School of Life: A Bad YouTube Channel | Big Joel

hey everybody uh today we're gonna be talking about a youtube channel called school of life brainchild of known man elon de baton it's like a self-help style philosophy psychology channel with like six million subs it's a big channel and in addition to all of the other things that are true about it the channel is also a steaming pile of filth it's a terrible youtube channel and it's shocking to me how much i hate it and so today i thought it would be fun to just go through some of those videos with you and talk about why they make me mad also you may notice that i'm a little less formal and a little more awkward in this video and that's because i'm not working from a script i have some notes here but basically everything that you're hearing right now is straight from my mind to your ears i just thought it would be fun to vibe and chill and have a little drink and talk about a youtube channel that i don't like very much uh and i hope that'll be a good time and with that out of the way let's talk about our first school of life video why love is never as good as it should be often our partner isn't necessarily being terrible in any overt way but we feel a growing sadness about the character of our relationship so the basic argument that this video makes is that the reason we find relationships distressing sometimes why we get upset by our partners not fulfilling our emotional needs is that during our childhoods most of us all had our emotional and psychological needs met by our parents the idea of happy coupledom taps into a fundamental picture of comfort deep security wordless communication and of our needs being effortlessly understood that comes from early childhood so now our romantic relationships are disappointing because they don't stack up they are not tragically inept nor uniquely selfish it's rather that we're judging our adult experiences in the light of a very different kind of childhood love that's the nutshell version anyway so looking at something like this which establishes a pretty bold theory about human emotion and behavior i think it makes sense to ask two main questions first is there concrete evidence that this theory is true and the answer here is a resounding no right the video doesn't mention any studies there's nothing in the description no citations mentioned and i tried looking up stuff myself and you know couldn't find anything and of course i couldn't right what study is gonna demonstrate that this theory is true it's such an extremely specific claim they're making here that the reason we're sometimes dissatisfied with our relationships is that we're comparing them to our happy childhoods you know how are you gonna prove that one out so right off the bat that's a bad sign right no proof for the thing they're saying that's not good don't like that still maybe you'd want to say that that's not entirely fair after all as i just said this would be an extremely hard theory to demonstrate so even if it were true we'd have no real way of knowing it and that leads me to question number two leaving aside anything related to concrete evidence is there just good common sense reason to thinking this thing is the case does it just sound right and the answer here is no it doesn't seem true at all it seems like a [ __ ] for one thing it just doesn't speak to everybody's experiences of life right not everybody has a perfectly happy childhood where they're shielded from all conflicts by loving parents who never express bad emotions to them our parents were probably kind enough to shield us from the burden that looking after us imposed on them they maintained a reasonably sunny facade and yet those kinds of people might plausibly have these exact kinds of emotions it's a pretty universal thing right feeling generally positive about a relationship but nonetheless sometimes feeling like all of your needs aren't being met that's pretty pretty much everyone sometimes feels that way so why do those kinds of people have these emotions what's going on there and the video just has nothing to say to that this theory is only happy kids aloud this is the dave and busters of pseudoscience but more importantly this theory just doesn't sound true at all it doesn't make any sense when you think about it for even a minute like why are we so fast to discard the possibility that the reason why we sometimes feel like our emotional needs aren't being met is that they're not being met and that feeling of deprivation can be caused by a million things maybe you had a hard day at work maybe something's stressing you out maybe you're feeling depressed or anxious uh maybe just maybe the person that you're dating acted like a bit of a dick you know it's possible it's possibly true right but no that couldn't possibly be it it has to be this reductive nonsense explanation you're sad now because you were happy as a kid and that's that you know the thing about this video and a lot of the videos that we're gonna watch is that it leverages the fact that it makes no sense at all in order to sound more profound if they had said sometimes people get sad and that can be caused by a lot of things nobody would have been impressed by that everybody knows it already because that's the truth but because they make this wild unverified claim that kinda sounds true when you blur your eyes it gets to sound meaningful and profound and like they have the hidden keys to human nature but you know they don't it's a bad video but anyway let's move on to the next video we're going to talk about called why truly sociable people hate parties and immediately how annoying is that title how like yeah truly sociable people wouldn't like a party these parties are so bad now uh and the video is just that that's what the video is the argument here as you might expect is that parties are bad and no fun and that the people who like them are weirdos and you're sociable unlike the sheeple who go to parties but in truth it takes a sharply insular and misanthropic person to feel that what goes on in an average party really counts as anything like the requisite encounter with one's fellow human animal and my only reaction to this is what a dick right what an annoying thing to say about people you know this video could have been fined so easily like all he had to say was it's okay to not like parties and as somebody who doesn't like parties particularly i would say yeah that's true it is okay to not like parties that's fine but instead he has to present liking parties as though that's like a morally bad thing or it shows a poorly developed character it takes a sharply insular and misanthropic person like you're weird and against being sociable if you like to dance and get drunk and have fun with people that's a bad thing according to alanda bataan i have this note about this video that's just the words in cell [ __ ] uh and yeah i think that's what it is i think that makes sense i'm not entirely sure how this is a video for the incels moving on let's talk about a video called the advantages of being just good friends so the argument here is that relationships are kind of awful filled with terrible insults and mistreatment and that we might reasonably mistake it as some sort of mental illness or aberration to get into one if we were to judge love chiefly by its impact by the extent of the tears the depths of the frustrations the viciousness of the insults that unfold in its name we wouldn't continue to rate it as we do and might indeed mistake it for a form of illness or aberration of the mind and based on that we should all value friendship more because everyone's always nice to their friends because we don't expect as much from them we are in the company of our friends our best selves so on a really broad level i can get behind this video friendships are great and maybe they are genuinely undervalued by society but i take two issues with the argument that he makes first friendship isn't simple at least not as simple as he seems to be acting like it is the thesis of the entire video is that friendships are important and great and shouldn't be seen as a downgrade on love but then he goes on to describe friendship like it's this totally unconflicted perfect thing that always brings out our best selves and we're always nice to our friends and it's always perfect we are patient encouraging tolerant funny and most of all kind we expect a little less and therefore by extension forgive an infinite amount more and you know they're not right we all know that they're not we've all fought with our friends right had a bad time with them we've all had friendships end either because of growing apart or because of an active cessation of the friendship and so i just think that it's kind of toxic and weird to pretend that friendships aren't complicated to act like they don't impact you negatively sometimes uh he acts like friendship is just as good as relationships but presents them as one-dimensional things that's the first critique of the video the other problem i have with the video is it's constant pathologizing of completely normal human things that do not have to be bad like no actually romantic relationships don't have to take you to the pits of despair and in fact if that is the defining feature of your relationship then that is what we call a bad relationship a a bad time that you're having and you should stop doing it i think relationships should be broadly nice in my opinion they should be things that you enjoy and not things that you hate uh that's my thought that's my hot take put that in a video and get it six million subscribers all right so let's move on to the next video we're gonna talk about called why nice people are scary it's very frightening to have to deal with niceness it can be unfamiliar it can freak some of us out so be ready for us to panic and hang on in there this video is raw cringe basically unlike other school of life vids it's not just some british guy talking to us like they do this weird [ __ ] like story thing about a girl who says she likes nice boys but ends up with guys who treat her badly because she hates herself people who treat us like [ __ ] can seem like they understand something profound about life and about us yeah no i'm uh i'm just at the office at the moment yeah thought i'd call see what you you were doing if you wanted to hang out uh next week sort of time is good and that in general is why people are afraid of nice guys so obviously the first thing we have to point out about this video is that it's more in-cell [ __ ] for one thing it gives men an excuse when they're rejected to pretend like it has something to do with the pathology of the girl who didn't want to date them you know she didn't like me because i'm nice and people only like mean guys because they like being treated poorly when that's not usually true is it nobody is so interesting or cool or special that they need to develop some mental illness to describe the people who don't want to date them additionally we can recognize that a corollary of this argument is that if you do want to get laid and don't care about being nice you don't have to be patient as the video says you should be you can just start acting like an [ __ ] which as we all know is pickup artistry it's just a video that's saying that you should be a pickup artist if you want to get sex uh which is massage it's bad it's misogynistic like yeah it's bad but whatever to all those points the real reason why i want to talk about this video is one line that happens in the middle which is just cringe embodied and i'm gonna watch it right now why are they interested in us i had the most amazing time last night thank you i love the colour of your hair [Music] i had the most amazing time last night thank you i love the color of your hair and the set in the most [ __ ] robotic monotone imaginable like obviously if you say that she's not gonna want to date you i had the most amazing time last night thank you i love the color of your hair oh god why can't that guy keep a girlfriend when he's spilling lines like that you know what i mean like it's a shock it must be because he's so nice complimenting your hair and stuff oh man that doesn't make any sense at all so let's move on from that and talk about another really weird one called five reasons the modern world is so ugly so on the face of it this one seems really simple it's just about why modern cities are ugly and why old stuff is good you know the drill and to be honest i don't really have a problem with this sort of thing like personally as the video shows various images of buildings that are supposed to be ugly i kind of find them attractive and cool but i don't take that to be a moral position at all if you think big weird skyscrapers and buildings are bad you know that's fine that's your opinion you're entitled to it and what's more i think it's fair to say that society should be attractive to the vast majority of us that we have a vested interest in making the world beautiful for the people who live here so in general i'm kind of fine with this video but here i just want to zoom in on one point that the guy makes actually a point that he makes twice in the video that like when modern art started to be a thing with the idea that taste in art is subjective the capitalists behind the construction of buildings rejoiced because now they had a license to make ugly buildings there was no such thing as an objective standard of beauty attractiveness in architecture was just a multifaceted subjective phenomenon once again this was music to property developers ears suddenly no one would be allowed to describe a building as ugly after all taste was merely subjective so why is he saying this right this ridiculous and ridiculously bold claim that property developers developed their properties the way they did specifically because modern art gave them the aesthetic license to do so it's not a very parsimonious theory right a far simpler explanation is that these capitalists were building large and tall structures ones that aren't easy to design in a traditional way and so they made them in a fairly cheap way and you know didn't care much about the aesthetic permissions given to them by the avant-garde why would they but also where's the proof of this right like the guy never brings up an example and i went into the description and didn't find any citations there wasn't even one example of this actually happening much less proof that this is a primary animating force in our cities looking the way they do the biggest reason that hollande baton had so much so that he felt the need to say it twice the architects of the modern movement began to wage a war on what they now described as the effeminacy waste and pretension of all the previous beautifying moves unfortunately the dream quickly turned sour when property developers heard that the artistic avant-garde was now promoting a concept of functionalism they rejoiced all we have here is a british man saying it that's all we need just a british guy you know i'm not saying here that the school of life is a fascist youtube channel or even a conservative one but i do think it's relevant to point out that this is the sort of [ __ ] that fascists would love because here the material reasons why our world looks the way it does modernization industrialism capitalism play a second fiddle to this cabal of intellectuals who are actually responsible those cultural marxists must be to blame i don't have any proof of that or evidence for that being the case but you know those cultural marxists have got to be to blame i mean look at how unhappy i am uh it's kind of an unfortunate video in my opinion a really weird one uh that's not good okay let's move on to another video called the importance of an unhappy adolescence it is hard to imagine going on to have a successful or even somewhat contented next six decades if one has not been the beneficiary of a good deal of agonizing introspection and intense dislocation in this period just from the title alone i immediately kind of hate this video i'm not really into this kind of misery fetishizing it's not good or necessary or important at any point in your life to feel terrible and teenagers are no exception broadly speaking the video's like okay i guess it's just about how teenagers have to deal with difficult realizations and how that can make them sad but also be helpful the sentimental protection of childhood falls away and a range of searingly malevolent but profoundly important realizations strike fundamentally i do kind of agree i mean of course coming into hard realizations about the world can be difficult but ultimately helpful but you know being miserable as a teenager isn't a joke it's not something that we just have to passively accept and it's not just caused by all of these big ideas that they're soaking in how about bullying how about feeling ugly and unwanted how about waking up too early in a way that's not healthy for you how about just normal depression these things aren't helpful they're problems they're issues and there's just no acknowledgement of that at all there's just this blanket statement oh yeah it's healthy to be sad as an adolescent there really seems no alternative but to be miserable in mid adolescence if one is to stand any chance of making a go of the rest of one's life like how about we start treating adolescents like they're people you know people whose mental health needs to be taken seriously and who aren't just like a [ __ ] prop in the invention of an adult i don't know it's just a bad and kind of irresponsible vibe i get from this video whatever also there's just this wild line that totally baffles me in the video we would never leave home and become parents ourselves if we weren't at some level compensating for the problems mistakes and vices we had first identified in our own parents at the age of 14 and a half what is that true people just wouldn't start families if not for the need to compensate for their shitty parents that's just a universal statement that we feel comfortable making on this channel that's fine see i kind of thought that people could start families because they find other people who they love or something or maybe they want to have kids just because they they like kids and want to have them so often on this channel they go to this place where they stake their entire analysis on extremely ridiculous and specific things we have relationship troubles because we had nice childhoods we have parties because 10 of people have hijacked our lives parties as they are currently structured constitute a clever ruse by a sharp minority perhaps only 10 of humanity we have families because our childhoods had problems it's fake you know it's nonsense the explanation for human behavior almost can never be reduced to one simple fact about us we're complicated and multi-dimensional people and this channel seems to think it's intellectual to pretend that we're not so one last video called the secret to leaving comments online this is just a funny one about how to leave nicer comments and about why people leave mean ones i guess so this one's mostly just funny to me because of the suggested nicer comments that they say we should leave and i'll just play one of those for you right now even though they're all ridiculous we want to convey immense disappointment so we say i used to like what you do but now i think you're a phony and a total fraud unsubbed wanker but we could say i'm puzzled because i generally very much admire you and i don't entirely see the point of what you seem to be doing it would be lovely if you could perhaps explain things from your no doubt very legitimate perspective so if someone said that to me online my only response would be to think uh stop it internet man why are you pestering me i've done nothing to you you know the problem with the original comment isn't just the tone of it it's also the sentiment being expressed right that you thought my video was such a waste of your time so bad that you felt like you had to tell me about it and you can't improve on that really certainly this doesn't do the job it's just saying the same thing but nerdier and worse big joel i usually love your videos but this was a rancid waste of my time could you talk to me about that could you explain to me a random internet person why the video wasn't a waste of my time i respect you muchly and eagerly await your response can you imagine uh can you imagine being me on the day i received that comment just fully emptied out you know if you watch a video of mine and feel like it's a waste of your time you really have two options either one not leaving the comment or any version of the comment or two leaving the comment and accepting that it will hurt my feelings and you know isn't that the point of a comment like that to hurt me what's the potential constructed upshot here that i'll start making videos that have more of a point to you uh no i don't think that's gonna happen just leave me to my garbage videos that would be my recommendation personally that's my secret on how to leave comments online leave me to my filth okay so that's the end of the video and i hope you enjoyed it i understand it was a bit of a change of pace for me but i had fun with it do i have a point to make is there some big conclusion that i have uh well here it is i think school of life is a very bad youtube channel i think they make terrible videos constantly uh okay bye so that's the end of the video i hope you liked it and had a good time i had so much fun making this if you feel like i didn't talk about enough school of life videos let me tell you i have like nine school of life videos raring for a sequel if anybody wants to see that it can be a thing so easily uh like comment subscribe if you want to give me money on patreon this is a fun one because uh there's a version of this video that i can't release to the public because it has some not safer work content not safe for work school of life content so if you want to watch that go to my patreon give me money and on that note now's about time for my patreon question of the video uh big joel's third biggest fan asks what are some pieces of media that you feel really nostalgic for you know that's a complicated one because i can't think of anything maybe i'm just too young to have really nostalgic pieces of media i know that when i watch rocky or the karate kid it makes me feel emotions that swell up inside of me uh king of the hill avatar the last airbender but none of these invoke the sort of melancholia that i'd uh associate with nostalgia really it's more just like i loved it as a kid and just continue to love it as an adult adult uh because that's that's the truth they're all good pieces of media and i love them all hey arnold could be one okay bye again that's it now see ya

Channel: Big Joel

Views: 1,033,260

Keywords: school of life, elain de botton, why relationships are never as nice as they should be, how to leave nicer comments online, five reasons the modern world is so ugly, why truly sociable people hate parties, the importance of an unhappy adolescence, the value in just friends, debunk, big joel, analysis

Id: JlkJJygIoVU

Length: 25min 42sec (1542 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/dcviapa]

"I had the most amazing time last night. I love the color of your hair."

GEEEEEEZUS

[u/delphi_edict]

/r/philosophy would agree with you

[u/[deleted]]

Wait, so according to SoL, are all of us only trying to start families because our childhoods were traumatizing or are all of our relationships failing because our childhoods were amazing? lol

[u/Kropotkistan]

I remember watching a School of Life video once and being put off by the general ~vibe~ without looking into it any further lol

[u/johntheduncan]

Very excited to watch this when I can cause my ex made me watch School of Life videos and they were without fail absolutely dogshit. I remember one on Marxism that was just pathetic

[u/9thgrave]

School of Life: Here's some common sense and half-baked explanations of complex topics like Marxism in a posh British accent. Now buy our bourgie self-help bullshit, you feckless knobend.

[u/chidedneck]

Pop psychology is just a collection of heuristics.

[u/Balurith]

Finally someone calling that channel out.

[u/2718281828]

This might be an unfair generalization, but I never trust these TED Talk style videos that look like animated infographics. Like where there's a little powerpoint clipart man with a rain cloud over his head and the British narrator is telling you what causes depression or something like that. It reminds me of PragerU videos. It feels like the amount of polish given to the visuals is inversely proportional to the amount of nuance presented.

(I don't trust static infographics for the same reason. I one saw an infographic about English that said "I am" is the shortest English sentence. Then elsewhere in the same image it said "Go" is the shortest English sentence. It was like it was made by an algorithm.)

I'll grant that this generalization is very broad. And it's not like low production values indicate a good video. But it seems to work in this case. I've never heard of School of Life before, but I don't seem to be missing much.