 Good morning, John. I wanted to make this video for, like, 10 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-freaking-how-everybody-we're-eating-buddy-the-else-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, because 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. I bet if there were, like, pretzels on it, do you have any pretzels? The pretzels didn't really help. Look, ultimately, this is bad, and it makes my tummy hurt. 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'm 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 me's 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 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 a 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, 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 kind of boiled down to that, which kind of 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 going to achieve it, even if I'm not going to even seed that tree sprout, even if I'm just planting the seed and being like, I'm not going to 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 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 I can move on to some other stuff, and we're going to 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 going to upload a weird video to Vlogbrothers, so expect that. I'm curious what everybody's going to think about it. Two, I'm doing my cancer standup 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.