"I don't want to be what's broken."

January 15, 2016 5:58 PM

Jake Roper from Vsauce3 talks about the frustration of recovery, creativity, and limitations.

Jake announced last November he has cancer. His earlier video on limits is apropos.

A few excellent Vsauce3 videos:
Could You Survive a Fallout?
Could You Live Forever?
3 Time Travel Paradoxes!!
What if Quicksilver Ran Past You? feat. Gonzo and Rizzo

posted by [insert clever name here] (4 comments total)

I was just recommending the Vsauces to a young friend at work. They are great. Charming, informative, adding good to the world.
posted by Glinn at 6:08 AM on January 16, 2016

The first video captures something I've not been able to articulate well about my own struggles with chronic illness- the desire to continue at life as it was before, the frustration of feeling broken, even how he describes pain so casually. Try doing that with a group of friends who are not experienced in reoccurring pain and you will get a lot of unnecessary sympathy. When I say it, and I think this goes for a lot of people who have chronic pain, or at least a longer term recovery, and pain is just something to add context, not to garner sympathy. It would be like talking about how your boss or spouse was driving you up the wall, how traffic was really annoying on the way in to work. How your computer kept rebooting. Except that thing is pain, which most people experience in the short term.

And captured in that is the blunting of creativity and how frustrating it is when you make creating part of who you are and suddenly cannot. The anger that your own body is unable to match your mind. The feeling does fade with time, which is good and bad. Good because learning go means you're not constantly beating yourself up over sow thing you have no control over. Bad because it feels like an important part of you has languished.

I dunno, it spoke to me, and I hope it speaks to others.

Also millennials. The earnest generation. They looked at the cynical gen x-ers and noped right out of that.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 8:05 AM on January 16, 2016 [7 favorites]

Conversely, I would have never found the vsauce channels if I wasn't looking for a passive way to fill my time.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 11:25 AM on January 16, 2016

I don't know Jake and haven't watched Vsauce 3, but I can easily watch a half-dozen episodes of Vsauce2's Mind Blow in a sitting, with its winningly earnest host Kevin Lieber.
posted by jjwiseman at 8:07 AM on January 17, 2016 [1 favorite]