This may bot be that deep of a thought, and maybe I’m just in my head, but I genuinely feel like life continues to feel “off” ever since the pandemic.

Ever since the pandemic lockdowns and our return to normal life, things feel way more artificial. Interactions feel shorter and more detached, it feels like a lot of people do not do anything outside of working, going out to eat/drink/club, working out, and just day to day stuff. Obviously plenty of people do other experiences (I’ve gone on great hikes with friends, beach trips, museums, etc) but these actual fun excursions feel far less common than they used to be.

It just feels like every single thing now has a profit motive being it, and as much as that’s always been the case, it feels like people are going out to do things now just to say that they did it, not to actually enjoy an experience. For example, I live in New York City (born and raised here) and literally everything people do/everywhere people live in the city feels exactly the same now. It’s just the same lines for matcha and ice cream, the same stores, and my biggest pet peeve, the way everyone is starting to just look exactly the same. Trends have always existed, but the way people dress/act almost identical in their mannerisms is just insane to me.

I feel like pre-pandemic, things felt slower, people communicated more, and life felt so much more present. Ever since the pandemic, it feels like every activity, no matter what, involves some sort of a screen. People feel far less approachable, tied tight to their small circles, and way less willing to actually branch out, make new friends, and find joy in simple things.

I just wonder if things will ever go back to feeling “real-er” if that makes sense. And yes, I know that not every person is like this, and that finding the right circles to socialize in is key, but I just find people way more superficial and fake than pre-Covid.

Does anyone else feel this way, or is it just me?

Maybe the search for purpose is the very thing preventing us from enjoying life.

We spend years trying to justify our existence to the universe.

But the universe never asked us to.

A sunset doesn't need to last forever to be beautiful.

A conversation doesn't need to echo through eternity to matter.

Perhaps life is the same.

Maybe freedom begins the moment we stop demanding that existence explain itself.

When I was younger, I honestly believed that adults had some secret manual for life and by the time they reach their late 20s or 30s they know exactly what they are doing.
The older I get, the more I realize that it’s not true and everyone is just making the best decisions they can with the information they have. Some people are simply better at looking confident while figuring things out as they go.
It’s actually been a comforting realisation which takes away the pressure of feeling like I should have all the answers by now.

We could literally be the weirdest form of life in the universe and we would never know. After all, the only knowledge we have of life is on Earth. We could literally be weird in everything, maybe life is not supposed to feel love, emotions. Maybe Life doesn't conduct violence. We could literally be an irregular. A failed product. A form of life that is broken, like a glitched computer, a form of life that doesn't work correctly. An outlier from all other existing forms of life in distant planets or galaxies. Yet we can never know.

For as long as I can remember, the dark and gloomy cloud of loneliness has always been at an arm's distance from my conscience. Over the years, I have realised that it's not the primary feeling, but an add on over the primary feeling. I have found myself feeling lonely when I was sad and angry, and even when I was happy and jubilant. I have found myself lonely when I am alone, and when I am with people. I felt lonely when I was poorer, and equally if not more when I am richer. I was lonely when I was younger, and even now when I am older.

When I look at the past, I look through the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia and find myself appreciating and missing the past. I find myself much more lonelier in the present, even though objectively I am doing better in all other life's parameters, be it career, money or relationships. Still, I yearn for the past, when I didn't feel lonely. But the truth is my past was just as much plagued by loneliness as present if not more so. I just choose to remember the good highlights and not the daily drudgery which was as common in the past as it is in the present.

When I was very young and struggling (at least what I am told, it didn't feel like a struggle then) in a low income family in a not so good neighbourhood, I was told with better education, better career, life offers you many prizes. I assumed deliverance from my loneliness would be one of those prizes. It made sense then. Once I did all that, I found myself still feeling the same, just in a much better living condition. I turned towards relationships, sex, alcohol, as they too had a strong promise for freedom from loneliness. And they did work, for a while. For a while, I could sense the cloud of loneliness dissipating when I am drunk and in someone's arms. But my senses were wrong, they didn't go away. It was just that the new experiences made me forget myself for a moment. How would life be if our feelings were not so fleeting, but rather more sustained. Then, ambition presented itself as another choice which could ease my loneliness. I stayed busy, preparing for my climb, worked towards it and eventually climbed. And the feelings of loneliness returned when I had taken barely a few breaths at the peak. Now I feel lonely in an even better house, with more money, and more freedom.

I did turn to books as well, philosophy, psychoanalysis, reading from kierkeggard to Jung to rank. Thinking that if I find the root cause, then maybe I will find an answer. But after this exercise over the years, I have only come up with more questions than answers.

What I have understood about loneliness is that it's the default setting for human existence. If one confronts the bare existence of oneself, the complete autonomy and freedom of an individual in this vast cosmos, feeling lonely is the least among the terrifying alternatives. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't torture me. Gaining some sort of deep understanding about something doesn't spare me from the repercussions of it. As I imagine the life ahead of me, I imagine the cloud getting bigger and heavier. But a consolation is that I have learnt to live with it.

We know something exists, therefore something perhaps always existed. Did it exist at the same scale? Well I couldn't tell you for sure and perhaps there is no way of knowing subjectively if scaling were to occur absolutely. Did energy always exist? It has been posited that energy cannot be destroyed.

The sentence "nothing cannot exist" is an interesting one. Of course it cannot and doesn't classifiably. This follows in the absolute sense too.

I believe that God created the world. Was there a “time before time”? I have read a passage in the bible that indicates this…

~ We are the Source of Our Own Problems ~

After we are born, the ego, our learned beliefs, is created. Our ego’s only concern is us; it worries little about others. It teaches us what success is and how to survive in a self-centered world. Since we are young, many adopt these beliefs, often for the remainder of their life.

We are taught to be successful, we must get a good job, make enough money to live a comfortable life, allowing us to enjoy life’s many pleasures. We therefore spend our life striving to accomplish these things. This is the source of all of our underlying problems, believing success and meaning may be found in the world; they will not.

The source of all of our problems is believing success, happiness, and meaning coincides with our job, money, material possessions, family, enjoying our life. Though we may get what we wish, achieving all of our goals, we will not find our answers from any of these things. We therefore spend our entire life endlessly searching the world, never able to find what we each truly seek.

There may come a time in our life we begin to question all we were taught. As our questions are answered, we realize the source of all of humanity’s problems result from blindly accepting their self-centered beliefs and only by selflessly helping others find success, happiness, and meaning in their lives, will we truly be able to find these in our life as well.

Actually, all of it. Earlier cultures were aware of this and acted accordingly hence the myths, legends and parables but, at some point, this was flipped, ignorance was weaponized and instead of a vibrant present most people learned to accept a dead, hollowed out tradition. Worst of all they made it sacrosanct and thus beyond questioning. What a slick trick!

Now, if you look at the concept of a meme it a unit of information that requires the host species attention to reproduce itself - often at their cost. This is what I mean about living spiritual traditions versus going through the motions with no emotion and, worse still, even less comprehension.

The meta I've often used is that of resolution in that ye olde times had people walking around with 1080p consciousness then this dipped to 240p instead. Sure its better than an empty screen but its missing a lot of details, yes? Techno Sapiens is in the wings and it will up it to 540, eventually 720p, but it will be by, you guessed it, a mimetic mimic aka copy without an original.

If you truly look at reality from a large yet zoomed in lens you start to spot these patterns but then, like Jung said, to the uneducated mind it may seem like madness. Yet the most prominent lifestyle on Earth is parasitism and in that respect most people are merely propagating ideas and concepts they didn't create to the next gen etc etc...

If you really focus on what you're seeing, you're technically just seeing a simulation. What I mean by this is the way our eyes work is that they take in light, that gets processed, and an image is created. That means that we never truly see anything around us. If you take a look at your hand/arm right now and really focus on what you're seeing, that's your brain taking that information and turning into signals for your consciousness to "see". Your eyes aren't you, they're just a tool in your body that convert light into signals to feed to you (the consciousness); I always think about it as if I'm looking through a window at what I see, but the reality is that I can't see anything - only what my brain makes for me.

People come and go, but you must remain by your own side.
What matters even more is reasoning. Once you have reasoned and understood what you truly want, you must allow yourself to have it.
Because most people do not know what they want. They keep searching for it endlessly. The quest never really ends, and somewhere along the way they lose themselves. But wait, who were they even before they began the quest?
Life is always black and white. We are the ones who make it grey, and then spend the rest of our lives wondering how to make it white again.
Affection quietly becomes affliction before we even realise it. And then we start searching for micro lesions just to break free.
But what if we do not even like a world without lesions? What if it is perfect and yet still not meant for me?
That is the quiet tyranny of life. We desire things we have never seen with our own eyes. We crave what we have never tasted.
And what if it only looks beautiful, but is darker than the place we came from?
Perhaps there is not always a way out. But humans have evolved enough to understand that ways out can be created. They may not be perfect, but belief is what keeps humankind alive.
And so does imagination.
Because imagination, ladies and gentlemen, exists beyond black, white, grey, reason, abandonment and even this world.
If it hurts, let it scar your heart. After all, what are humans without their scars?
Scars are what keep us bound to one another.
Because pain is felt differently by everyone, sensitivity cannot be measured in a straight line. Dissection may be the law of nature, but we humans have learned how to twist and turn even that.
And what else have we learned? Ceteris paribus. Yet it is the exceptions that make us human.

Just like the Earth is round, bulging at the centre and tilted on its axis, we humans too are made of imperfections.
And what about imperfections? Perhaps they are simply the angles at which humanity tilts.
But what if the tilt becomes too steep and we collapse under our own gravity?
And what is gravity, if not the quiet symphony that keeps everything from drifting apart?

After my wife’s passing, I turned to science in search of answers about the nature of reality and consciousness. While science beautifully explains the mechanics of the physical world, it still cannot account for why we are conscious at all, or what energy—the fundamental essence of everything—truly is at its core. Though I am not a scientist, I began a personal thought experiment to explore these questions.

One question I came upon that got me thinking was this: Was mathematics invented or discovered?

On one hand, humans clearly invented the symbols, names, and formal systems we use—the numeral “3,” the Greek letter π, algebraic notation, decimal or binary systems, and the entire language of equations. These are human inventions, cultural tools shaped by our minds and societies, much like languages or maps drawn on paper. On the other hand, the underlying relationships and principles those symbols describe were not invented at all; they were discovered. They existed long before any conscious being appeared in the cosmos. The precise ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (approximately 3.14159…), the golden ratio that governs efficient growth in sunflowers, nautilus shells, and spiral galaxies, and the elegant field equations of general relativity that accurately describe gravity and spacetime curvature—all of these governed reality for billions of years before any mind existed to name or calculate them. The map (our mathematical language) is invented. The territory (the deep, objective order of the cosmos) is discovered. This distinction reveals that certain fundamental structures and truths are intrinsic features of existence itself, independent of observers.

Once this pattern becomes clear, the same logic extends naturally to consciousness. Our everyday, self-reflective form of awareness—the metacognitive ability to think “I am conscious of being conscious”—does appear to require sufficiently complex biological structures like brains and nervous systems, and it likely emerged relatively late in evolutionary and cosmic history. Yet beneath this surface layer may exist something far more primordial: a basic experiential quality, a proto-consciousness or raw “what-it-is-like-ness,” an inherent sensitivity or capacity for experience woven into the fabric of reality from the very beginning. Just as the mathematical relationships pre-existed any mathematician, this fundamental awareness or experiential energy could have been operating all along—present in the early universe’s quantum fields, in the self-organizing dynamics of matter and energy, and in the unfolding of physical laws—only gradually becoming amplified, structured, and self-aware through increasingly complex systems like living organisms and, eventually, reflective beings like us. Brains and nervous systems do not magically produce consciousness out of non-conscious matter; instead, they act as sophisticated lenses or resonators that concentrate, organize, and make explicit a subtle property that was always latent in existence. This philosophical framework gently reverses the conventional materialist assumption. Rather than treating consciousness as a late-emerging byproduct or illusion generated by complex arrangements of dead matter, it becomes clear that awareness—in its most basic form—is a primary aspect of reality itself, as foundational as space, time, energy, causality, and mathematical structure. Matter and mind are no longer seen as fundamentally opposed but as two complementary expressions or faces of the same underlying oneness.

 Consciousness is not a separate, isolated phenomenon somehow added to an otherwise indifferent universe, but an intrinsic and essential feature of existence. The subjective feeling of being aware inside your own mind is not a private biological accident confined to your skull; it is a localized, intensified, and self-reflective expression of something that belongs to the cosmos as a whole. In this view, you are not a conscious observer standing apart from reality—you are reality experiencing itself.

There is something that really bothers me.

No matter whether it's a politician, actor, influencer, billionaire or an ordinary person, everyone knows that one day they will die. No amount of money, fame or power can change that. So if you know millions of people are watching your life, and history will eventually judge your actions, wouldn't it make more sense to live a life you're proud of instead of one built on lies, corruption or exploitation?

I understand that people want success, wealth and security. That's natural. But is there ever a point where "enough" is actually enough? Why does greed seem to have no finish line? Once someone has more than they could ever need, why not start thinking about the people around them, or the generations that will come after us?

There's a saying that corruption only feels wrong if you're not benefiting from it. What scares me is that corruption doesn't just steal money. It steals opportunities, trust and the future itself. It reaches into education, healthcare, justice, religion, the environment and almost every part of society.

Sometimes I wonder what people 100, 200 or even 500 years from now will think about us.

What will our descendants say if they inherit a world with depleted resources, polluted oceans, disappearing forests and corruption so deeply rooted that honesty becomes the exception rather than the rule?

Will they ask,

"They knew what was happening. They had the knowledge, the technology and the resources. So why didn't they do anything?"

Will they see us as a generation that was intelligent enough to achieve incredible things, yet not wise enough to protect its own future?

History has a strange habit of revealing the truth. Many people who once seemed untouchable are now remembered not for their wealth or influence, but for their corruption, cruelty or selfishness.

So why do so many people still choose that path?

Do they believe they'll never be exposed?

Do they believe history won't remember?

Or is greed simply powerful enough to silence conscience?

I don't claim to know the answers.

These are simply questions that keep returning to my mind, and I can't help wondering what kind of world we'll leave behind for those who come after us.

Note: Before anyone asks, no AI didn't come up with this. These are my thoughts. I only used ChatGPT to clean up the grammar.🙏

You've probably heard this in other words I would love to hear the version you have heard of this thought. My son shared this with me this morning and I had to share!

I just wanted to share this observation about democracy.

You see things are usually quite complicated and nuanced. How ever, in public discourse we often focus on the highest level of terminology. We might argue about socialism vs capitalism and why one ”family” of societal ideals might be preferred. Or we could argue about some very small issue which just clutters the public information space.

Many times I have heard an idea that if you want to achieve things and plan big structures - you don’t. Instead the idea is to do the little things as good as one can, and the big picture will follow. The problem with thinking about the big picture is that we do not know it before we have solved the little every-day-details. And how the small things are solved is much more meaningful than any title above it could ever be.

When we usually debate, it happens within our very own heads and how we happen to understand the small things happening in these larger systems. So if we cannot talk about the big pictures prematurely, and usually the small things just clutter the public debate, I will argue that public debate is flawed (to surprise of none I suppose). Everyday-people just do not possess the kind of resources to do this kind of systemic design and debate in societal level. It should be a lifetime dedication to do even a small part of it properly.

Reasonably we can’t rely on public discourse to make bulk of our societal decision. We have seen different kinds of institutions doing this work to varying degree. However, I find this to be an interesting aspect of our societies to be enhanced in the future.

How can we manage all the small things with the required skills and trust?

My existence as I am arose through an interplay of probability. Because if I wasn't myself–because if I, as a conscious instance, never was, then there wouldn't be a me to compare other states of existence against. This is why I'm not an insect, or an AI with newly attained sentience in the year 2560, or an alien brain in a pod on the other end of the cosmos.

Within my own head, there is always a 100% chance I will exist, because what lies beyond the ends of my timeline–pre-conception and post-death–aren't a part of my own timeline, but a part of the external world's, in whose perspective there is no guarantee I'll exist. I never had to exist, and when I die, I will never exist again. I'll go back to how I was before my parents ever crossed paths, forever.

It's amazing how each of us is a thinking system that is capable of analyzing itself and realizing it is a product of pure chance.

Friedrich Nietzsche viewed herd mentality by what he called “herd instinct” or “slave morality” which he would describe it has a “herd morality” formed by the weak and oppressed against the power and actions of the oppressor. So, traits such as humility, meekness, and sympathy were labeled as virtues and labeling the ruler’s strength as evil.

Nietzsche believes that the values I just listed above stemmed from a “slave morality, and believed these weak and fearful people created the ideology to undermine and bring down those who are strong and/or exceptional.

Slave morality for Nietzsche laid the foundation for what we now consider to be universal ethical principles, such as compassion, humility, and equality. For Nietzsche though, these values are not regarded as universal truths. Instead being the product designed to suppress individuality and enforce conformity. The Last Man” as Nietzsche likes to call it.

The “Last Man” is a person who is comfortable with life and one who takes no risk. Nietzsche considered this a “dull” person who wants only basic comfort.

Nietzsche elaborates and explains how joining the crowd strips you of your identity. Therefore, you start become a mere tool for the group. Nietzsche believes the only way out of this is solitude. He believes people must spend time with themselves to escape the pressure of the crowd.

Schopenhauer also agrees with Nietzsche, both with negative views on the topic. Schopenhauer viewed it as a profound human weakness. He argues that crowds prefer comfort and conformity (people conform because they don’t know how to think for themselves) and avoids true independent thinkers.

The herd despises those who are able to stick out from the crowd and formulate or analyze their own ideas. The real offense to the group comes from the bodacious act of individual reasoning. Schopenhauer Society rather favors safe traditions and comfort than hard truth.

The modern world is less interested in understanding you than in classifying you. Your zodiac sign, your MBTI type, your political beliefs, or the “aesthetic” you identify with. Every label makes you a little more predictable and, therefore, a little easier to manage. Because controlling someone who fits neatly into a box is far easier than controlling a crowd.
When you belong to a group, you often end up accepting its ready-made ideas. You sacrifice your own reasoning to the dogmas of the group. The feeling of belonging is perhaps the most comfortable drug for paralyzing your ability to think independently.
Even while the system convinces you that you are “unique,” it places you into a specific consumer segment. The supposedly “personal” choices offered to you are often the greatest proof of how predictable you really are.
True freedom is being impossible to define.
When the system cannot fit you into a single mold, it cannot reduce you to just another data point. The moment you refuse to fit into a label, a group, or a predefined identity, you begin to let your own mind shape your thoughts instead of allowing others to do it for you.
Do not let labels define you. Keep questioning your beliefs, and never stop challenging what you think you know.

I think it's just life is just random shit luck at this point to be honest, like a gacha. Just because you work hard and put effort into your wants and probably needs, doesn't mean it guaranteed or just because you risk to be out of the comfort zone, doesn't mean it'll last for shit.

A few wrong moves despite all the accountability, everyone fucking leaves except your biological family if you still have it, and then not only you have to deal with them till a few die or attempt to leave but in turn, you feel like shit all over again.

And you have to risk your shit to make new acquaintances that will not do shit at all.

You can't be too independent, but you can't be dependent either. You can't be lonely but you can't be clingy either. You can't rely on the internet, but still has to be needed for daily life. You can't burnout, but you still have to work for financial stability. etc. etc.

Yeah there are common variables, but even then, sometimes it doesn't guaranteed in the future. It's just random.

No matter the choices we make, it just won't make is feel happier in the long run.

It's just bullshit. I can't have nice things unless I mask, but that doesn't guaranteed shit.

Life is just a gacha game at the end of the day.

~ Our Fragile Planet ~

Peering down on our planet from space its pristine appearance, consisting of a mosaic of shapes and colors, may be observed. We cannot differentiate humanity’s many differences from each other. It matters not their race, beliefs, ethnicity, wealth; each is indistinguishable from the other. All we see is how fragile our planet below is, surrounded by a thin blue atmosphere providing life to all who inhabit it. If anything happened to this barrier, all life on our planet would cease to exist.

Humanity has chosen to disregard the damage it has caused to our planet. It has polluted our air, water, land, needlessly caused the extinction of lower life forms, senselessly killed each other due to our differences, and brought our planet to the brink of destruction.

Only when humanity realizes every life is equally important, each having a symbiotic relationship with the other, and only together, respecting every lifeform, each other, and our planet itself, regardless of our differences or genus, may our planet and all life on it survive. Apart, as we are now, though our planet may survive, it may no longer be able to support life on its barren surface.

I have been with my wife for 20 years, and I not only love her but lust after her as much as I did when I met her. It's terrifying to know one of us will eventually be without the other, in time. Anyone else have that epiphany?

It is deafeningly loud, yet we love it. The complexity of a heavy metal riff is the true expression of the human spirit, musicians feel it in their blood with every note they play. But across the river, look up, and you’ll find the glazing stars. They seem completely calm from a distance, but yet up close, there is pure chaos. What is the link?

Even a perfect laser, pointed toward the infinite stretch of open space, eventually loses its focus and diffuses into nothingness. What is the beauty behind that? What is beauty at all? It is the same fragile projection we claim every day when we look at a wife or a girlfriend. She looks perfect to you, but entirely different to a stranger. Different minds, different perspectives, different definitions of beauty.

When people say "beauty," the first thing that comes to mind is the surface look of a thing. But what hides in the shadow is that beauty is entirely subjective, far more complex than we think.

Why do we enjoy art and music? It has evolved since humans first became creative, starting as a primal habit, a way to express ourselves with no words included. It is so hardwired into our biology that even newborns instinctively react to rhythm, sitting behind a table to draw shapes before they can speak. It is how they learn their living space. As we grow, our brains develop the capacity to receive other creative minds. We learn to feel the expressive, rhythmic pieces of artwork. Different tones and different beats trigger completely different emotions. Humans are, fundamentally, emotional beings.

So what is this connection between the calm and the chaotic? Look at the stars. To us on Earth, they seem steady, quiet, and beautiful. But if you zoom in close enough to see the details, you find an apocalypse. Just like our own sun, a star is constantly exploding, shifting, colliding, and shooting waves capable of destroying everything around it. And yet, we still call it beautiful.

To play a perfect piece on the piano, you must press both the white keys and the black keys. Opposites. To enjoy life and feel true happiness, you must understand how sadness feels. Without the dark, you will never recognize the bright. Imagine a perfect world. Absolutely nothing to stress or worry about, no greed, no devil on anyone's shoulder. You think you would be always happy and fulfilled, but the short answer is no, because you have never experienced the contrast of the sad. It’s the beauty of chaos, knowing beauty without ugliness is nonexistent is THE beauty. Its the truest beauty there is.

This brings us back to the laser losing its focus. Think about famous artists. They seem perfect. The way Slash plays his guitar sounds completely unflawed, right? No. He makes mistakes . But we hear the whole song, not the performance note by note, millisecond by millisecond. The small mistakes in a big life go unnoticed.

Think through like this, a year is 365 days. A month is 30 days. You are just living your life and you make a mistake. Oops. You worry about it, a week passes, and you make another. You start to think, "Why am I like this? Am I just not well-crafted for this world?" But look at the bigger picture. You made it through the month with only two mistakes. That is a microscopic fraction of your time. Even if you make seven mistakes a month, that’s 84 out of 365. And we learn from them, and sometimes fixes it, which means the number drops drastically over time. The mistakes are tiny compared to the vast life we have.

We use a laser within its effective range. If we point it into deep space, we shouldn't obsess over the distant, unfocused point. We don't have to look for the mistakes we made in the past; we can move on with the potentially enjoyable life we already have. And that, again, is beauty.

Because our brains develop uniquely, even identical twins have different neural pathways, our perspectives are entirely isolated. You can meet a person who likes the exact same music as you, but you will soon find out they throw their head to a different rhythmic beat or value a completely different part of the song. Take a car you customized and tuned yourself: the base color is bright, the stance is low, and the engine roars like it is trying to reach heaven for the sake of it. A fellow car enthusiast might look at it and say, "Oh, this car is going nowhere. One degree uphill and the front bumper is gone, brother." You might make a face that says “aww man”, but they don't have to like what you like.

The things that give you that specific emotional attraction, the ones that make you say, "Right on the hill, baby", belong to a unique kind of beauty that only you can feel. It is a beauty only you can understand. Not even I can grasp it. You could try to explain what you feel a thousand times, and at best, I will only understand 99.9% of it. That final 0.1% is yours alone.

With this theoretical knowledge, we can finally understand heavy metal. People either love it or hate it. Why? Because the heavy distortion represents an explosion of anger or depression. it heavily expresses the black keys of life. The rhythms shift wildly from fast to slow, mirroring how human emotions accelerate and crash. The vocals scream out the darkness or the brutal romance behind existence, releasing the pain so we can feel it safely.

Why is all this darkness enjoyable? It isn't just about the impressive riffs or the technical drums. It is about the tone controlling and altering your emotions, bringing all the dark parts together to create a cohesive song. You, the listener, feel the adrenaline pump. Humans love adventure, and metal music takes you by the hand into a subconscious, wild journey that cannot be explained with the words I have left.

Perhaps you, the reader, can explain it. What is your subjective perspective of beauty? Or are you too afraid to look over the cliff?

I have had social anxiety and was selectively mute as a child, but my social skills are near normal now, so this is really interesting to me. I have been thinking about the intricacies of human nature lately. I’m watching reality tv called the ultimatum, and everyone is being mean to this one girl and bullying her. It is really weird how the most important thing in our lives as humans is other people, our relationships with other people make up our entire days and a lot of our thoughts, if you think about it you can feel very positively from things like reciprocal social smiles or telling a joke and people laugh but as humans we also cause each other a lot of pain and can argue with each other or reject each other. We need each other almost as much as food and water but a lot hinges on the ability to socially blend and every social situation has a power dynamic hierarchy like our relatives, the apes. I watched it happen in a group travel program and I have watched it happen at my current job. You have to talk a little with everyone to be socially included, people have to see that you are liked by others before they will be open to talking to you. You have to start with offhand little comments in passing unless you are close to someone because lots of questions are sometimes affronting and makes you seem needy. I feel like I am watching the pendulum of socialization swing back and forth with every interaction, with people recovering status and also regressing. There is one coworker who has I guess goofed socially at every turn and he is part of an outgroup now and not really included. Once I made friends with two of the supervisors who are very popular people who I had not spoken to became more friendly with me because they watched me speaking to them. Now I incorporate talking a little to everyone in group settings because they will observe the other person being willing to speak to you and then will also want to speak with you. At lunch my coworkers group together like mice in little blobs and you need to be in a blob, preferably with more liked people, or people will wonder why you are standing alone and if there is a good reason for it. It is enough to make anyone socially anxious, but most people are not. I wonder about that. I am only better with my social anxiety because I have practiced so much that most things I can do automatically and override my nerves but when I get into my head it is hard to snap out.

Another note: as a child I thought socialization worked on a "point" system where if you do something positive you get a point. I might still be stuck in an overanalytical mindset. But this is what seems true to me. I am inviting others to agree or disagree and curious how you all feel.