EXPLORING THE UNIVERSE

The question of personal responsibility for debt doesn’t seem so significant when you see how banks and governments are making increasingly larger debt loads inescapable. Debt is painful and it seems like our largest institutions are too invested in profiting from it to make it easier on the average person.

Life is meaningless, sure, and the only rational course of action is to behave as such. There is no plan, no objective truth, and everything happens purely by accident. But this doesn’t necessitate nihilism. If we instead choose to embrace the Absurd, we can view our circumstances as an opportunity to change our perspective.

Picture all the gold you could possibly imagine. Now double it. That’s how much wealth the richest man who ever lived controlled. Most people will go their entire lives without ever learning his name. When asked who the richest man who ever lived is, it might be tempting to mention some modern billionaires. People like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or maybe the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. But all of these answers would be wrong.

Flow is a tool we can seek out to improve our lives. It is a mindset to help us boost productivity, conquer challenging tasks, and lean into our creativity. The promise of being able to turn off the outside world and turn on the most positive parts of our inner world is alluring and something to strive for. But as soon as we get too fixated on achieving these feelings, we might lose what flow is really about. 

If a tree falls down in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? How do you know? Taking it one step further, if you hear the tree hit the ground but don’t see it, why do you trust your sense of hearing? This might seem like a ridiculous question but the truth is that despite our total reliance on them, our senses deceive us all the time. We can’t truly know anything, but even what we think we know breaks down upon investigation.

In a previous Aperture episode, we looked at the mental health effects of TikTok. But it seems as though the self-inflicted risks directly linked to the app are more far-reaching and have greater consequences than we could have ever imagined. From health and safety to privacy and security, given the long list of problems that TikTok seems to pose to the general public, what do we do? What can we do? Can we “fix” TikTok? Or should we just ban the app entirely?