tries to commoditize absolutely everything
This is something, that gets forgotten and pushes aside constantly,
because it flies in the face of mindlessly feeding into the machine.
It's a little thing called
curiosity.
When we're born we essentially inherit the world
and everything that comes with it from our ancestors
and I find this idea of both amazing and gut-wrenching.
I guess I'll start with a good part:
Humans have done some incredible stuff from history.
We've created languages and traditions and we've made beautiful things.
We're part of this unbelievably long relay race that I find astounding.
Through our creativity, we have time and again shown,
that we're capable of accomplishing the impossible
Okay. Now for the not-so-amazing part:
We inherit all the problems and there are a lot of them.
Not only that. Many of the systems currently in place actively perpetuate these problems
or do nothing to solve them
We don't have a history of treating each other very well,
and we're very quick to step over each other in our rush for progress.
So, you enter this world and the weight of responsibility gets placed on your shoulders
and depending on your background and your circumstances and the path that you take,
there are many levels of responsibility.
They get placed on all of us as we go through life
of being a good citizen a good family member a good person.
And, it's not entirely clear how to juggle not just the responsibility,
but the pressure that comes with it.
I honestly think that if you try to imitate the people that came before you
and please everybody and follow all the rules
and fit into whatever model of success is currently in place.
I'm sorry to say it, but you're doomed to fail.
Curiosity requires space
and the more you try to squeeze yourself into other people's ideas
or expectations of who you are or who you should be,
the less space you end up having.
Being a good "fill in the blank" was probably defined by somebody else a long time ago.
And That's problematic in a world, that's constantly changing
the only way to get out of this labyrinth of an inheritance,
that we all received upon being born into this world is
not through asking for permission,
but by asking questions, by paying close attention,
by being for lack of a better word curious.
It's the only way it's the only option that we have
because you cannot be creative,
you cannot make discoveries about who you are
or the world around you,
if you think you already have all the answers.
I'm not saying any of this is easy.
Okay, challenging anything from anybody honestly scares me.
I do wish we all got along more
and I do sometimes allow myself to shut down some of my curiosity.
Whenever I allow society to convince me that it's not worth anything,
but in Malcolm Gladwell's words:
It's a lot of pressure to always feel inspired and motivated
and to shoulder the responsibilities of this world
and to fit into labels and to perform
and to always do the right thing.
When I talk about my life as a series of experiments,
it's my way out of some of that pressure.
There's something about asking questions
and approaching things that way, that opens the world up.
I would almost call this a superpower if it wasn't already built into all of us,
but it's clear to me that it's not something
that you can afford to take for granted.
Now, there are many ways, that you can go about doing this.
My preferred method of approaching things is
essentially pretending that I'm a researcher here to learn what it means to be human.
I'm currently on a very interesting assignment,
called being Nathaniel.
And right now, I'm learning what it means to live life in June of 2020.
I'll give you some examples.
Some of my very favourite things right now
are French bread,
the way it's light out past 10pm these days,
and French people on bikes.
This motto of mine
that everything I do is just part of a series of experiments
is one of the things that allows me to keep going.
It's something that has allowed me to avoid getting paralyzed
by everything that's going on.
I'm not saying I'm original, okay. I'm not.
I've seen this sentiment echoed all over the place
Gandhi wrote that:
It has almost certainly a completely overused example,
but can we just take a moment to imagine,
how different things would have looked,
if Gandhi just accepted the world, that he was born into.
One of the craziest things that I realized recently is,
that somebody elses enthusiasm in something,
that I don't maybe necessarily think,
that I care about,
is enough to potentially change my mind
and to make me interested in it.
Author Sam Wren-Lewis in his book "The Happiness Problem"
describes three powerful consequences of curiosity.
He writes:
One of the biggest dangers,
that we all have to fight against is our own brains.
Some of you might already be familiar with the
also sometimes known as
And that's just one example.
There's all kinds of ways,
that we are programmed for survival
in a world that doesn't exist anymore.
Things have changed.
Our brains will tell us, that we don't have enough
and simply acting on that without any sort of self-reflection.
It is not gonna get us anywhere.
I'm essentially proposing a different way of approaching things.
One of the beautiful things about curiosity
is that there's nothing, that you cannot be curious about.
You can wonder about obvious things
like life and death and the universe,
and if mayonnaise is an instrument,
but you can also wonder and be curious about less obvious things,
like, why you're not feeling happy or focused or motivated
and that's okay too.
In fact, that's the point.
I think curiosity is what makes life worth living.
If you're curious enough about something, you'll find a way.
This video was sponsored by Skillshare.
I'm really grateful to have their support
which has allowed me to in general
raise the production quality of these videos.
By the way,
I can't quite share a ton of details just yet,
but I am working with them
to create an original course
that I think might interest a lot of you guys.
That should be coming out at some point
within the next few months.
Basically for those of you that don't know,
Skillshare is a website,
an online repository of online courses.
They have a massive selection
and you can learn anything from
photography and filmmaking
to animation and lifestyle
and organization.
A year-long membership comes out to less than $10 a month
and it's definitely worth checking out,
if you're looking to explore new fields of interest.
As many of you know,
I'm a huge fan of street photography
and I really like this course in particular
as well as this one on drawing.
I often find it inspiring to observe the creative process of others.
The first 1000 of you guys
that use the link in the description below,
can get a couple months of Skillshare premium for free
to explore what they have to offer.
Consider checking it out.
Thank you so much for watching and
I'll see you soon