SPEAKER_00 0:10

Is anyone else like too aware? Like, I'm too aware that this is all temporary, this is all part of the human experience.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Last week on Tuesday, the 3rd of September 2024, a TikToker called Manifesting Abundance released a video which gained an unprecedented amount of traction. In the description of her channel, she describes herself as a holistic life guide, here to help you become the best version of yourself. Before the 3rd of September, she posted a number of videos about dieting and muscle building and mental health. But in the video that really took off, the subject for this episode of the Speak Life Podcast, she simply sat in her car and recorded herself talking about her outlook on the world and asked, Am I the only one? By the time we recorded this podcast on Friday, her video had reached around 7 million views. Now, as we release this episode, it's on 14 million views. It's clearly resonated with a huge number of people. And in this episode, Speak Life director Glenn Scrivener will be asking why. What has happened in our culture to lead us to this point? And is there a better story?

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Like I'm too aware that this is all temporary, this is all part of the human experience, and that nothing matters, and that everything is subconscious programming and everything is made up.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

What she is doing, I think, is the end point of Descartes' way of seeing the world. You start with the independent individual, you start with skepticism, you start with rationality. Rather than starting with a world that comes to you, that you simply are dependent, you're a member of a community, you receive it on faith. Um, no, no, no, says Descartes, and and she is following that trajectory, and I think that trajectory does lead you to this kind of nihilism. We're happy, free, confused, and lonely. At the same time, it's miserable and magical. Hello, my name is Glenn Scrivener from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus, including the subject of nihilism. Are you aware of nihilism? Uh, it's one way of seeing the world. And when you think of nihilism, you probably think of Eeyore, right, from Winnie the Pooh, who is just um on a downer, let's let's put it that way. Um, but nihilism doesn't have to be like that. There is such a thing as optimistic nihilism. And I think this TikToker really shows us what optimistic nihilism looks like today, and it looks like everything. I think she has resonated with millions and millions of viewers because she's putting her finger on the pulse of where late modern Western thought has gotten us to, and it's miserable and magical all at the same time. Let's have a look at her 46-second TikTok uh short film, let's call it, and uh it has had over a million likes, and I think we'll see why. Let's have a look.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Is anyone else like too aware? Like, I'm too aware that this is all temporary, this is all part of the human experience, and that nothing matters, and that everything is subconscious programming, and everything is made up. Like the days of the week, that's made up. Monday, someone decided this day is called Monday, this day is called Tuesday. It's all made up. Like humans made everything up, like money. It's just made up, it doesn't mean anything. Like there are so many different things, like road signs, the road street names, like somebody just decided the street is named that name. Like it's so stupid. Like, I'm just it's really hard for me to live my life and just be a normal person because I'm just too aware. I'm too I'm always seeing things from a background perspective. Like I'm seeing everything, I'm seeing through the programming, seeing through the matrix. Does anyone else know what I'm saying, or am I just crazy? Please help me out.

SPEAKER_02 4:00

So, this is from a channel uh called Manifesting Abundance by Elle May. Um, and she largely has put out videos on the secret to losing weight fast, ditch dieting, uh, three tips for muscle building, how to lose weight easily and fast. Uh, every now and again she gets into kind of emotional well-being and she talks about how to change the emotions you feel, and that's often to do with kind of meditation and positive thinking, that sort of thing. Um, but she's really hit it big time in the last two days with this video called Am I the Only One? And she has found that she is not the only one. She's not the only one who feels like everything out there is just arbitrary. That we are asked simply to receive on faith a whole world that has been built by other people, and it's seemingly random. Like, why is Monday called Monday? And why is today Monday? Like, why can't I just redefine this as Thursday? Or why can't I just call it Ian? We are simply asked to take on faith, a world that is out there, and not just a physical world that is out there, but a social world that has been constructed, and there are these naming conventions, and we're all just meant to sit here and just accept that today is Monday? It seems like everything is nonsense and we're just expected to play along to a game, the rules of which we did not agree, and which just appears utterly arbitrary. And and loads of people are resonating with this video, and you know, the the most liked comment is somebody just saying, Welcome to nihilism, it's cold in here, followed by oh no, you're not alone, this is called nihilism, and you start to find things quite funny after a while, but you're definitely not alone. Third comment: Optimistic nihilism just comes naturally to me now. You have a mini existential panic at the start, but you get used to it. This is the Taylor Swift song, 22. We're happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time. It's miserable and magical, oh yeah. And she's kind of owning it. Now, to explain why we all resonate with this, we're gonna do a little history lesson. We're gonna go back 400 years to Descartes and figure out the kind of the bill of goods that he sold us that we've been kind of living out of for the last 400 years. Uh, we're then gonna go back to the Bible and figure out naming and that kind of stuff, and then we're gonna go back to our birth and figure out what natural life really looks like. And having gone to those three different locations, I think we'll figure out where we fit in all this and if there's any way out of the nihilism. I think there is, but let's first go back 400 years and uh Descartes uh goes into his oven famously, and he wants to figure out what is real about the world. He wants to see through the matrix, see through the programming, and Descartes, think about it. It's it's been a hundred years since the Reformation got going, and in a sense, there he is in France, and it's like mum and dad are fighting, right? The Catholics and the Protestants are going through this very messy, very public divorce, and it's awful, and it's and people are starting to die. It's it's getting, you know, that heated. And Descartes is like the teenage child of some warring parents, and he just goes into his room and he slams the door and he retreats into himself. And we can understand that. We can understand why if mom and dad are fighting, you want to go to your room and you want to um live in your head, and that's kind of what Descartes does. And he's like, I don't believe Mum and Dad anymore, I don't believe any of their generation or the generations above. I know that for a thousand years we've been thinking about the Bible and stuff like that, and we've been receiving a worldview on faith, and I'm not gonna do it anymore. And so he has his kind of teenage rebellion. He's not a teenager when he when he does this, but it is a kind of a teenage rebellion against squabbling parents, and he just says, for the last thousand years we've been taking things on faith. I'm gonna do the opposite, I'm gonna have a method of doubt. And so he goes into his oven, right, which was probably just like a really warm room that kind of warms up the rest of the house or just warms you up because of the rest of the house is uh very dank and and chilly. And so there he is, thinking his way to reality. And he's not gonna receive anything because it comes externally to him, because he thinks to himself, well, my senses can deceive me, there are optical illusions and things like that. So I'm not gonna I'm not gonna believe my senses. Also, I can think that I'm awake when I'm actually asleep and dreaming. And if you want to ramp up the skepticism to 11, then you could actually think I'm just a brain in a jar being prodded by a mad scientist. I'm not gonna believe anything at all. And I'm going to have this radical method of doubt that is opposed to the method of faith, faith-seeking understanding, that Christian philosophers had followed for the last thousand years. And instead, I'm gonna doubt everything. But there's one thing I can't doubt that I am a doubter, right? If I am in the process of doubting, there is an I who is doubting, there is an I who is thinking, and so I think, therefore I am, or I doubt, therefore I am. And so Descartes wanted to start with the internal world first, strip everything back until he could come to some rock solid kind of rational truth that he could then maybe build out from. So he he starts with the internal world first and then wants to build things out. He starts with an independent individual first, not a dependent member of a community first, and he starts with rationality first, not as the theologians for the last thousand years had said that we are heart-driven creatures. So since Augustine especially, um, theologians had had kind of said, you know, it's what the heart loves that captivates the mind and directs the mind. And there was a there was another philosopher at the same time as Rene Descartes. He was also a philosopher, also a theologian, uh, also a mathematician, and Blaise Pascal, he was very much in the Augustinian tradition, and he really didn't like Descartes and the whole turn that Descartes made, because Descartes was talking about I think therefore I am. And Blaise Pascal was like, No, I love therefore I am. I'm a heart-driven creature rather than a brain-driven creature. But really, the history of the West has not so much followed um Blaise Pascal. We we have followed Descartes a lot more, thinking of ourselves as rationally driven creatures who are independent, who are individual, who are radically skeptical, and we begin with me, and we try to build a world out from the inside out, and that has been Descartes' method of doubt. And for 400 years that has seemed like the the obvious way forward in the West. And now you come to manifesting abundance, and and there she is, like she she is seeing the external world as like the matrix, right? And and she sees through the matrix because she is an individual who sees the programming, and she is somehow prior to the programming, and she can some kind somehow divorce herself from the matrix that everybody else is stuck in, and she has this radically individualistic first-person narrative going on, and she wants to sort of send a message out via TikTok, like, is anyone else seeing the matrix? Is anyone else kind of like that? And actually, we're we're all kind of caught up in this Western tradition of thinking of ourselves first and being the these expressive individuals. So what she is doing, I think, is the endpoint of Descartes' way of seeing the world. You start with the independent individual, you start with skepticism, you start with rationality. Rather than starting with a world that comes to you, that you simply are dependent, you're a member of a community, you receive it on faith. Um, no, no, no, says Descartes, and and she is following that trajectory, and I think that trajectory does lead you to this kind of nihilism. So that's a brief synopsis of the last 400 years of Western thought. Okay, very brief, but but there you go. Let's do a second thing to understand this video, and and let's think about naming. On page two of the Bible, Adam is given the task of naming the animals. The Lord puts humanity in charge. This is my world, but I want you to run it and I want you to name it. And it's not an arbitrary thing that, you know, Adam sees an Ardvark and just says, Ardvach. Like there's there's something about humanity and its position with the world that the stewardship of humanity over the natural world is a God-given kind of a thing, and that the world and humanity, and humanity and God are in such a relationship that that it's not purely arbitrary to call this an advark and call this a beaver and call this a chipmunk. There is something apt about human culture and human dominion over the world and human stewardship of creation, and Adam takes this role onto himself. Now we are born into Adam's world in which Adam has named the animals, as it were, and in which society has named the days Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. This is the month of September, and I don't make the rules, I come into the world, and humanity as a whole has already determined those names and has already set the boundaries of the world in certain places. And I come in and I'm dependent and I'm radically communal, and I take my place in a humanity that is far bigger than me, and I simply have to play my part in Adam's world. Like that that is a sort of a scriptural understanding of the first Adam, but then of course you know that there's a second Adam in the Bible. Jesus Christ comes as the Lord of heaven who takes humanity on himself. And what he wants to do there is unite himself to our position so that we can be united to his position, so that through death and resurrection, humanity can be raised up. And so what does Jesus do when he rises again from the dead in Matthew chapter 28? He stands on this hill on top of the world and he says to humanity, Go into all nations and baptize them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And so what he wants us to do now, in him, the second Adam, is we can go and start naming things. We can go and start putting God's name on people all over the nations, right? In the first Adam, we simply receive the names that have been given. In the second Adam, we come to maturity where we now are namers. We now can contribute to the stewardship of the world and having dominion over the world. And that's a that's a beautiful thing. There's a journey that we've gone on. In the first Adam, we simply accept the names that are given. In the second Adam, we become namers. We become those who can put our stamp on the world, who can label the world. And there is something of a maturity to humanity that happens as we go from Adam to Christ. So that's biblically what's happening with naming. So we've thought about the history of Western thought from Descartes, and we've thought about a biblical view of things. Now, which of those two views of humanity is more correct? Because Descartes was basically rejecting the biblical story. Descartes saw his warring parents, Protestants and Catholics, kind of dueling it out, and he wanted to reject the method of faith that accepted the biblical story, and he wanted instead to be a radically skeptical individual. Is Descartes right or is the Bible right? And one of the ways of answering that question is just to ask yourself, okay, what are humans actually like? Are humans actually like Descartes, shutting the door in the room and going deeply into themselves? And do we begin from a radically skeptical internal position of doubt and then work our way out into the world? Is that how you and I come into the world? And the answer is absolutely not. Okay? The way I came into this world was as a radically dependent person in communion with others, in particular in communion with my mother and then my father and family and society out there. And I come into this world not as an individual skeptic, but as someone who constantly has to receive their life from the outside. And in the gaze of my mother and in the affirmation of her love, I grow up into personhood, don't I? I grow up into the sort of person who can start naming things. Now to begin with, this is really worth thinking about. I am not in charge of my own name. And to begin with, you are not in charge of your own name either. You were given your name from the outside because you're a dependent person. And it's the love of people from the outside who see you, who know you, and who can label you. You start as a named individual, not as a namer at all. And then as you grow up, you grow from a place in which you don't even know any names, you don't know any words. But slowly you might start to do a drawing. And then your mum says, Oh, look, that's a dog, or that's a lion. What do you want to name the lion? What do you want to name the dog? I want to name the dog Charlie. Okay, you've named the dog Charlie. Well done, you. And then you start to name your toys, right? You're given toys, and what do you want to name this toy? What do you want to name that toy? Maybe you'll start to get a pet, and your parents will say, You can name the hamsters, what are you gonna name the hamsters? Okay, and you start to practice naming other things, and you can start to make your stamp on the world as you grow up into maturity, but what comes first is that you are named. What comes first is that you are loved. What comes first is that you receive reality from beyond yourself, and you're not in a position to begin with to make your stamp on the world. You need to be brought to maturity. So I put it to you that just five minutes of reflection on who you are as a human being shows you that Descartes is wrong, and maybe therefore the Bible is right. And if the Bible is right, I think it gives you a way out of the nihilism. Here's the way out of the nihilism: receive your name from beyond you. That is how life works, and it's how life in Christ works. You don't name yourself, you don't define your own identity. You are given your own identity, and it's completely beyond you, completely beyond your biology, completely beyond your choice. It is given to you by somebody you love. Your name, whatever it is, is given to you by somebody you love. You don't name yourself, you are named from beyond. That is true in life. It's also true about life in Christ. In baptism in the Bible, what happens is you submit to Jesus, and then guess what? He gives you his name, and you're baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and you become a named individual who then can rise up and go off and start naming other people and start bringing the name of God to the nations. That's the way actual life runs. There's a beautiful story, I'll finish with this. There's a beautiful story in John chapter 20, where Mary is in a flap. Mary doesn't know what has happened. She had followed Jesus, she'd watched Jesus die, and now her life was over, so it seemed. Little did she know that Jesus was about to rock her world. It was Easter Sunday morning, and Jesus had risen again. Mary goes to the tomb, the tomb is empty. She figures that there are some grave robbers who have taken Jesus, and she's in a total flap. And she actually even bumps into Jesus, not realizing he's Jesus to begin with. She just assumes he's the gardener in this garden place where the tombs all were, and so she she starts accusing Jesus, like, what have you done with Jesus? What have you done with the body of Jesus? And you know the one thing that gets her out of her flap? The one thing that gets her out of her miserable nihilism. The one thing that gets her out of it is Jesus says, Mary. She doesn't say his name, he says her name. And everything in her world sort of flips right side up again, and she's like, Lord, rabbi! She flings herself at him, and and and then Jesus is like, No, you got a job to do, Mary. And he sends her to his brothers, the disciples, to be a proclaimer of the resurrection, right? Go and tell my brothers. And it's like her little Great Commission moment. It's like her her little go and proclaim my name to others. First you're named, you're set on your feet, and in the the embrace of Jesus, he then sends you out as someone who can name stuff, who can make your mark in the world. And this is this is what I hope for manifesting abundance. El May, whoever you are, El May, um you are not first a namer of the world. You are first one who is named by someone who loves you. And he knows you by name. And when you hear him call your name, uh that is not to press you down and make you accept a horrible, arbitrary, socially constructed existence above us. He doesn't want to suppress you. He actually wants to set you on your feet. And now with a whole bunch of TikTok followers, maybe you can go out and put the name of Jesus on others and make your way in the world. A world that is thrumming with meaning, a world that is charged with the grandeur of God, a world that is not nihilistic, a world in which things fit, in which there are names for things that are not arbitrary, because there is somebody who knows your name and they know the names of things, they know where things go, they know where to put things in life. We live in that kind of a universe, not arbitrary, meaningful. And you are named and you are loved, you are set on your feet so that you can make your mark in this world. That's where you fit. That's where you fit, and that's where you find meaning. If you want to find out more about this, why don't you go to 321course.com. You can find out about the two atoms that shape our world. The second atom, Jesus, coming to raise us up so that we can have true dominion over this world and escape a nihilism of meaninglessness. Go to 321cour.com, start your account, we'd love to see you there, and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

Well, there we go. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Speak Life Podcast. If you're new to us, this is the kind of thing we do. We look at various conversations that are happening in the culture and respond to them from a Christian perspective. You've just heard from Glenn Scrivener, the director of our ministry, and the vast majority of the content on this podcast is also available via the Speak Life YouTube channel. So if you go to youtube.com forward slash speaklife media, you will be able to watch all the clips that Glenn is referring to in these episodes. I realise some people prefer to watch, some people prefer to listen while they're driving or cooking or anything like that. We want to make our content as accessible as possible, and we pray that it will be a blessing to you, whoever you are, and wherever you're listening from. If you don't know me, my name is Thomas Thoroughgood, media producer at Speak Life, and we love hearing from you. So if you'd like to get in touch with the show, you can contact Thomas at speaklife.org.uk and we will read out some of those emails in future episodes. It's always wonderful to hear from our listeners. Well, thank you so much for downloading this episode of the Speak Life Podcast, and we will be back very soon. God bless you.