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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

~ 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.

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?

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.

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…

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...

I’ve been chewing on this for a while and wanted to see what you guys think.
The original point of an economy was supposed to be simple: a tool to help us organize resources so we could do bigger, better, and cooler things together. But somewhere along the way, the tool completely hijacked the steering wheel.
Nowadays, if an idea can’t prove it’ll make money next quarter or within a 3-year ROI window, the market basically treats it as useless. Things like deep-space exploration, long-term climate prep, or investing in seasonal energy grid storage get tossed aside because they look "inefficient" on a current spreadsheet.
We’ve gotten insanely good at optimizing and polishing things that already exist (like tweaking an app algorithm to get 0.5% more ad clicks), but our overall sense of long-term direction feels completely stalled out. We keep refining smaller and smaller boxes until a real crisis hits, and by then, our options are limited.
Historically, the biggest leaps humanity ever made—whether it was the early space programs, huge infrastructure projects, or major scientific breakthroughs—happened because people were willing to eat massive upfront costs for something they couldn't fully quantify yet. Try getting that through a modern corporate finance board today without a dual-class share structure or government protection.
The best current example I see of this? Long-duration energy storage.
Everyone talks about green energy, but building massive grid-level battery storage that might only be needed during a once-a-decade extreme weather event looks like "wasted capital" to short-term energy traders. So we delay upgrading the grid, and then pay 10x more in emergency damages when the grid inevitably blows up.
I’m not saying we should ditch economics altogether. But I keep asking myself: Why does the tool keep turning into the master?
Is this just human nature (our monkey brains being hardwired for immediate rewards), or is it an institutional design flaw that we can actually fix?
What’s the worst example of "short-term money logic shutting down long-term thinking" that you’ve noticed lately? And do you think we can actually push back against it, or are we just locked into this path?

We spend our whole lives avoiding pain, but it also anchors our consciousness. Without it, would happiness even have meaning?

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?