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YOLO ApologeticsFull TranscriptBarry: James was in a bad place when his friend Dan called him up with an idea for an adventure.James: I was in a job in London, and I was getting to a point where I was 24, I believe, and was about to have a midlife crisis.Barry: What was the job?James: I was working in printer sales, of all things. So I was selling printers and photocopiers, just cold calling, and I hated it completely. So I'm James Moynihan and I am from Surrey, England.Dan: And I am Dan Olifi, and I'm from London.Barry: Dan's idea was for him and James to find a deserted island somewhere, go and survive there naked for three weeks. Just like they do on that show Naked and Afraid, where two people, usually strangers, one man and one woman, get dropped off in the wilderness and try to not die.MusicBarry: Only one difference though. On Naked and Afraid, there are teams of people-- producers, medics-- standing by in case of emergency and helicopters are boats ready to airlift you out if you get bitten by a snake or pass out from dehydration. James and Daniel on the other hand were just two college buddies looking for an adventure.Dan: Yes, so I've got a YOLO tattoo. We watched quite a lot of survival shows, so we're talking Bear Grylls, Naked and Afraid, this was like all kind of research. Well, mine anyway. A lot of YouTube.Barry: After months of planning, which meant calling up random administrators of Pacific island nations and getting denied entry to every deserted island they could find, James and Dan settled on the jungles of Malaysia. Because, one, you can actually fly into the country, and two, the jungles looked pretty cool on Google Earth.James: The funniest memory I have is trying to get through the airport. So we bought the airline ticket and we then booked it for a month later to come back from Malaysia, and that was the hardest conversation I've ever had with my mum, because I told her that I was doing this jungle trip, and that in four weeks time I needed to be picked up from the airport but there is a possibility that I might not come back alive. So I had to sit her down and say, if you've not heard from me in five weeks, I'm dead! And then I was like, can you give me a lift to the airport? Tape: [Several voices] Do you only live once? You only live once. Because you do only live once. Meredith: From Slate, this is Hi-Phi Nation, philosophy in story form. Recording from Vassar College, here's Barry Lam.Barry: A few months ago, the philosopher Nick Riggle, who was on the show last season, called me up and said he was meditating on YOLO, 'you only live once,' and its predecessor, carpe diem, 'seize the day,' you know, those cliched bits of justification that people give for making highly risky decisions that, even when successful, don't amount to anything more than a fleeting warm memory. He issued me a challenge: make an episode about YOLO. This is the result of that challenge. The first thing I did was put out a Google Alert everywhere on the Internet where people cited YOLO as their reason for doing something. You'd think there'd be some killer stories, but mostly I found financial planners blaming YOLO for why Millennials don't save for retirement, which is part of what makes YOLO paradoxical, actually. On the one hand, the wisest thing you're supposed to do in life is be forward-looking and delay gratification. And yet there's almost universal disdain for people who shun YOLO, who live for safety. In 2015 some internet people tried to issue a response to YOLO. They called it YODO: you only die once. It never took off. People shut that down quickly. Anyway today I'm bringing you some YOLO stories weaved with Nick Riggle's meditations on YOLO. We're going to follow Daniel and James and their attempt at surviving the Malaysian jungle. I've got some stories from listeners, and we interview people on the street and ask how they would live if they found out that they had more than one life, what if they had two or three or an infinite number? Did it really matter to their life decisions that we only live once? Turns out, not really. This is the last episode of season 3, and it's a fun one. Thanks for listening to all 10 episodes of this first year we're here at Slate. Stay tuned in to the end to hear some important news about season 4 of Hi-Phi Nation, and stay subscribed-- we have big plans. MusicTape: You know YOLO, you only live once, and this just might be it.Barry: How would you describe the person who doesn't live like YOLO?Tape: They're scared, intimidated, close-minded.Barry: Do you hang out with people like that?Tape: I do, but then you turn right around.Riggle: You know what YOLO means, what 'you only live once' means, but what does it mean to you?Tape: It means seize every opportunity that you can and don't regret anything.Riggle: What do you think this risk-averse person is missing out on?Tape: Life! That's all life is all about, risk, and doing things that scare you?Barry: And you think they're not happy? Tape: I don't think they're happy.Barry: Why is that? Why are risk-averse frightened people who like--Tape: They stay in their shell and they don't try things that I think that they really want to try. Tape: I think that when you overcome what you're scared of, it makes you happier, makes you grow, and makes you a better person. It makes you who you are supposed to be.Riggle: Say it with me-- YOLO. Barry: Philosopher Nick Riggle, former pro skater, now professor at the University of San Diego. Riggle: 'You only live once,' annoying in form and content, YOLO is a yodel-adjacent call for idiocy that induces a layered cringe. The rapper Drake, who's often credited with coining the term in his 2011 song "The Motto," apologized for his part in popularizing it. "I sincerely apologize," he said in an opening monologue for Saturday Night Live, "I did not know your annoying friends and co-workers would use it so much." Urban Dictionary's top definitions of YOLO include, in addition to 'the douchebags' mating call,' 'the dumbass' excuse for something stupid that they did,' 'also one of the most annoying abbreviations ever.' But there's a grain of truth behind the extremes and idiocies that YOLO connotes. When we contemplate the thought that this is our only life, the only one that will ever have and the one that, when it's gone, it's absolutely gone forever, we think that we should live a certain way. Take the plunge, quit your bullshit job, try new and thrilling things. And the idea isn't that you should be risky every once in a while, or that you should give vitality and verve a try. It's really the idea that you should be a certain kind of person with a certain sensibility and style. One who has 'you only live once' on the tip of their tongue, who embraces life with a spirit of adventure and openness to risk and uncertainty. But recent trends take 'you only live once' far beyond waltzing, the social climbing, and even soap operatic drama to next level absurdity in danger. On September 12 2012 the rapper Ervin McKinnis, AKA Inky, AKA Jewels, tweeted this: 'drunk AF going 120 drifting corners #f***it Yolo.' Shortly thereafter the car he was in ran a red light and crashed into a wall. He died along with the four other people in the car.MusicNick: When we separate YOLO from the extremes, the annoyances the ironies, we're left with a thought that really does seem intimately related to motivation and action. Simple reflection on our one and only life can be enough to send us friends eat into the uncertain world. Why? What is the connection between the thought of having only one life and embracing life in all of its precarious glory? The world contains only one playable Stradivarius guitar, the Sabionari of 1679. Basically no one plays it. It's worthy of museum protection, handled with the utmost concern, and played only on very rare occasions by caring masters. This makes it puzzling why 'you only live once' isn't used to inspire the exact opposite thought. If my life were like the Sabionari, then you might think I should be a hypochondriac, extremely risk-averse, and at least mildly agoraphobic. 'You only live once,' after all, so don't take too many risks. In fact, be extra careful! Let's call this the preservationist objection. Here's the objection: the thought that you only live once motivates the exact opposite of risky behavior. Life is precious, fragile; it's rare. So if you only live once, then you should be extremely risk-averse. James: We landed in Kuala Lumpur the day before. We've got taxi across the whole country. We wake up, I think it was around about 4 o'clock the next morning, and we get a taxi to the edge of where Dan has, sort of, Google Earth thinking this will be the start of our trek into the jungle. The first day is a key day here. So we've gone out, we've brought one machete between us. We get there, and as far as we could see, what we thought might be jungle had been cut down and plantation farms of palm oil trees had been put in its place. So what we fought were trees from looking on Google Earth what the trees we were looking for. [Music] James: But we decided, right, let's trek. Let's try and find the jungle. There's a lake somewhere. We know from having maps, and we've got printed out versions of the maps. We trekked for about 12 hours, yeah, but we didn't bring any water. And so we can sort of work out that there might be some kind of rain forests in the distance. but a night comes along.MusicJames: Out there, it goes from being light to dark almost instantly. And then once it turns dark, the heavens open up, and it just rains and it rains, it rains, it rains all night. So we're under this sort of bush where we're gonna try and keep the heat in and we're gonna try and get some sleep. Down at this point, yeah, in the dark, it's cutting down bushes to put over us.Dan: Sort of make some kind of shelter when it's pulling down already. It's like thundering and lightning, and I go in a very stupid fashion with the machete to put it into the ground in a very, like, Rambo type way. So I get it and I stab it into the ground.James: And all of a sudden I hear [slicing noise.]Dan: And then obviously it hits the ground, and then my hand just slides right down it.James: And he swears and he says, 'Ah f***.' MusicJames: I've jumped up. And Dan has cut his hand with the machete to the point where I can see muscle, bone. We can't really bandage it up because of the amount of rain; it would just get damp, it will get infected. So I actually got some superglue that was meant to be for the camera equipment, yeah.Dan: We figured, you know, use the superglue put it into my hand just to create a better barrier. Well, so it does work on cuts, it's only on small cuts that's gonna work on. It was a cut on the palm of my hand, which meant whenever that opens, it's just gonna open it further.James: And we're trying to push like his hand back together. At the same time, super glue it.Dan: And it stung like hell. The benefit was that there was no light, so I couldn't see how bad my hand was for a lot of it. So I just kept my hand close and just kind of ignored it.James: We're then in this rain under this bush a few more hours, and then we decide that we're not gonna get any sleep. So we're gonna trek in the dark, through this sort of palm tree farms. And we do that don't we? And this goes on, and then the Sun rises. It's beautiful, but we carry on going. And we're going for, maybe another five hours, yeah? And we're going up and down these little valleys, up and down, and then Dan slips on a rock and goes 'bang!' straight on his hand.Dan: And it just went straight into like some dirty mud. it's smoked really bad. and I'd point like I knew there's no way I could keep this clean, and it's best to leave now whilst my hands still kind of intact and moving, rather than stay out there and then it'd get infected.James: And he went awfully white.Dan: I was fading. James had to help me, kind of, I was, like, trailing far behind 'cuz I was just absolutely gone and out of it. The heat kind of hit me hard.James: And in the end, we found, we see a road in the distance that's obviously used for, like, logging trucks. And then this logging truck doesn't speak a word of English, it's going. And I'm just like, 'We just need water,' because we've now gone roughly about 36 hours with no water. And then this guy drives us to, like, this little old woman's shack. And we managed to get water. So we I drink the water and it goes in and comes straight back out because I was that dehydrated that my body was starting to sort of shut down from the loss of water. We then get back to the city, Dan gets his hand typed up. We're in a hotel. So that's the first day, yeah?MusicJames: Now most people here, yeah, in their right mind would be like 'Right, we're done. We're not doing this again.' We're in this hotel room after one day and we go, 'Should we go back out again? we've come this far.'MusicMeredith: Hi-Phi Nation will return after these messages. [Messages]Barry: Do you live your life according to YOLO?Tape: ...No. You know, so I'll give you an example. I really want one of those electric skateboards, but, but someone won't let me. I don't want I can't mention names, but there's somebody out over the four of us that won't allow that, and it's none of us three here. And it's because she's afraid I'll get hurt, you know the job.Nick: And, you know, so you think you got, if you think, if you got one of those skateboards, that would be like expressing the YOLO spirit?Tape: You know what I can tell you? I have a great life. I retired from the military. I got a good job. Been married for 25 years. Have a great family, great daughter, so I have no reason to be overly risky.Nick: Maybe 'you only live once' reminds us not of irreplaceability, but of mortality. What good is carpe diem without a little memento mori? The fact that 'you only live once,' combined with the fact that you're not an immortal, means that you're guaranteed a very final ending. But then, why should 'you only live once' move us to do things that have a decent chance of causing our death? One answer is that a YOLO death is somehow preferable to a non-YOLO death.James: Using Google Earth again, because, that's the way we roll, we decided to trek into the middle of Malaysia. So we got another taxi, to a place called Kuala Tahan. We trekked for another day and a half. Barry: James and Dan get to their destination, which the internet says is one of the oldest jungles in the middle of Malaysia. They strip off their clothes, put some GoPro cameras around their heads, and have a go at not dying for the next twenty days. Dan: It just actually poured down, and it's the middle of the night, you're getting cold. You're shivering next to this guy. We're both naked as well, and we're in the mud. There's ants biting us, there's those mosquitos as well.James: I woke up and I was freezing cold, to the point where we thought we might have to go, dimwit, ya know, through hypothermia. We had black bags for all the camera equipment, so, like a bin liner, put it over myself and do exercise to heat my own body up as I was thinking ah so this no lot when you see in the newspaper, this person went out to the backcountry and died. I was like, we're those idiots now who are gonna die.Barry:Nick: The enthusiasms of 'you only live once' are not limited to death-defying Superman stunts. They extend to our life choices and projects. There were times in my early 20s when nothing made me feel more alive then playing guitar. Singing with friends, writing songs, playing shows with the band. I felt like there couldn't be anything better to do with my life with a life than that sometimes when I look at my dusty guitar I really wonder whether something died in me. something I should have nurtured. What did I lose? Maybe it's because I'm busy with things like this. I suppose that, when all this said and reckoned, I really care more about stuff like this than anything sung or strung. But if that's true, it's sad! If you could experience the force with which my younger self envisioned a lifetime of musical love, then you'd be a little sad too. It's a sadness that makes me want to seize the day and pick up my guitar. It's almost as if I want to live twice, equally in love with words and music. The fact that I can't because I will die is almost depressing. Reflecting on it doesn't exactly make me want to seize the day. It makes life seem like it's such that we can't live only once as much as we might want to, which makes its motivation seem like it can't deliver what it demands, like there's too few seasons to make the day worth ceasing. This is the dark side of Yolo that no one tweets about.Barry: Yeah, let's just get to it. Like, tell me your YOLO story.Emily: So I was working at a tech company in San Francisco, but it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life or existence. So I quit and moved to Japan and became a translator.Barry: Was it, like, a really well-paying job that you had to give up a lot for?Emily: I mean it's not like I was an engineer, but I had never made money like that before, so it felt like a big deal. And when you think about like stocks and stuff like that to you then it's like, oh maybe if I hung on longer I could make a pile of money. But the first time I visited here, I remember being in like a taxi and like probably [inaudible] and just looking out the way, it was very, like, a lost in translation moment. Like why don't I move here? And then I decided to answer the question and say, oh I did. I think the biggest the biggest YOLO thing my mind is, um, I came out as transgender recently. And trying to decide if I want to go into hormones or not. So that would be a one heck of a leap.Barry: I don't even know what the YOLO thing would say about it right? 'Cuz, like, YOLO's really about risk or no risk right?Emily: Yeah. I think that's that's the biggest thing for me, right? Like, I could go on hormones and hate it. And then, and then what? Because you do only live once.MusicBarry: This is the most interesting interpretation of YOLO for me. It's not pointing out that life ends, it's pointing out the life has only one path. When you make a decision, it's done. You can only miss out at the choice you didn't make. You can't live two lives at once and enjoy both-- that's a tragedy, and a lot of pressure. What's supposed to break a tie? Maybe a little philosophical thought experiment what help.Nick: Do you feel like, if you had another life to live after this, like, another human life, would you, would you do anything differently?Tape: I don't think so.Barry: If you had a second life, how would you live that one?Tape: Just like this! Just like this.Tape: You know, it's worked for 25 years. I wouldn't risk changing it.Barry: You know your second life is coming up. What are you gonna do in that one?Tape: YOLO this life, YOLO the next life.Nick: But I guess, in a way, we do live twice. Our lives have different stages, and now that I'm no longer young, maybe there are different yellow standards that apply to me. The 20 year old options are different from those of someone's staring at 40, and I had a YOLO-strong youth as a pro skater, flippin', spinning, grinding, competing, and generally YOLOing around the world. When I look back on this, I'm glad, even proud that I did what I did. And I made numerous apparently unsound decisions: high school dropout, single-minded pursuit of a necessarily short-lived career, made money that I spent on, I honestly don't even know. But what should I do now to live up to the fact that I have just this one life? Drink a third pint of beer? Hike a smallish mountain? YOLO's voice is louder and clearer when risk and adventure are easy. Maybe all it does now is whisper, 'Hey bud! Why don't you plug in that bread machine?' Maybe part of the idea behind the thought that you only live once is that, if you had two lives instead of one, then it wouldn't be so bad if you sat one of them out. But if I did have two whole lives to live, I'm not sure I would like to skimp on either. I would definitely feel bad about living neither of them, but I would also feel like I should live both at least a little. Our question still stands. Even if we had two lives on earth, why should either of them embrace or even entertain the YOLO ethos? I might like to use one of them to be an accountant, then the other to be a priest. it would be interesting to compare their subtle pleasures their differing senses of achievement. They'd present different challenges, involve me in radically different communities, and connect me to divergent sources of inspiration creativity curiosity and passion. Maybe the connection between death and 'you only live once' isn't straightforward. Perhaps it goes by way of the popular thought that life is, in a sense, absurd. The thought of our death reminds us that we're but the speckiest off specs on a speck of a planet in one specky galaxy among many billions. When I take a bird's-eye or cosmic perspective on my life, I begin to doubt the seriousness with which I tend to regard it. The perspective reveals an almost comical gap between the importance I attach to my life and the utter nothing that my life will amount to, no matter what I do. And yet I continue to act like what I do matters. I worry about not playing guitar. I wonder if I ought to use my bread machine. I think that I should love my one and only life. The fact that I continue in this way despite my avowed cosmic insignificance is absurd. To use an example from Thomas Nagel, as modified by J. David Velleman, it's as if my pants fell down as I was being knighted, and I remain utterly poised for the ceremony, pants around my ankles. But come to think of it, isn't that kind of a yellow thing to do? to own and embrace such an unpredictable moment? 'Pants totally fell down as I was being knighted. Didn't lose eye contact with the king #medievalaf.'MusicNick: This, of course, doesn't explain the connection between such a perspective and risky adventurous action. But it sets the connexion and relief by revealing another dimension of the preservationist challenge. The perspective we take on our lives when we're impressed by the thought that we only live once is the same perspective that might alienate us from our lives by showing us that we take them far too seriously. Why should that inspire an embrace of life, rather than the attitudes and responses we commonly associate with the feeling that life is absurd, existential despair, or ironic detachment? Barry: It turns out that if you're trying not to die with your best mate in the jungle for eighteen days the most accurate characterization of your experience is... boring. Dan and James pretty much got used to being rained on all night. They built their shelters sturdily enough that it didn't need any more work. And hunting or gathering that just uses up energy you don't have to spare, so you just sit around day after day.Dan: All the best moments were just, like, us at night talking about food. And we'd just describe to each other, just like, noodle bread, which is like noodles in bread, because this is so sloppy, it's like, it's a hot food. That's your entertainment for the evening. And it's like, it's what gets you through it, just like, I'm adding all the foods you're gonna eat when you leave. James: We ate quite a lot of bugs. So I would sit there, and every ant that would come past and sort of play a game. Like oh, you'll do, and then put, like, ants into your mouth and they bite the top of your mouth before you could actually chew them. You'd have to be very quick, and you'd be like like that [chomping sound.] Lots of beetles, worms, because we were blacking out. I was, at some point. I ran about, day 14 maybe, onwards, vision would just go to black, and like all the noise would just go to like a mute sound.MusicJames: Dan was sort of quite persistent in the fact that he wasn't gonna leave if I was gonna leave. So we could have left each other and then never seen each other again.Tape: Well I don't actually believe that we only live once. Barry: Okay.Tape: Yeah. I believe that we've already lived a couple of times, at least, yeah.Barry: So tell me how that thinking affects how you live your life here.Tape: Man, like, it takes a while to figure it out. Because you're born, you don't remember shit, but then you keep going, you start to remember shit and you start to realize like, 'Oh I've lived before.' If you live before that means you die before so you ask yourself, are you very scared to die? For me the answer was no.Nick: Maybe Nietzsche has an answer. He seems to be the 19th century's chief yellower he was a sort of nihilist and so thought that life was absurd in a sense. But that didn't stop him from thinking that we should embrace life. He did not like the idea of living twice, of a heavenly and eternal afterlife. He firmly believed that you only live once and that it was important to take this seriously. But in a clever move, he evokes YOLO vibes by combining the idea of eternal life with the idea of life on Earth. He has us imagine that we have only one type of life and we live it over and over again so you have infinitely many lives, but they all have the same character or description. You do exactly the same thing in each life. if you're a grocery store clerk in one in and all. Nietzsche thought that if we imagine the eternal recurrence, as he called it, of our life vividly enough, we might be moved to adopt a carpe diem latent attitude toward life, passionately affirming it in all its glory. The revelation of life's eternal recurrence is supposed to get us to affirm life, but getting us to reflect on whether we're living the life that we would want to live over and over again. Nietzsche's idea seems to be that contemplating life's eternal recurrence will get me to seek either in my past or in the future a tremendous moment that would move me to praise as a God the being who informed me of this fate.Barry: So you got to tell me your YOLO story. first just tell me who you are.Liz: My name is Liz. I'm an attorney in Seattle. It was this website called Gaia Online. One of the conceits of the site is that you have an avatar that you dress up. They're anime. and I just sort of logged in on a whim because of my friends we're using it and ended up staying because there was a sub forum about politics I'd like to talking about politics and I met people there and made some online friends. His avatar was a girl and he never corrected anyone that he was not a girl, because, you don't always expect to make really lasting friendships on these websites so, why? Many years past I'm in law school instead of undergrad. And we're watching movies together by streaming them at the same time, you know, having online conversation still, but I still think he's a she when I was at this point where I thought, 'Oh is this person a woman and I love them are we just really good friends, am I not straight anymore? Like it was really confusing. I finally said, 'Look, I have some suspicions. He came clean, so we met. I was in upstate New York. He was in Vancouver, Canada.Barry: And what do you think of him physically the first time you saw him?Liz: He's a lot taller than me, I mean, I thought he was like really cute, really trim and tall. But yeah, I was, like, super attracted to him. And eventually I just said, 'Why don't you move in with me, and then we can talk about getting married and stuff like that?' And this part is actually a bit of a blur because he agreed that would be a good idea. That was right when everything really sped up to get married.Emily: I'm Emily. I graduated college recently.Barry: Yeah, so you have a YOLO story for me? Emily: I do, yes me and my friend went out for drinks on her birthday. We happened to go out to a place that had horse decor, and she mentioned that she would love one day to go to the Kentucky Derby. So I said, well why don't we do it this year? And of course this year was two weeks away, 12-hour road trip. But we decided, you know, what why not live a little? and we decide to go for the cheapest hotel notice some interesting stains. And so then the day of the Derby it starts raining, and it does not let up it was the wettest Derby in history. We go place a bet.Barry: Did you win the bet or did you lose the bet? Emily: It ended up that we won, yeah.Barry: You did win!Emily: Yeah, we did win. Our horse came in first so there you go.Barry: Gosh how much money did you win?Emily: Um, it was only a $10 bet, so it was only like, you know, yeah, okay Minnesota, nice. There you go.Barry: Yeah, you're the least risky YOLO-er that I've ever heard. Ten dollars!Nick: But I'm not sure why Nietzsche's idea should work. Why considering life's eternal recurrence should move me to affirm any sort of life. One of my favorite movies is The Big Lebowski. It's great. it's funny, original, profound, has unforgettable characters and really great dialogue. I've seen it probably three or four times, and maybe I'll watch it a few more times in my life, or maybe not. Even the best films aren't ones that I necessarily want to watch over and over again. One reason I don't really care if I watch The Big Lebowski again is that I'm still in touch with my sense of its value. I smile at the memory of Walter admonishing Donny. I identify with the image of California that the film evokes even in memory. If these feelings, this complex sense of the film's value, went away, then I would as soon as I realized that want to watch it again. I think I might feel the same way about my life. The Macho Man Randy Savage once signed my Slimjim, I hugged Topanga from Boy Meets World, I was ranked 4th in the world in competitive Street skating I gave all that up to become a philosopher, and look at me now. I love my life, but supposing things stay about as good as they are, I wouldn't want to live it again.MusicNick: It's certainly possible that I've missed something essential about Nietzsche's idea. But consider more generally how odd it would be if the idea that you live only once could have the same motivational effect as the idea that you live an infinite number of times. This suggests that numbers have nothing to do with it. 'You only live once' reminds us that we have only one life. But it also reminds us that we have a life. It reminds us that we're alive. 'You only live once' doesn't work by reminding us that we're unique, irreplaceable, mortal, that we must always use what we have, and so on. If anything, it tells us that we're alive, and it emphasizes a particular understanding of what it means to be alive. Reflecting on the fact that you only live once gets us to realize that we're not really alive unless we actively appreciate the life we're living. And living is so much more than having a heartbeat.James: I think it was two days before our flight. We left the jungle, and we trekked out, and it took two days, yeah. And then we just waited on this road for a coach to come along, and the coach allowed us on for free, and it drove us to this tourist spot that was like a lot further. We knew where it was, in the heart of Kuala Tahan. And then that's where we had our first first meal.Barry: What does it feel like to have a meal-- the rest of us don't know anything about what that feels like. Dan: Yeah like if both of our stomachs so quickly, and your eyes are way bigger than your stomach, and you make yourself feel very sick.James: It's the worst meal choice I have ever made in my life. We decided to have spicy satay, and after having not eaten and your palate-- it was so spicy. It was the worst choice I've ever made in my life. I was, anything, so excited to, like, drink a fizzy drink and eat this food that I was, like, my plate was shaking, and it dropped all the food on the ground and I had to get some more.Nick: As the proto-YOLOing Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells us, 'To live is not to breathe. It's to act. It's to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years, but he who has most felt life. Men have been buried at 100 who died at their birth.'James: The whole journey on the coach, we didn't speak to each other at all. We both sort of put our headphones in, and we've been in nature, and not listened to music, not listened to anything at all. I'm telling you now, music when you've not listened to it, and then when you've had to listen to this nature and this guy, yeah, it's phenomenal. There are songs that I didn't even know I liked before, and it just brought tears to my eyes listening to this music.MusicNick: Rousseau thinks that living is not just having a heartbeat. It's a kind of action. It's living your life in a way that makes you feel alive, attending, savoring, listening, examining and exploring in ways that inspire the sentiment of our existence, and that keep us in touch with the richness and full value of life. And this is where the preservationist objection fails. The preservation of life might be responsive to life's preciousness and rarity, and we can be moved to act in ways that realize those values. But preciousness and rarity are a small fraction of the value of being alive. Attempts to avoid the kinds of challenge adventure and thrill that make us feel alive and that keep us in touch with life's full value, tend to offend life by making it routine, subdued, fearful, predictable, closed-minded or non experimental. The full feeling of life is not stoked in these ways. To grasp that you only live once is to grasp the significance of being alive, which is so much more than maintaining a heartbeat. Rousseau suggests something even stronger, that there's no real point to having a heartbeat unless you're living. If that's right, then the preservationist life is merely a way of ensuring that your heart doesn't stop, which is either grossly inferior to living, or entirely pointless.Dan: When I got back to England, I was just like in my head, I was just like on cloud nine have achieved just, like, a great thing. Like, that kind of changed a lot of my outlook on life, and I think when you make big achievements, you know, I mean that just makes you just a more positive person. But nothing that, you know, can really faze you anymore, because you've already achieved that. You know, what else can you do? What can't you do? And what you kind of thought you can't do, it's gone down to like barely anything. James: I'll quit my job knowing that when I come back, I'm gonna focus on something that I want to do that will make me happy.Barry: does you think you found you found yourself in the jungle.James: I want to have said that I've lived, and I want an experience that if I'd just-- to sit down with grandkids in many years' time, I've got a story to tell about this epic adventure that me and Dan went on. And they'd be like, "Really, did you do that?" And I'd show them all clips and stuff like that.Nick: While some people maintain their sense of being alive with little or no help, others need sturdy reminders, prods and provocations. But we have to be careful not to go too far in the other direction. The mass media culture of surrounding YOLO has encouraged the idea that YOLOers are adventure-seeking fanatics. But it's not essential to the YOLO ethos that we constantly strive for heightened experience, attention, or thrill. Indeed such constant striving will inevitably become the kind of distorted routine that YOLO advises against. What seems to matter is that we maintain a sense of the contrast between life's inevitable routine, with its repetition, its habit, mechanization and familiarity, and life's peak offerings. The feeling of life is reliably with us when this contrast is steadily in mind, and the acceptability of daily life is seen in the light of life's more thrilling registers.Barry: Nick Riggle, philosopher, former pro skater professor at the University of San Diego. Hs book is "On Being Awesome: a Unified Theory of How Not to Suck." Dan Olifi and James Moynihan are looking for people interested in sponsoring even more survivalist adventures of theirs. Dan has biked across the Sahara, walked to the Alps. You can contact and follow Dan on Instagram. He's @danbanksofearth. Follow James on Instagram. He's @JamesMoynihan50. You can find all of this at our website, . And thanks to Emily, liz, and Emily, for sharing their stories. As i said earlier, this is the last episode of season three of Hi-Phi Nation, and here's the big news. I and Hi-Phi Nation have received a Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship to produce all of season four, the very first season I'm dedicating to the philosophical foundations of one, just one, institution of American life-- criminal justice. Between now and next year I'll be out and about, reporting on stories and some of the deepest questions about punishment, deterrence, justice, and moral responsibility in the American legal system. All of that will be brought to you in a serialized series sometime next year. If you want to get a taste of what that's going to be like, episode 1 and 2 of this season for the beginnings of that project. In the meantime, you'll get bonus episodes in your feed, along with previews and updates, so subscribe now, if you haven't already, to the Hi-Phi Nation feed. Thanks everyone for listening to this season. From Vassar College, Barry Lam signing off.Tape: For Slate podcasts, editorial director is Gabrielle Roth, senior managing producer is June Thomas. Senior producer is TJ Raphael. Visit for complete show notes, soundtrack, and reading lists for every episode. That's . Follow Hi-Phi Nation on Facebook and Twitter, and at the website for updates on stories and ideas. Music ................
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