This got almost 200 views on YouTube after a SINGLE day so that y’all for that! I had a lot of important stuff to say with this one.

Transcript:

Today I wanted to talk about a topic that might seem a bit controversial on the surface. The idea that God has a plan even if you’re not in on it. This is a line from a Gabby Barrnett song, a country song from twenty twenty-six. You might know her from American Idol. She finished third on the sixteenth season.

I haven’t watched American Idol probably ever. I’ve just never really been a big fan of these talent shows because I’ve always felt they were rigged, and they really only gave a chance to people that they thought were marketable or popular or whatever.

People that could be considered potential future stars. And Gabby Barrett being a Gen Z blonde white girl who’s deeply Christian. There’s nothing wrong with that obviously. But, I’ve listened to that song a few times and in a way it sounds very hopeful.

Things are going badly, but God’s got a plan, and even if you’re not in on it, everything’s gonna end up working out his way, right?

This is gonna make some people angry, but it all depends on what your conception of God even is. I used to believe that God is all-powerful and created everything and set things in motion so that eventually everything would work out. But when you live actual life and you become an adult and you’re not a straight, white, blonde person, things often don’t work out for you, even when you are a straight, blonde, white person who’s Christian. Let’s just be honest.

Over the last decade or two, being an adult, I have come to the decision that if God even exists in the way that people think that He does, as this Lord Father in Heaven who has just this incredibly convoluted plan to defeat Satan, cool. But the way I look at it is God’s plan is let everybody just screw the hell up and see what happens.

Because we live in a world with so much systemic racism, and bigotry, and injustice. I read a book like Daisy Dixon’s Depraved, and I’m just thinking to myself, “Okay, we’re still allowing the normalization of the R-word and treating women like complete crap and as second-class citizens to the point where the Barbie movie has this entire little monologue that’s actually quoted in the book, Depraved, about how it’s impossible to be a woman, right?

If you’re a trans woman, you’re completely screwed. I say this to Emily all the time. When she thinks things are going bad, it’s like, ” I see white straight people being screwed over all the time, so we’re just completely effed.” Even if God had a plan, of course we wouldn’t be in on it because there’s no possible way that we could understand the ins and outs of that.

Why would we even bother? So I take that song to mean that you just have to leave it in God’s hands. But no, you can’t just leave it in God’s hands and just go through life struggling and suffering. This is the mistake I see a lot of Christians make, and they make this mistake with good intentions, well-meaning, like, suffering is just part of life and then we’re gonna go get to be with God.

Well, you don’t know that. And even if you do go be with God, what’s it gonna be like? ‘Cause if you read the Bible, it just sounds like you’re forced to go to church every day, and your entire life is just singing His praises, and why is that a great life? Anyway I’m not bashing Christianity. I’m bashing the idea that God’s got a plan but you’re not in on it.

That’s the way I hear it. I like that song because I just laugh at it like, man, life sucks. Oh, but God’s got a plan so everything’s gonna work out. No. No. No. For most people, it will not work out. That is just the nature of life. Just that’s not how life works. The law of averages works out that 90% of people are gonna just live very mundane, mediocre lives. And if that’s part of God’s plan, mathematically that makes sense, right?

Okay, I’m saying this all in jest. My point is that I don’t even believe God has a plan. God created people and created the universe, and we evolved out of whatever cosmic soup God cooked up, and we just happened to rise to the top. What I find incredible is that I don’t even think the human beings are even the most intelligent creatures on the planet.

It’s just that we have unique skills and abilities and reasoning capacities that other creatures apparently don’t have. Doesn’t mean they don’t have them, they’re just not apparent to us. I think that if God had a plan, it was, “Let’s see what happens. Let’s put this huge experiment into motion and see how it works out.”

And it is funny sometimes how, and uncanny, how these astrological things can work out certain ways. I’ve always just taken it as my personal, you can’t really call it a religion, I guess, as I call it intentional bibliomancy, which is you read something, you see something, and it sparks something in you going, “Oh, wow, this is what I should do next.”

But it’s not that God is telling you something directly. It’s that there’s something in the universe that’s already reacting to the things that you’re doing or things you’re thinking. It’s just you’re already thinking these things. I don’t necessarily believe in the law of attraction per se.

I do believe that your mindset and your actions and how you go about your life does actually attract things to you. If you go certain places and you see that you’re attracting certain kinds of people or not attracting certain kinds of people,

people have this horrible tendency to overcorrect themselves in order to attract the people that they think that they need in their life.

And this is a very distressing and just not productive mindset. And now that I’ve had some time the last couple of weeks to sit around with myself and be with myself, I realize what I really want is I actually like having solitude like ninety percent of the time. But, maybe one or two days a week, I wanna go, say, go to the card store and talk cards with somebody or go to a show and hang out with an indie artist or whatever.

I actually like having quiet, nothing to do sort of vibe. You know, I have my things that I work on, like these audio essays that have a picture of my desk and my chair in them, and I put some text over it. Yeah, God has a plan, and that’s part of His amazing plan is for me to just yap on about whatever I’m thinking about at that particular moment.

No, no, no, no, no. Even if God had a plan we weren’t in on it, who cares? The problem is people try to have these plans for their lives, and you can have goals. You can have objectives, but life is always gonna throw things at you that you can’t possibly account for.

There are people that I know that act like they do know what God’s plan is, and God’s plan is that God only likes white straight people, which makes no sense because Jesus and the disciples were Jewish and closer to Arabs than white people.

You gotta love whitewashing. That’s something I wanna get into another time, but I know that what I’m saying might make people mad. I’m really just trying to bring some hope to people that if you’re a Christian, if you’re not, it doesn’t matter. Just know that even people you think have a plan actually don’t have a plan.

They just say they have a plan, and they say it so much, they write it down and just keep repeating to themselves like a mantra. And eventually, maybe one or two times out of 10, they might accomplish something. And the great thing is in life is that you only need to hit on one thing. David Achu talked about this.

He’s become my favorite video essayist thanks to Anna Howard mentioning his video about video essays. I watch a lot of his videos, and he’s really inspired me to get back on this creating content train. But what he also said was, is that inevitably, it’s only the top 5% that are ever remembered, and then even most of them are only remembered for one thing, and they just live off that one thing forever. I think of First to 11, and they’re very talented, but they’re basically remembered for that cover of Sweet Child of Mine from five years ago that got 75 million views, and that’s the only reason that they have the opportunities that they do.

It’s really true for anybody, that even the most successful people in the world, they’re remembered for one thing. Leonard Nimoy is remembered for Star Trek and also that very silly Hobbit song. But you know what I’m saying? Even the most successful people, are remembered for that one thing, and then the other 90% of the great things that they do, forget it.

Yeah, David talked about this. It seems silly that an all-knowing, all-powerful God that loves us so very much would make it so that we have to spend our entire lives finding that one thing that allows us to just skate by the rest of our lives , you know? And most people are like, “Well, I’ve had to work for a living.”

I say, “Well, yeah, but you still have a job. You found something that makes you money, that allows you to live life in some semi-comfortable way,” right? But that’s also not true for 90% of the people in the world. Here in the United States we got it really good. Even homeless people have it better than people that work their asses off in other countries.

And the wealth inequality and the despair. Why would God have a plan where, most of the world does not know about Jesus and know that He died for our sins? That doesn’t make any sense. That’s not a God that I want to identify with, I’m not saying that there isn’t a God.

I actually do believe in an all-powerful force that created everything because I have to believe something, that there’s something out there that has some control over something. But no, I just think that the universe is a very complex and unknowable thing that we meat puppets can’t possibly comprehend.

If you really think about it, if you take it at face value, saying God has a plan even if you’re not in on it, that’s not even an untrue statement. It is a true statement. Even if, you don’t believe in the man upstairs, it still makes sense. When I listen to that song, it reminds me that, yeah,

I don’t need to be on it. I can just do my thing. And that’s how you should take it. But just leaving things in God’s hands and going, “Well, I guess I’m just going to accept where I am in life,” I don’t think complacency is a good idea either.

I think that you should always be trying to better yourself, because I think that that’s what God would want you to do, right? Any loving parent or creator is going to wanna watch their child or their creation take on a life of their own. That’s what most parents do. As a parent, yes, you can guide and you can discipline and you can do all these different things, but at the end of the day, a parent is just a big kid.

They just have more life experiences and a more, I hate to say adult perspective, which I’m not even sure what that even means, if you really think about it. I know as somebody who likes to make a philosophical argument out of everything, when you break it all down, you really think about the words that you’re saying, you realize that these are all just arbitrary constructs.

Our society is an arbitrary construct that we just agree on so that we don’t just all devolve into anarchy. Even though anarchy, that isn’t even what anarchy even means, but just complete chaos, right? But the thing is that even with our polite society, it is nothing but chaos. Do you think that part of God’s plan is to have these poor college students calling people at 2:00 in the afternoon to add on to their home warranty plan? What kind of life is that? It pays something. But then you only get paid if people actually accept that, and yes, this actually happened to me today, and the guy sounded really depressed when I told him I was fine with the coverage.

I was really nice, because I’m sure people have just hung up and yelled at him today all day. I understand that at the other end of every transaction, there is a human being. For every transaction, there are countless other human beings that are responsible for that transaction even being able to take place.

I understand this. We’re all part of a system, and we all have to sort of agree on a bunch of arbitrary rules in order to make things work. Money is just an agreement. Money doesn’t actually exist. It’s what we use as a form of exchange to keep society working. But society is extremely imbalanced.

It’s extremely unfair. But if it was fair, then it would still suck because then 90% of people would just be working the same dead-end jobs they’re working now. Fair and unfair are so nebulous and relative and I’m in a position where I don’t have to work anymore, which is great. But I’m not a super rich person who can just go buy a Ferrari or whatever, I’m not in that kind of position. But I only got here because I made certain choices that just happened to work out. You make one choice in life and it just works, right?

No, that’s not how it works because no matter how meticulously you think you’re in control of your life, you’re actually not in control of your life. No one is in control of their destiny. What you are in control of is how you react to certain situations, and like many people that are in my position, I made one good choice after a whole bunch of really bad choices, and it worked out.

There’s a lot of choices that are hard to make, like moving to Buffalo and separating from my spouse, even though we still care about each other, because I needed the space, and I needed to be in an area where I felt like I had a chance to grow and become a better person. Whereas the places I was being, it was kinda like, “This just place isn’t for me.”

And now I’m somewhere I feel at home, but then I also need to reach out. Buffalo’s not tiny, you know? And the people I’ve dealt with here are all really nice, which is not my experience everywhere else I’ve been.

So I think I’m in a pretty good spot. I’m right down the street from a major card store that’s known very well online. Of all the things that I know, a lot of my successes have come because of sports cards and trading card games.

A lot of my happier moments in life are because of these things, and it really made me happy to see that my video on my thoughts about Strange New Worlds, that Star Trek show, is actually doing pretty well. For an audio-only video with no captions or anything, it’s done really well. It’s got over almost 100 views after just a few days.

That’s very encouraging for me, because it tells me that, yeah, people are turning on these videos and just listening to them while they’re doing something else. I don’t know how much people are actually looking at it and people are not really engaging with it, but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is I put something out there, and people are at least seeing it. And for a long time when I was doing my writing, no one saw it except for a very small handful of people, a couple of whom actually gave me work. One of those people ended up becoming my wife, so yeah. See? You never know what’s gonna happen.

You just keep putting yourself out there. It might seem like nothing’s happening. You don’t know, because you can’t go by metrics. You can’t go by, “Hey, this worked for somebody else.” Numbers are useful, but they’re not everything. You have to do what you feel like is the right thing to do for you.

You should make an informed decision. If you’re worried that God has left you behind, just stop thinking that way because it’s just not true.

If God does have a plan and we’re just not in on it, just don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about the plan. Don’t even worry about your plans. Just worry about what can I do right now to improve my situation? What will make my life better right now? And it’s just like that Atomic Habits book and that whole 1% thing that you just have to do something.

Even if it’s five to 10 minutes a day of reading a book or working on a creative project. If you just set aside just the smallest five to 10 minutes every day to work on something, you’re going to do something. You’re going to accomplish something. It might not be anything anyone cares about, but if you care about it, it makes you feel better about your life, it’s worth it.

So don’t worry about God’s plan. Don’t worry about being in on it. Don’t worry about all the big conspiracies and all that because I’m going to be completely honest with you. All these people that they talk about being secret organizations and societies, they have no idea what they’re doing either.

All these big CEOs you think have all this vision. No, they have 100 other people that just sit in a room and blab all day. Then they take the transcripts. See, now you have AI. So now you can just take a meeting and just boil it down and then the CEO can go, “Oh, these ideas are good.

I’m just going to go use them in my keynote.” And then he gets a massive $100 million bonus or whatever. It’s ridiculous. If you think somebody has a plan, I guarantee you that they might have a plan and that just about nothing has gone according to plan.

It’s just that things have worked out just well enough that they’re in a good position. That’s it. I almost guarantee you that nothing has ever gone to plan ever in the history of mankind. Nothing ever goes according to plan. Sometimes you end up with something better and sometimes you just end up living an okay, decent, I’m broke but I’m okay kind of life or I’m modestly successful to a point where I can just sit around and yap into a microphone on my Samsung Galaxy.

Just be happy with what you’ve got and if what you have sucks, just remember it could be always worse, that you can always get better at whatever you’re doing. In some of these more disadvantaged places, I guarantee you , and in fact, there are documentaries about this, how people even in the poorest places, they figure out something and they’re like, “Wait, I can do this,” and then they become relatively wealthy for their area.

So don’t worry about plans. Don’t worry about making these ridiculous stretch goals. It’s not that you can’t have them. I think it’s healthy to have aspirations and all that stuff. But the older I get, the closer I get to 40, I realize I got a really nice house now. I have a wife that cares about me even though we aren’t really meshing anymore.

I think I’m a pretty good person. I think that I have done a bunch of good stuff for a bunch of people, and yeah, maybe I haven’t been recognized for it. Maybe I’ve been forgotten. But the fact that I accomplished things and built all these skills that I’m using now to try and relate my experience to people online I think that thus far, this is the most success I’ve had online in a long time.

Of course, my greatest success was meeting my wife, but that’s another story that I will get to later. There’s not always a happy ending. Whatever you do, don’t feel like you failed, because we all fail. The most successful people in the world fail 90 to 95% of the time. It’s just we only remember the 1 to 5% of the time that they succeeded

Just name a famous person and look at their record of successes versus failures, and it’s they usually have one major success and maybe a couple other modest successes, and then everything else flopped. Or it just kinda just did fine

Stop putting people on pedestals. Stop worshiping people because they’re hot. Stop worrying about how you compare to other people, because there’s always gonna be something, somebody better at you than you at some skill. There’s always gonna be something that you don’t expect an opportunity that you could never have imagined that’s going to drop in s- in your lap, and then you’re probably gonna be too dumb and not realize and just not take it, ’cause I’ve actually had that happen before.

I don’t regret it, because what I ended up with was much better. But I’m just saying that don’t worry about, does she like me? Does he like me? Only worry about where you are at the moment. And I think Arthur Ashe said this, that you take what you have, and you use what you have. Start where you are and use what you have, because that’s all you got. He became the only Black guy to win Wimbledon or something. I actually made a whole essay about it a long time ago, and it did okay. It’s probably on my website somewhere.

I think the greatest advice you can take away from this whole ramble is just chill. Trust me, that is way easier said than done. I can’t chill. I’m always trying to find something to worry about, because we live in a society that’s always worrying about something. The world is not going to end tomorrow.

It could, but most likely it won’t. Even if it does, you won’t notice it. Like World War III could happen. And if you live in a place like Buffalo, you might hear rumors about it, and guess what? Like I’ve always said to Emily, like nuclear war happens and we end up in a nuclear winter.

All you can do is work on ideas. All you can do is just work on the things you’re thinking about right now. Start where you’re at, just like Arthur Ashe said, and stop worrying about what God’s plan is or what even your own plan is. Because trust me, I had plans for this week and they all fell apart because I got sick and I’m still sick.

You can tell I’m not really doing that well physically right now. But I had something to say and I wanted to get it down before I forget about it. And lately I just can’t really compose myself in words. I have a software to help me take my vocalized thoughts and turn them into something almost coherent.

I do want to get back to writing. I do have my collective works that I was planning on putting out next year. I think that’s still going to happen, but it’s going to happen in a different way than I intended originally. Let’s just be frank. People don’t read anymore. They do, but you know what I mean.

There’s just too much to consume out there. People don’t really have time to sit down and read books very often. Kudos to those who actually can get through a book. I can’t even get through a book anymore. I don’t even have an excuse. I just get distracted by everything else. We just live in a world so full of distraction.

We all need to stop making plans and just be present in the moment. I know this is not anything groundbreaking, but I feel like people listening to this, if you actually got this far, thank you for listening to me ramble.

Of course, what you hear is going to be a lot more coherent than whatever I just produced. But yeah, just take care of yourself. Don’t worry about what God intends for you. Don’t worry about what you even intend for yourself. Just look at today and go, what can I do right now? And what I can do right now is I can stop yapping, put this into my editing software and get it uploaded.

Take care, everybody.