Transcript:
"Imagine you visited a beautiful beach, then you return the next day and there was one less grain of sand on the beach. Would it seem to be a different beach? So, too, will the universe continue in its way if humanity did not exist to witness it."
"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena."
"We are more insignificant than we ever could have imagined. We could get rid of all the oxygen and all the galaxies and everything we see in the universe will be largely the same. So we're insignificant on a scale that Copernicus never would have imagined."
"Our planet is a lonely spec in a great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no it, that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."
"And in addition, it turns out that the future is miserable. That should depress you, but I would argue, that in fact, it should've embolden you and provide you a different kind of consolation because if the universe doesn't care about us, and if we're an accident in our remote corner of the universe. In some sense, it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us. We provide our own meaning, and we should enjoy our brief moment in the sun. We should make the most of our brief moment in the sun because this is all we have. And even if we're so rare that we're the only life forms in the universe, which I doubt. That makes us, in some sense, while we're more insignificant, we're more special."
"Whether the universe cares we exist or not, I do not need validation from the universe to find my own life significant. The concept of an afterlife places value on what is to come, rather than what it currently is, thereby diminishing the importance of the here and now."
"So when you always live towards the future, your life is trapped in that conceptual reality of false thoughts, which assumes a greater significance for you than the immediate reality of life, which is always now because your life consists entirely of the present moment. If you truly realize the significance of that statement, your entire life consists of the present moment. Your life is never not this moment, even when you remember the past. You can only remember it now, and when you think about the future, you can only think about it now."
And people live as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to some better point, which never arrives. So that's a bad way to live, and it makes living hard..."
"Living for the afterlife thoughtlessly following the set of what not-to-do rules, which you cannot question. That's basically devaluing your life in favor of worshiping that."
"If an afterlife is something greater to look forward to, then relatively speaking, our current life is lesser. And so we stop appreciating for something that is for something that could be."
"Try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. You will find out, among other things, that it will pose the next question to you, what was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born."