I always had a certain disdain for those cookie-cutter, default memes that people sent around in non-niche communities. You know the kind of meme—where you think to yourself, “Haha, how relatable.”

I could never quite put my finger on what exactly annoyed me about them, but I think I’ve figured it out. It has to do with the Existentialist theme of authenticity. I disdain these unrelatable memes because they are produced in such a way as to be liked by the masses—designed so that everyone can relate to them and no one is offended.

By doing this, they become less human and more robotic: a non-authentic engagement with reality. It takes away from what makes us individuals, forfeiting our ability to call ourselves human. Instead, one becomes a Massenmensch—not an individual, but a clumped-together mass, a grotesque monstrosity of anonymity and soulless conformity.

A Russian movie set in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign. It explores how Stalin treated ‘counter-revolutionaries.’ The first hour of the movie should have been cut in half — the beginning is really slow — but the second half hits hard. 6/10.

Fun Fact 1

The mathematical technique called proof by induction, despite its name containing induction, is in fact deductive—shocker!

Fun Fact 2

In the philosophy of language, there’s a theory called referential semantics, which says that the meaning of an expression is the object (or objects) the expression refers to. But this leads to a problem: either a sentence refers to an object, or it does not. Consider the sentence:

(A) “The current King of France is bald.”

or its negation:

(not A) “The current King of France is not bald.”

We realize that neither (A) nor (not A) is true, because France currently has no king. On this dilemma, Russell famously remarked:

Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig.

Do you see – how bright I burn?

Set in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It’s alright—a dog-eat-dog world. 6.5/10.