I HATE This YouTube Channel
- Aidan J
- Feb 21, 2019
- 3 min read
This week, while scrolling through the YouTube trending page like a bored teenager, I came across a video on loneliness by Kurzgesagt, a science/philosophy channel. As I am a bored teenager, I clicked on it to see what hidden truths the animation would reveal to me. While I wasn’t disappointed, I left the video feeling angry. I hate Kurzgesagt. But why?
After all, it’s a video with noble intent. Right?
It introduces a problem that everyone suffers from, loneliness, and tries to console the viewer.
Maybe it’s because the video feels inconsistent. During the first part, especially around the three-minute mark, the channel conjectures how loneliness was an evolutionary adaptation along the lines of pain, where it is a corrective behavior that gave individuals a higher chance of reproductive success. Something like, when we feel lonely, we will go out of our way to talk to people. However, this is just blatantly untrue: lonely people oftentimes become even more lonely. They even address this in the section of the video on loneliness in the modern world—they call it a “vicious cycle” at the seven-minute mark, where feeling lonely removes you from social interaction which informs your actions that lead to even more exclusion. How, and why, would loneliness be different for our ancestors where it corrected their behavior, when in our times loneliness makes our behavior worse?
They have also simplified the concept down so much that some parts of the script just do not make sense. They say loneliness is subjective, and therefore if you feel lonely, then you are lonely. That can be a powerful statement when we consider it outside of the context of the video. One interpretation: loneliness is dangerous because it can become an identifier for who you are, not just an emotion you are feeling. Another could be that loneliness is subjective, so other people may not understand that you feel lonely. Unfortunately, “if you feel lonely, then you are lonely” comes across as a tautology. I don’t think their simplification works. I also try to simplify interesting ideas for a broader audience, so maybe I am upset because they do it better?
It’s also hard to criticize them because they showed two scientific books at the end of the video that they used for research. I don’t know how much of what they said was scientifically proven, but I will also say that philosophy and science are separate domains, and maybe it makes me mad to see them thrust together without any care.
An example of how they don’t seem to care about the issue is their statement that seeking a therapist is courageous, not a sign of weakness. While I believe in that message, I felt something insidious inside of it, like they were plugging therapy as an easy solution to an age-old problem.
It’s still a well-animated video that can help people, at least temporarily. Maybe it doesn’t deserve my ire. I get mad at basically every philosophy channel on YouTube, like Wisecrack, because they’re so definitive in their answer. I keep watching them, though. I guess I like making myself mad. In fact, I like watching these videos and then picking them apart for being stupid. I guess I’m going to willingly keep doing what I hate.
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