Good morning, John.

I wanted to make this video for like ten straight years and then recently I had something happen to me that made me feel like, "Hey, maybe I shouldn't put stuff off, especially if it's easy stuff." And so, you have seen that I have bought a lot of questionable items and now I am boiling pasta. But also, you read the title of the video so you know what's about to happen ho-freakin'-ho everybody, we're eating Buddy the Elf's special pasta.

Now I've seen other people on YouTube do this and they often have tomato sauce involved, but if you look closely when Buddy chooses to make pasta his perfect way, I don't see any pasta sauce on there, which is good for me 'cause I think that would make this significantly worse. That's Chester by the way, he's our new cat.

Instead actually, this ain't that bad. It's basically just eating candy with noodles to cut the sweetness, except they're not cutting the sweetness at all.

Hank: I bet if there were like pretzels on it. You have any pretzels?

Katherine: Yeah

The pretzels didn't really help. Look, ultimately this is bad and it makes my tummy hurt.

Hank: For the thumbnail.

John, before I got sick, I thought that I had a pretty good grasp on what life was for, but as soon as I got a little bit close to the edge, I was amazed by how quickly I lost my grasp on that. There's a pretty strong like "How are we sure that any of this matters at all?" vibe to secular mortality. I think that's fair to say. Real question here: When I am dead, will anyone have eaten that Elf pasta? Because I feel like no. Certainly no one who exists will have had my experience of eating that Elf pasta. Also, do I even have that experience now and someday I might forget that I had the Elf pasta. Is the person that ate that Elf pasta in that situation, is that person dead then because that memory no longer exists? I'm getting to an age where I see clips of myself on the internet doing stuff that I have no idea I did. Are all of the mes that had the experiences that I've forgotten dead already? I know I'm wearing a ho-ho-ho onesie right now, but there is no perpetual postponement of the mortality of any experience or any individual or any species or any system of living chemistry.

And now that I'm looking at it, even if there was, I don't think that would help me find meaning in a universe that, to my eye, doesn't have any any objective meaning or at least if it does, is unwilling to share it with us. I'm not saying you should eat Elf pasta all the time or ever, in fact, never do this. Obviously. Dispositionally, I am about as far from being an nihilist as you can get, like, it's just not compatible with my brain chemistry, but I do understand it a little bit more than I used to.

Now, mortality is depressing. It's--or it's like a big thing to struggle with anyway. But I do want to be very clear that throughout all of it, I still very much wanted to be alive for as long as possible, if only because things are interesting and I wanted to keep seeing them. Like, it kinda boiled down to that, which kinda brought me back to a weird place where, like, maybe a big part of the right thing to do is to do what feels right. Like, not hedonistically. Not eat all the Elf pasta you can. Just like recognize that I'm an animal that evolved to be in community with other animals like me and do that. I have needs and wants for myself and for others, and I should strive to attain those things. Even if I'm only one piece of the striving, even if I don't think I'm ever gonna achieve it, even if I'm not gonna even see that tree sprout, even if I'm just planting the seed and being like, "I'm not gonna be around to see what happens with that," but I'm doing it! Like, I'm just trying to move toward the thing that I want because I am me and I am a person and I am a human being and I am a living organism, not because I want to change the universe but because I want.

And I think wanting is good, like, I want to want. I think when you stop wanting, which I have gotten there, that's the--that's the bad part. I want to want. And like a lot of the job of the consciousness is to try and direct the want, to try and figure out what the right wants are. And I want so many things, like earlier today, I wanted Elf pasta and then I got it and now I don't want it ever again. Now we can move on to some other stuff and we're gonna do some of those things in the next year and in the year after that and then eventually we'll all die, but we'll be wanting together.

John, I will see you next year.

Bonus content!

Number one: Christmas Eve, I'm gonna upload a weird video to Vlogbrothers, so expect that. I'm curious what everybody's gonna think about it.

Two: I'm doing my cancer stand-up in Southern California. There is some information on the shows that are currently booked. There will be more shows being booked. I'll let you know about them when they go live.