John Green reflects on his wild introduction to YouTube in 2005

The video is as mid-2005-YouTube as it gets.
"Paper Towns" New  York Premiere - Outside Arrivals
"Paper Towns" New York Premiere - Outside Arrivals / Taylor Hill/GettyImages
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Leave it to John Green, author of many books and creator of many more YouTube videos, to take a meme from the very early internet and turn it into a highly philosophical discussion about existentialism.

The device he used in his latest video to bring about this point, of course, was the first YouTube video he ever saw -- a collection of memes with an origin that only the 1990s could claim.

The video goes into more details about the game, poorly translated from Japanese into English, that turned phrases like "all your base are belong to us" and "You have no chance to survive make your time" into legendary memes of internet past.

But it's that second phrase -- "you have no chance to survive make your time" -- that prompted his thoughtful monologue.

"I just love the idea that time isn't only something we have or something we spend,' he said to conclude the video. "It's something we make ... knowing that time is finite."

We are, as humans, temporary. There is no way of getting around that. All we have is the time that we make. We can either become slaves to it or masters overseeing it. Unfortunately, many of us are often not in full control of our time the way we all wish we could be. And that's quite a difficult concept to not only grasp, but also to accept.

But making the most of the time we can control is still possible. We make time for caring for others. We make time for caring for ourselves. We make time to grieve; to celebrate; to plan and reflect. We either make time, or we don't. We either use time, or let it slip away. We either actively live, or we simply exist in a life. Time is what we make of it, no matter how much of it is ours.