What If Everyone Was You?

[00:00:00]Did you read my hat? Just read it now so you're not distracted later. What if everybody who ever existed, your mom, your dad, your ex-girlfriend, the guy who cut you off on the five freeway this morning driving a green key of Soul, even Epstein and Gandhi. What if all of these people were you? And I don't mean that in that like we're all connected, man. You know, I mean literally literally you. Same soul, different different costume, if you will. There's a short story by Andy Weir and he's the guy who wrote The Martian and Project Hail Mary called The Egg. It only takes about 5 minutes to read, but I'm going to walk you through it because reading I don't think so. And then I want to talk to you about what it does in your head once it's in there. Because whether it's literally true or just a really good story, it doesn't matter very much to [music] me. What matters is the question it leaves behind if this were true. How would you treat people tomorrow? All right, cue the dramatic story music.

[00:00:56]So, a guy dies. 35 years old, wife, two kids, totally average life. He would hate hearing that after he's dead. It's like, I didn't think I was that average.

[00:01:05]Anyway, he gets taken out in a car wreck on the way home. Nothing dramatic about the death. He just kind of flies out the windshield like a real man. But then he wakes up in a void with someone sitting across from him that's calm in a way that he's never really experienced [music] before. I mean, you know, wife and kids, you heard that, right? Some people might call it God. I'm gonna go ahead and call it a guide, but it really doesn't matter what you call it. But he does what just about any of us would do.

[00:01:31]He looks around and he says, [music] "What the [ __ ] Am I in hell? Is this heaven?"

[00:01:37]>> You're not going to heaven.

[00:01:38]>> Can I go back Can I go back and clear my search history real quick?

[00:01:41]>> I knew I should have used a VPN. You're not being punished either. Oh, thank God. Are you God? I need you to listen for a second. Right. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry.

[00:01:50]Uh, I I talk a lot when I get nervous.

[00:01:52]And I did just fly through a windshield.

[00:01:54]So, you're going to go back now [music] again and you're going to live every human life that's ever existed in [music] every single direction.

[00:02:03]Wait. So, I'm going to go around like a peeping tom. I'm just going to be watching everybody. That's That's cool.

[00:02:07]Yeah, I'm down with that. That's cool.

[00:02:08]Yeah, I would love to, actually. No, you're not going to be a peeping tom.

[00:02:13]You've actually already done that. But you're already living all of these lives. Every single one of them. And we've actually already had this conversation [music] billions of times before. But you choose not to remember. You do that on purpose.

[00:02:31]So, I'm I'm I'm learning. You're Abraham Lincoln. Awesome. You're also the guy that shot him. Oh, my bad. Yeah, sorry about that. You're also a 10-year-old kid in a Chicago hospital right now [music] who learned his mom just died of cancer. Damn. You're also the mom two floors up who just had a brand new baby girl enter the world. You see, the universe is an egg, but you're not quite ready to hatch yet. Bars. Time, according to the story, is just a workaround. Our brains can't hold everything happening at once. So, we just chop it up in little before and afters to keep from short circuiting or something. But really, there there's just one consciousness. you running through every possible version of being a person, collecting them all like Pokemon. Every good decision, every cheap shot, every single act of love and moment where [music] somebody hurt somebody because they didn't really know another way to feel powerful in that moment. And once you've done it all, once you've actually been everybody, even Epstein, that's when you're ready to hatch into whatever's [music] next.

[00:03:39]The universe is not cold and empty and indifferent to you.

[00:03:42]>> The universe of everything you >> The universe is an egg and you're not done cooking yet. Bars. Now look, my fellow neurode divergence, you can pick this story apart in about 4 seconds if you want to. Try something with me.

[00:03:54]Forget whatever is true for a second.

[00:03:55]Just imagine living as if it were. See, we as human beings are wired to sort people. Our ancestors needed to know that real quick. friend or threat, tribe or not tribe. Because if they hesitated, they'd get eaten or skinned or I don't boiled without seasoning. So, the brain built a shortcut, two folders, us and them. We're pretty generous with the US folder. When somebody in our folder screws up, we got a whole, you know, little file of context ready to go. You know, they were tired. They were going through something. They they only had two drinks. You're really going to give them a DUI. Somebody in the them folder though, they do the exact same thing.

[00:04:33]They had two drinks. We need to We need to give them a DUI. That's just who they are. That's their character. That's what black people do. Whoa, whoa, whoa. He was white. He was white. You said his name was Kevin. That's not even a black sounding name. Black sounding name.

[00:04:48]What's that supposed to mean? Checkmate, [ __ ] Who's the racist now? And we do all this automatically every day. And most of the time, we don't even clock it. But what the [music] egg theory does is it takes a little Miley Cyrus wrecking ball right straight into that them folder because there's no them left to stand. It was always just you standing in a different pair of shoes with a a different set of problems in a different decade. And if you actually run with that for a second, all of this everything around you starts [music] to look a little bit different. If if you cut yourself off in traffic, are you actually mad or is it just a little bit embarrassing? [music] It's like getting revenge on on somebody who quote unquote wronged you. You're just mad that your leg tripped on a crack. Oh no, my mommy's back. Imagine if that was true. Mom, are you okay?

[00:05:36]Okay. Yeah, I was I was just checking. I I tripped on a crack.

[00:05:40]Mom, all of a sudden being cruel to someone is really just self- sabotage with a with a lot of extra steps and energy. And do you ever feel better after? I know if ever I'm mean to somebody later, I'll be like, "Oh, I feel worse than when I started." And now helping out a stranger that you're never going to see again isn't just you being a performative person wearing meta glasses uh so you can get some credit online. No. Now, now you're actually clearing out a rock off of a road that you're going to be walking down eventually. You just don't remember which pair of shoes you're going to be wearing when you get there. Is it the pink Crocs or is it the Jurassic Park Crocs? It's both.

[00:06:21]>> Now, it's easy to sit here and go, "Cool. I'm also Shakespeare. I'm also the interdimensional beings who help build the pyramids. I contain multitudes." Whoop whoop. Because that [music] feels great. The real bummer or the yucky yuck of it all is that if everybody is you, then the monsters are you, too. Cuz you're also the guy who does something unforgivable, committing [music] the the worst possible atrocities in the world. You're the troll spending his Tuesday night trying to make a stranger feel small because it's the only power that he's got left.

[00:06:49]Yeah, I'm not listening to a guy in juggle makeup with toys on the wall. Oh, you're also the parent who does to their kid exactly what got done to them because nobody ever showed them another way to be a parent. [music] But when we hit that idea of of really truly being all of this, something in us kind of because our whole defense system is built around I could never do that. We need there to be this hard line between us and the worst people who've ever lived. The egg story makes you ask a much harder question, which is under exactly what conditions, what wiring, what childhood, what decade [music] of being kicked just enough while you were down would I have ended up [music] doing those things? Now, I want to be real clear for the people who tend to take things extremely literal and don't necessarily [music] see nuance or subtleties. My fellow neurode divergence, this does not mean that everybody's actions are fine and we're all one and that there's no judgment. No, no. Accountability doesn't go anywhere. You still lock the door.

[00:07:54]You you you call it out when you see it.

[00:07:56]That part doesn't change. What changes is why empathy is so hard and why almost nobody actually does it. Because hating somebody is free. And sometimes it is fun to be a hater dog. Because feeling righteous and and good about yourself without ever having to deeply reflect is awesome. Actually sitting with a person who did something awful and admitting that you share the same basic architecture and that if your cards had been dealt just a little bit differently that you might have played the same hand. Well, that's that that's that sucks booty hole. This all connects to something Carl Jung was talking about way before Andy Weir ever wrote his story. Jung had this idea of the shadow.

[00:08:37]Basically, everybody's got a basement in their head, right? Where they [music] keep the stuff about themselves that they don't want to look at. The jealousy, the the cruelty, being a, you know, a little little bit of a coward.

[00:08:49]Kyle. Oh, Kyle's me. Oh, the parts of you that if you saw them in somebody else, you'd call them a bad person. Cuz most people, they don't want to go down to the basement. Instead, they find somebody else, whether it be a co-orker, a politician, Jamal who works at Subway, whoever is easy, and they project the whole basement onto that person. But now you get to be a hater without ever admitting that it's yours. And this is most of what passes for moral outrage online these days, honestly. People just screaming at their own reflection and and calling it activism and only talking to other people who already agree with them so they can keep the monsters monsters. Jung [music] didn't think the goal was pretending that you didn't have a basement. He thought that that was actually a really really dangerous stupid thing to do. [music] He didn't say stupid, but he said something like nothing grows towards heaven unless its roots go down into hell first. You actually got to go down there with a flashlight for four loco flesh. That's actually a real thing. Kind of blurred out, but yeah, that's what integration means. Banging a four loco flashlight and then having to go clean it. I've actually never used one. The idea of using a flashlight and then it's like it felt I felt great. And then you got what? Then you got to go you got to go clean it. You know how demoralizing that is? What if you have a roommate or something? What are you doing? Oh, you're you're cleaning the four loco flesh. How was it? It was pretty good.

[00:10:10]Now, the egg really isn't a new story.

[00:10:12]Andy Weir just put new paint on something ancient because at the end of the day, life is a repetitive cycle that we don't seem to be learning from as we watch history repeat and we slowly destroy ourselves. [music] Hindu philosophy has got a line. Tatam ai something like that. It means that thou art. The idea that the little soul in you and the big soul running the whole show are the same soul. Buddhism teaches that the you [music] think of as completely separate isn't as as solid as it feels. You're like a wave for a little while. It looks like it's its own thing, but it's always part of the ocean. Even the version that a lot of us grew up hearing in church boils down to the same thing. Do unto others as you'd have done to you, which only makes sense if others [music] was never really a separate category to begin with. I don't know that you can really call it a coincidence if it's a bunch of people from totally different worlds finding the same door in the dark, right?

[00:11:04]Imagine if they found one of these in the door though. I mean, in the dark, like they'd be like, "Oh, what the what is this? Four loco 12% alcohol." And then they're like, "Oh my god, you can [ __ ] it." Not one of them says that the answer is floating above everybody, detached, the above it all, right? Every single one says the same thing. You're not separate from this. You're stitched into it. But hell, man, maybe none of this is real. Maybe there's no God, no guide, no void, no egg, and [music] we're just clever little monkeys on a rock making up bedtime stories so the dark doesn't feel so big and scary. Or maybe, just maybe, some stories stick around for thousands of years because they're pointing at something true that regular language can't quite grab on to.

[00:11:48]So, I'll leave you with this one question because it's the only part that actually matters. If every person you run in tomorrow is just you wearing a different life, how are you going to treat them? Me, I'm going to kiss them.

[00:12:02]I'll be like, "Oh, we I'm going to kiss you now." And they'll be like, "What?

[00:12:06]No." And I'll be like, "I'm you." and then they'll be like, "No, you're not."

[00:12:09]And then I'll get arrested. That's just me, though. That's the egg. That's it, guys. That's the end of the video. Let me know what you think. Hit the subscribe button if you want to. If you don't, that's fine. Um, I'm going to go uh