I haven’t had a hard life. I’m a white, tall, American, male, from an upper middle class family, two loving parents, 4 loving siblings, soccer practice, cabin in the summertime, noodle salad. Oh ya and then Youtube comes out of nowhere and makes me rich and famous popular on the internet. I kind of have it all.
The only problem I’ve ever had is not having any to begin with. Boredom. Depression. My own thoughts & imagination turning on me. Just a blessed, bored, bougie, little brat. Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, Sugar, Fat, Salt, Likes, Views, Attention. It’s all wrapped up in a shiny, glittery box full of nothing. My neurotransmitters are shot. I’m not trying to sound edgy, there’s just something in me that wants to talk about this.
What’s there to do after you have it all? Do your best to contribute and help and be nice I guess. I think about this concept of short-term vs. long term gratification, but I’ve never really applied it to my life. Not consistently anyway. I’ve never really cared to. That’s kind of the root of evil right there. The tipping point. It all boils down to that spectrum. Good (long term choices) VS. Evil (short-term choices). You’ve thought about this.
Is it that simple though? I remember a girl asked me what’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I thought about it for a second. “I don’t feel bad about any of the stuff I’ve done.” She laughed. You know, no regrets. It’s mAdE mE tHe PeRsOn I aM tOdAY! I don’t understand why people say that. What if you’re not a good person. What if you’re a serial killer. Same with Everything happens for a reason. Is it a good reason? I don’t like those phrases.
When we film a video, sometimes 2-3 hours go by before we film anything. We’ll walk around campus, figuring out what exactly we’re doing, hanging out, eating, getting batteries. When I say ‘we’ I just mean whoever is with me that day. Usually Luke, Aryia, or Danny. What I was getting at though was that those 2-3 hours of ‘wasting time’ have never bothered me. It’s just what we refer to as The Process. All the hang-ups, frustration, trouble that we encounter trying to get a video done is just part of The Process. It’s normal. It’s inevitable. It’s the universe’s way of making you earn the video.
So if we go back to the Good vs. Evil thing, is it really that simple? Or was I, for instance, suppose to visit a certain amount of strip clubs in my early 20’s before I was bored with them, so now I’ve learned my lesson, and don’t go to strip clubs anymore because I’m more mature and it’s degrading to women, so now I’m gonna respect woman and practice commitment with someone I care about? Where in all that did I just go, “Hey, I’m not gonna do this now.” If everyone makes mistakes and learns from them, then what’s the problem? I’m asking what’s the problem with making mistakes if you’re just going to learn from them, is it all just part of the process of life? I don’t really know what I mean by that. I’ve confused myself again.
I tell you man, this Free Will dilemma, I just can’t get my head around it. Maybe I’m smoking too much weed. Or taking too much adderall, or Ativan, or Lexapro. That last sentence just made me sound like a pill-popper. I am. I’m a pill-popper. I love pills. I love having the ability to change my reality with a substance. I like that simplicity. I guess that’s evil though, it’s short-term. Are they still evil if they help you be a better person? Not just to yourself but to everyone else in your life?
I could go through this post and fix some of the points I’ve made (if any) and make them crispier, think about it more, ramble more, but I don’t really want to. I’m tired. I’m just gonna post it.
Thanks For Reading,
Andrew Hales
3:32am
Los Angeles, CA
Losing All Hope Was Freedom 
Same. Fucking same. He was my final push for beginning to write again. And writing exactly how I want to. A weird type of analytically form that combines horror, realistic fiction, and non fiction/history stylization, to describe real things and pieces of me. He’s sparked all my repressed creativity simply by writing. I read all the time, but for some reason, Andrew encouraged a crazy amount of drive for me. This guy really, really, has something. It’s the intimacy he lets off and something else I can’t explain.
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All of your posts make it sound like me and you have many similarities with social anxiety and depression but you do a much better job of hiding it while not really hiding it at all. You’re older than me by about 7 years but it seems like you are young and old at the same time. Keep up the blogs and the Vlogs and best wishes
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You’re a really good writer Andrew. Keep doing it.
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Deep thinking eh? I love it man. There are a lot of unknowns, uncertainties and non black-n-white things in life. It can be so frustrating to wrap ones head around it all.
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Reading good Literature helps me sort some of this stuff out. For me, literature was really boring in High School but taking it again in college i’ve realized how awesome it is when a life lesson really resonates with you.
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I fukin love you andew, just started writing again because of you.
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Maybe you are over-compensating for the fact that you haven’t had a hard life by subconsciously trying to make your life harder…
There are literally endless possibilities in this life and just going to strip clubs and popping pills seems pretty fucking boring to me. If you are so “rich,” go fly to India or some shit. Go meet people who have no idea who you are and don’t give a shit about youtube. I think you could make great documentaries in the future with this kind of narrative you have going in your personal writing.
The whole “not trying to sound edgy” thing is interesting. I’ve been so resistant to get better myself for so long because society doesn’t want us to be happy. It’s much more interesting and “relevant” right now to be this edgy, unhappy, moody person. Which is kind of how I am naturally too – and I think society fosters this mindset in a way. But what do you care about more – finding your own happiness or continuing to torture yourself for the acceptance of other people that don’t give a shit about you?
Anyway, I know it’s easier said than done. I don’t know if any of this makes sense. I really like your writing and I think it’s the realest thing you do.
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You covered a lot of ground here…
– I think maybe you’re too self involved – ya know the whole “can’t see the forest for the trees”.
You find your own meaning of life, everyone is going to come to a slightly different conclusion. I’ve already figured that out for myself and it’s more than I care to type out, but if you’re curious just ask. Because of that I don’t really think of “long term vs. short term” or “good vs. evil” anymore. It doesn’t seem relevant.
– I hate those same phrases, “everything happens for a reason”. Everything has a cause and effect, but a reason? I don’t know about that…
– In regards to free will, search youtube for Robert Sapolsky speaking to Alan Alda. I’m not convinced we have free will being that so much of who we are is beyond our control (e.g., genetics, hormones, fetal development, environment) but we still know the consequences of certain actions and make those decisions every day.
– As for the pills, who knows. Well, probably your doctor.
Best wishes,
Stephanie
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You know you’re capable of more, Andrew. To be completely honest, it seems that getting to be a popular youtuber was too easy of a goal for you and now that you’ve accomplished what you aimed for you feel empty.
This emptiness is inevitable for successful people who follow through with what they’re striving for but it will hit those later who go for bigger accomplishments.
Something that connects to this topic is the following quote by Michelangelo: “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”
The danger in the quote is the emptiness I already mentioned, the feeling that you own the world and can’t affect it anymore, a feeling of helplessness. Jack London’s book “Martin Eden” demonstrates well how a young aspiring writer gets to this state of mind.
It’s possible that you may have to change your course, quit youtube and perhaps focus on music or something else that you have a talent for. I believe that you personally are not a multi-tasker but someone who focuses solely on one thing when striving to be great. Do you really want to be great at youtube?
That’s all I wanted to say.
“Martin Eden” is a good book by the way.
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Have you seen “the secret” documentary about the power of thoughts?
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when it said Free Will i thought Will was a rapper or something and it was a slogan, people trying to get him out of jail. i was about to google it until i realized… free will.
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My opinion is:: we are just living, and it’s so important to get to a “goal” because society says so, that we totally forget the process. But then again, before we reach that “goal” we go around judging everyone’s actions and forget that they are trying to reach a goal, just like us. I’m not sure about the good and evil theory, I’m just dropping a weird opinion in this weird post you made, just for the hell of it.
Greetings from Mexico.
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The subject of free will is easy to solve. The truth is that no human being knows whether or not anyone has free will. One thing that could prove that everything is determined is a machine that could predict the exact location of every particle in the universe from the beginning of time to the end of time. But that machine does not yet exist. I believe an experiment has shown that scientists can predict which decision we will make upon given a simple list of choices by the scientists, even before we are aware of which decision we have made. However, this does not prove that we have no free will. It simply shows that scientists have a machine that allows them to be aware of some simple decisions we have made before we are aware of those decisions we have made. The only thing that we can do is just accept that we have no means of determining whether or not we have free will. We have to remain agnostic on the issue, just like on the issue of religion. You can wrestle with free-will and religion in your mind for as long as you want, but at the end of the day you will have no evidence that we have free-will, no evidence that everything is determined, no evidence that there is a God, and no evidence that there is not a God. The best thing to do is to have the mental strength to admit these truths and to stop wasting time trying to find answers that don’t exist.
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We all make mistakes in this life. It’s Natural. But it’s much better to learn from others mistakes then to learn from experience. These short-term (Evil) decisions might seem alright at first. But These short-term decisions could have a big impact on your life. They could lead you to a destructive, self-harming lifestyle. Just some thoughts I wanted to share.
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We have free will to choose between good and bad. And it’s not necessary to “make mistakes” to learn from them or “experience something” to know that it’s a bad thing to do. Like you don’t have to experience suicide to know that it’s a bad idea. Like you don’t have to get addicted to alcohol or drugs to know that it’s bad for you. And your life is not 100% pre-planned. You have the free will to change your outcomes. But I do think that there are “outcomes” for yourself that are better than others. that’s all i have Andrew. I love the channel and Danny. You guys are great and I feel like you guys are just at the beginning of something great. You have control of your life! Use it!
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Woah. It’s so weird when things make sense or rather someone says something about something you’ve thought long about. The whole long term short term thing, I’ve thought about recently mostly based around online conversations. It’s seems that a lot of people are quick to call people ignorant and a bigot and fuckhead when they disagree with someone. Basically people are choosing the short term gratification in order to feel high and mighty in the moment where in the long run if you call someone a fuck stick in an argument and tell them to go educate themselves they just feel bad about themselves and really aren’t going to change their perspective like you want them to. I don’t know, it just sucks cause sometimes I wish people would understand what their doing and how it’s fucking society up. But that doesn’t necessarily leave me out of the equation, I know I’m equally as guilty
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What makes long term choices ‘good’ where as short term choices ‘bad’? When it comes down to it, what really is good and what really is bad? We, our physical beings, will inevitably will cease to be conscious and exist so how do we say one thing we do is better than another?
The only thing we can do is acknowledge how all consciousness is defined by this inevitability. Shouldn’t that drive us to spread compassion and experience reality with other sentient beings?
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Good and Evil. Think, wondering what criteria would make something good or bad, if you’d like everyone to do a certain action, what would happen.
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What the actual fuck Andrew? Make a movie and show all this things you’re talking about.
PD: it will be fun.
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