Nihilism Is Taking Over Modern Society. Here's Why.

The following is an allegorical interpretation of a thought experiment posed by 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal, which reveals something simultaneously profound and deeply unsettling about the modern world. Every week, a man goes to a race course to gamble on horse racing. His hope is to eventually win a large enough sum of money that will change his life. After years and years of this, without having achieved anything near his goal, the man has now become a regular at the course, known by all the aristocrats, merchants, stewards, bookmakers, and so on who frequent or work the course. One aristocrat in particular, who regularly visits the race course out of a love for the art of horse racing, often observes the gambling man's constant and obsessive betting. He watches him lose over and over, only occasionally winning. He watches him thrash with agitation as the horse races take place. One day, the aristocrat approaches the gambling man. How much money are you hoping to ultimately win? he asks. What would satisfy you? The gambling man pauses for a moment, confused. Then he murmurs the number to the aristocrat. Hmm, says the aristocrat. He reaches into his waistcoat pocket and pulls out a large sack of coins. Here, there is your money, the aristocrat continues. The gambling man stares down at the coins, his eyes widening and lighting up. But, continues the aristocrat, you can never gamble here again, okay? In fact, you can never gamble anywhere. I know of every race course, tavern, inn, house, club, none of them. Why? asks the gambling man. Firstly, you are missing out on the beauty of these races and games. Secondly, if you gamble again, you will surely lose my money, and my money does not go to waste. Dumbfounded but elated, the gambling man agrees. Several weeks go by, and the gambling man can no longer take it. He is miserable. He got what he was gambling for, but something is missing. Soon, he returns to the race course, approaches the bookmaker's counter, and asks to place a bet. I can't, says the bookmaker. You agreed to the aristocrat's terms. I cannot participate in breaking them. Please, says the gambling man. You can play, but you can't bet actual money, and I can't let you win, the bookmaker responds. Desperate to do something, to play again, the gambling man agrees. Every week, he returns to the race course and places fake bets, knowing full well that he will not win anything. He watches the horses whip by on the course, and feels nothing. There's no hope, no uncertainty. On the verge of complete and utter despair, the gambling man decides he must undo what he's done. He returns to the aristocrat. Here, says the gambling man. What is this, asks the aristocrat. It's the money I still have, nearly all of it you gave me. I don't agree to the terms anymore. I'm going to gamble again. Why? Isn't this money what you were after? I guess not, says the gambling man. In Pascal's book, Pensée, he uses this thought experiment to explore what he believed to be humanity's greatest plight. Boredom. For him, most human activity is a result of a kind of existential boredom. More specifically, the result of our intense repulsion of boredom. Boredom creates space for us to think and feel fully and without distraction. It allows us to see and know the wretchedness of our condition. According to Pascal, we loathe this experience. We refuse to confront the realities of our being. And so, we agitatedly do and pursue things, creating distractions and problems to occupy ourselves away from ourselves. Pascal writes, All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. As a result of this, for Pascal, it's rarely the outcome of our endeavors that we are truly after. As illustrated with the gambling man, we don't really want the outcome to materialize fully. This would destroy the point. Rather, what we really want is to occupy ourselves in the service of obtaining some outcome that is possible but uncertain. It's the continued potential for obtaining something, and the belief that obtaining it will benefit or satisfy us, that keeps us satisfied. In plain terms, we gamble or do things that fit this gambling pattern because we are trying to continually escape ourselves, our boredom, and our awareness of our condition. In the words of Dostoevsky in The Gambler, Gamblers know a man can sit for almost 24 hours at cards without looking to right or to left. Gambling Away the Modern World Gambling has never been more popular than it is today. It's estimated that around 1.6 billion people worldwide gamble regularly, and over 4 billion people gamble at least once every year. That's over 50% of the global population. This increase has seen its biggest ramp in the last 30 or so years, with both the internet and smartphones creating unprecedented accessibility. Among many other things, we now indulge in our impulse toward escapism through gambling and media at obscene scales. More than just the increase in popularity of traditional gambling, like casino games, sports betting, and so on, as a culture, we've also recently begun to make gambling markets out of everything. On what are known as prediction market platforms, you can gamble on essentially anything that is uncertain in the world. Will Jesus Christ return by 2027? You can bet on it. How many starving children are there in a particular war zone? You can bet on it. Will a nuclear weapon detonate by June of this year? Will a political figure wear a certain color tie or name a country a certain number of times in a speech? You can bet on it. Will some influencer do some influencer thing? You get the idea. Interestingly, prediction markets actually originated for utilitarian purposes. Launching in 1988 at the University of Iowa, researchers used experimental prediction markets to try to determine the accuracy in foreseeing political events when individuals were financially incentivized to predict correctly. The goal was essentially to determine what we could learn about the world when we let people bet on things, when human predictions are decoupled from biased desires or preferences for the outcome. The study did in fact find that these markets often do produce more accurate predictions than traditional methods. However, what we also learned since then is, if you let people bet on things, they'll bet on everything. The Nihilism Loop What does it suggest about humanity's current relationship with itself when, despite the vast increase in the availability of interests, knowledge, things to do, and places to explore, we have dramatically increased the amount of gambling we do on trivial games and bets? Of course, gambling can be fun for fun's sake. Like anything else, it can be done without having broader or deeper implications. In its most basic form, there is, arguably, nothing inherently wrong with gambling. In fact, one could easily argue that nearly everything we do in life is a kind of gamble. But it is perhaps emblematic of something deeper when the level of habitual, trivial, casino-like gambling rises to the immense cultural scales we are currently seeing. There seems to be a kind of negativistic, feedback loop, fueled by our unaddressed existential boredom, that is further facilitated and augmented by modern technology. This loop works as follows. To avoid the discomfort of boredom, we engage in activities and endeavors. We direct our attention away from ourselves and toward things as a misguided attempt to resolve our condition externally. When these things inevitably do not resolve the underlying tension and disquiet that we are trying to escape, we become bored and agitated again. Still unwilling to face boredom head on, we create new things and technologies and start to loop over, trying to find more forms of distraction. Over time, these distractions seem to become increasingly trivial and mundane, as the looping, gyrating nature of the phenomenon seems to whittle down our activities to increasing meaninglessness. We become more and more numb as both our tolerance to distraction and sensitivity to boredom increase. What we seem to have arrived at is a place of such cultural numbness that, rather than reconcile our relationship with ourselves and the events of the world, we have turned everything into a kind of game or spectacle. This phenomenon, exemplified by prediction markets, the proliferation of gambling, as well as things like the commodification and spectacularization of the news and media, creates a dynamic where we can engage with the world, we can know and see what happens, but we don't have to really hold any feelings about it. At least not deeply and not for very long. It's merely a bet, a clip or a headline, that we can scroll past or quickly move on from. Author and theorist Neil Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death, When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversations become a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, in their public business, a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk, culture death is a clear possibility. Financial Nihilism There's also an obvious economic component to our increasing cultural nihilism and gambling proclivities. A kind of financial nihilism. In many countries today, wealth inequality is at or near all-time historic highs. We've all heard the numbers. The top 10% of Americans own about 70% of the nation's wealth, and the top 1% own roughly 30%. This wealth disparity, combined with the rising prices for basic goods and a seemingly perpetual sense of job, technological, and global uncertainty, can cause individuals to easily and understandably feel as though they've been left out from a shared sense of growth and opportunity. When individuals feel disconnected from the cultural narrative and system they're a part of, they naturally stop believing in it. At least, not fully. One sees it as something unworthy of investing much time, effort, and sincerity into, and instead, everything is perceived through a kind of cynicism or ironic detachment. If it seems as unlikely to grow within a system as it is to beat the odds in a random chance bet, what is likely to emerge at scale? What else is there to do but bet on Jesus and war? To hope that the chaotic arbitrariness that seems to have conspired against you might randomly pluck you back up, out from the margins, and bring you into something? Something is always missing. Even in the best of cases, what we see from the winner's circle of the modern world's casino is mostly only the bright neon lights of more casino games. After a certain point, winning doesn't do anything. The prize money doesn't satisfy. The gambling man in Pascal's thought experiment shows us this. It is not winning, it is not losing. It is the hope and uncertainty we experience in the games we choose to play. And so, what seems to matter is this. Wisely choosing what games we play and how. Each of us have a choice in whether we keep playing games or not. And each of us have a choice in what kind of games we play and what bets we place. Can I fail to understand that I am a lost man? But, can I not rise again? Yes, all it would take is just once in my life to be careful and patient. And that's all there is to it. All it would take is to stand firm just once. And I can change my whole destiny in a single hour. Wrote Dostoevsky. Rather than the increasingly easy and accessible indulgences of trivial things, perhaps the true gamble in life is betting on something hard. Something sincere. Something that one truly cares about, despite odds and despite the system in which one exists. This requires sitting with boredom. It requires understanding more about what it is that we are always trying to escape or cover up. It requires self-knowledge and the embrace of our condition. Through which, hopefully, eventually, we find what matters to us deep down. And through this, this sincerity and depth, perhaps we win the great wager of life. Even if we ultimately lose. Whatever games we choose to play and whatever bets we choose to place in life, if we're lucky, we'll find ourselves able to explore the world and travel to different countries. Of course, in the modern world, staying connected to friends, family, work, and our interests, wherever we are, is simultaneously essential as well as expensive and convoluted. This video's sponsor, Saili, a new eSIM service app, solves all of this and makes staying connected simple and convenient. I'm hoping to do some international traveling myself coming up this summer, but doing so requires that I still have the ability to maintain connection with my work. This means I'll need data on my phone. However, I loathe dealing with trying to obtain a local SIM card at the airport and getting them from random stores or vendors can put you at risk of scams. Saili, however, allows me to download the app once at home, install the eSIM, prepay and preplan, and I'm done. Just a couple minutes of prep and it will activate instantly after I land. This gives you full access to the internet in over 200 countries without exorbitant roaming fees and without having to search for Wi-Fi in unknown places. Not only can you maintain connection easily and affordably, but with Saili's security features, you can also browse more securely, change your virtual location, block malicious ads, and stay safer with web protection. All Saili eSIM plans are compatible with iOS and Android devices, and if there's any reason your device is not compatible, Saili will provide you with the full refund, so there's no risk in trying it. If you're traveling abroad soon or plan to in the future, download Saili now and get an exclusive 15% discount on all Saili data plans through the link in the description and then use code WONDER15 at checkout. And of course, as always, thank you so much for watching in general, and see you next video.