Shadowing-Übung: Our Greatest Delusion - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit Video

I'm not sure what I expected to find when I went to Chernobyl. I mean it's been so long since the nuclear reactor there melted down and spewed radioactive atoms across the land.

So for almost thirty years this place has been virtually abandoned. These days workers are allowed into the zone but only for two weeks at a time. And that's not because the levels of radiation are too high, it's actually for psychological reasons. More than two weeks in a place like this will apparently make you think strange things. And I was only here for four days but I started to think about rocks.

Yeah... rocks.

Rocks appear to be permanent. I mean I know that they aren't. Mountains are constantly eroding and in places the crust is melting back into the mantle. Rock obviously isn't permanent but on the scale of a human life, it is and people recognized that fact - rocks are permanent - for thousands of years and I think that's what makes them important to us. I mean, "a diamond is forever" We build these monuments out of rock because they will outlast us and virtually every other material we can think of. Our modern structures of metal and glass are just rock refined by our ingenuity. Rocks are both practical and symbolic. We seek to indentify ourselves with rocks. We carve our heroes in stone because we want them to last forever and there's a way in which we want that kind of permanence for ourselves too. I think it's in the core of the desire to scratch our name into stone, put your initials in wet cement, really man-made rock, or fasten a padlock to a bridge. In this way we try to push our impermanence from our minds. The monuments, statues and bridges, they give us a sense of continuity, stability.

That this is the way it is and the way it's always been. Like the way we first we concieved of stars: static, unchanging, eternal. And this way of viewing the world helps us maintain our greatest delusion: the thought that we are in any way eternal. We want to believe that some part of us, our consciousness or our soul will last forever. But what do you make of it then when you see stone is not even so permanent?

Walking around Chernobyl I think it's understandable I started contemplating not only the permanence of rocks but also their decay, and by extension, our decay, death, what the world would look like without people.

You know the closest I can come to imagining true nothingness is to picture the universe running really fast in reverse. All the galaxies squeezing closer together, stars expanding back into gas clouds and everything getting hotter and denser, compactifying until the whole observable universe could fit into a room and then sinking further into a tiny point and then... nothing. Not the nothingness of empty space but real nothingess which has no size and no time. To me that is probably what death looks like, a nothiness so complete you wouldn't even miss it. For that, you'd have to be there. But just as soon as I can form this thought, it evaporates like a void in nature. The world rushes in to fill it.

And this make sense because the hardware I'm running has been developed over billions of years with the only requriement being that it frequently and accurately makes copies of itself and it would help not in the slightest in the goal of making copies if the hardware could accurately simulate its own non-existence. When we do acknowledge our impermanence, it is often through insipid catch phrases like "yolo" or it's in art projects like Damien Hirst's "The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living", which is just a huge shark in a tank of formaldehyde. A sense of our mortality should strike fear into us, like the sense I have when I'm swimming hundreds of meters off shore and the water below is deep and dark and I can picture the shark swimming beneath me. The same kind of fate stalks us daily but not in this visceral way, just in trivial ignorable way. Hence the delusion. You're permanent like stone, always were and always will be. So we are left hardwired for denial, a selected inability to imagine true nothingness, an ephemeral sack of particles that thinks itself eternal. This delusion is comforting and it makes living easier. It might drive you crazy to be confronted with the ultimate meaninglessness of everything all the time, what we call nihilism. But the same delusion I'd argue is also debilitating.

It lulls you into a false sense of security, inaction, like a due date a long time in the future. There's always tomorrow so we procrastinate living the life we truly desire and we live in more fear. The sense that your soul is eternal makes you cowardly because failure would stick with you forever. For really ever. Shame, embarassment, disappointment, they would never leave you. A distant horizon encourages you to play it safe. Live to fight another day, for after all there is always another day. And this is why I find nihilism liberating and emboldening. If you can really picture the nothingess that awaits you then what is there to be afraid of? Errors and humiliations will be forgotten but great achiements may not. We may have no meaning in the cosmic context of the universe but we make our own meaning daily with each other and this is the thought that leads to action: your days are numbered, you don't know what that number is but it's finite, so get busy with what it is you want to do. Time is running out.

📺 Gleicher Kanal

Struktur	Im Video
Passiv be + Partizip Perfekt – wichtig ist, was geschieht, nicht wer es tut	are allowed · has been developed · will be forgotten
Present Perfect have/has + Partizip Perfekt – eine vergangene Handlung, die jetzt noch wichtig ist	has been · has been developed
Relativsätze who / which + Satz – eine Zusatzinformation über eine Person oder Sache	nothingess which has

Shadowing-Übung: Our Greatest Delusion - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit Video

We're trying something new...

Something is jamming GPS over Europe. Here's what we found

Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

You've (Likely) Been Playing The Game Of Life Wrong

Why Life Seems to Speed Up as We Age

How does light 'know' the shortest path?

The CIA's new tech doesn't make sense

Why does every mammal get 1 billion heartbeats in their life?

Why Cold Drinks Were Deadly Before 1914

Exposing The Flaw In Our Phone System

The Most Controversial Problem in Philosophy

Why Boredom is Good For You

Why Are 96,000,000 Black Balls on This Reservoir?

We've Been Using The Wrong Science In Court For 50 years

Explaining Pi With Pizza

5 Fun Physics Phenomena

The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics

Falling ladders - why does this happen?

How a slinky falls in slow motion #shorts

We're 99.9% sure this pattern is true, but no one can prove it

There's a Giant Hole In Earth's History

What science can’t answer, according to physicist Jim Al-Khalili | Big Think

Love, Loss and Symbolic Death

Human Immortality 4K | Can Science Defeat Aging?

Tanya's Words :: The Irrationalism Of Humanity

The uncomfortable truth | Yuval Noah Harari

Nature Is Speaking: Lee Pace is Mountain | Conservation International (CI)

The Most Insane Weapon You Never Heard About

"I loved every minute of it, however hard it had been"

Why Did Ancient Humans Start Believing in Gods?

ALBRECHT FUND SHADOWING_Technology Magnifies Who We Are

The Building Blocks of Everything: Matter & its Properties

Warum mit diesem Video Sprechen üben?

Grammatik & Ausdrücke im Kontext

Häufige Aussprachefallen

Grammatik in diesem Video

Was ist die Shadowing-Technik?