How I made friends with reality | Emily Levine

With her signature wit and wisdom, Emily Levine meets her ultimate challenge as a comedian/philosopher: she makes dying funny. In this personal talk, she takes us on her journey to make friends with reality — and peace with death. Life is an enormous gift, Levine says: "You enrich it as best you can, and then you give it back."

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48 Comments on How I made friends with reality | Emily Levine

  1. I’ve never seen such a hit miss Ted talk. She says something that makes perfect sense, then utters complete nonsense lol. She is interesting at the very least.

  2. why are people so afraid to live forever? they dont love themselves? they dont want to see other galaxies? they dont want to play the video games in 5000 years from now?

  3. She’s awesome and very funny. I don’t associate anti-death with being anti-life or anti-nature or anti-woman though. That leap was hard for me to make. Transhumanists and others who want to defeat death have expressed a deep appreciation for life as their primary motivation. I have no reason not to believe them.

  4. so I want to live forever and i support bernie sanders. I must be the ultra women hater bernie bro…….they kind of showing me that i should hate women with their assumptions

  5. Emily I don’t see human longevity as disrespectful to nature. Our ingenuity is natural. However, I did love your talk, great work!

    • Identify someone who has lived forever, all those who are for it. You can’t because all those who live forever are not your friends, or even acquaintances, strangers maybe. But for fear that you would want the recipe, they wouldn’t want you to be even their servant. Reality.

  6. Cogito Ergo Zoooom! I will for my time here, cherish that. Emily, You are a treasure and a sparkling jewel! Thank you for the reality check. Rhythm and polarity a powerful choice!

  7. She said if you are against death, then you are against life which means you are against nature and that is against women because women have been associated with nature…

    It was going so well until that. That makes no sense. That’s like a Nigahiga video where he breaks down conspiracies.

    • Willing Nihilist sounds weird, but i think her point is, death and life are two halfes of the same thing, just like women and men. For her, being able to hate one half, means to hate reality, because everything has two sides to it.

    • Svenja Ch
      That could be one interpretation, but even then she said that if you hate life you hate women. One word after the other. It just did not sound good at all.

      Nice try though. It could be that.

  8. This lady seems lovely, but, no offense, the talk was mostly horseshit. I strongly disagree with her view that life and death are essential to one another and to be immortal is disrespectful to nature. Ageing is literally a mistake in the way cells reproduce, it’s just an effect of telomeres being reduced after each reproductive cycle. There are animals that live forever. Death is just a coincidence in our evolutionary development. And please, stop using quantum mechanics as a metaphor for everything. This lady has no background in science, thus no real understanding of them, despite she claiming to have it. Again, no offense, but she just seems a delusionally “””enlightened””” person that mixes scientific mumbo jumbo and spiritual concepts to cope with her illness.

    • Also the whole “coming to terms with death” part doesn’t sit well with me. Typical talk by people who have forgotten what it’s like to have to survive.

    • Taaking everything so literally and being a stickler for science (as in to say that which exists is only that which we can quantify) is such a limiting and in a way an incorerct perspective on life. Besides, life and death are essential to one another everywhere you look in life

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