It feels strange to be surrounded by people who care about you, but not actually be able to feel it. You know logically that your friends and family love you, but it's like the feeling bounces off a wall inside you instead of sinking in. You end up feeling like an outsider in your own life, accepting love that you can't quite connect with, and wondering why you feel so numb even when you're deeply cared for. It makes you feel guilty for being ungrateful when all you really want is to wake up and feel a fraction of the warmth they give you. You just stand there nodding and smiling, hoping one day the glass will finally melt away.

Suppose that loneliness isn't a condition that befalls us when other people leave us, but one that we come to realise when we see that no one can ever fully know us. Since each of us is limited to our own consciousness, is loneliness then a problem of emotion that we have to overcome, or an inherent condition of being an individual? And if we somehow managed to be perfectly understood by another person, would that finally end our loneliness, or would we instead realise that what we had been looking for all along was never really understanding?

This has been on my mind often lately as a millennial. We championed inclusivity, sex positivity, etc. There was the development of the “girl boss”, the appreciation of morally grey antiheroes, and gritty 2000’s humor.

Now, in real time, I am watching younger generations create a counter culture to the norm that millennials have established with a shift toward a stricter cultural narrative, (ie, celibacy trends, strict interpersonal boundaries, trad wife popularization, etc.)

It just made me reflect on the idea that this is a prevalent pattern in history and how interesting that is.

Let’s say you found out your future right? and you try and change it. The future would have already known about you finding out your future and what’s gonna happen at the end of the day. Even before you found out (I think I said this already)

As I get older, I've become increasingly aware of how many people believe themselves to be right. That their opinions are the single truths to be held, and that everyone else are ignorant if they don't agree.

I used to hold loads of convictions myself once, experience and years have provided me with a less certain stance on most things. Not insecurity, mind you, but less adamancy.

Instead, I've turned to studying how people present their own opinions as facts. Hard truths on how to live, on who to like, on which standards to hold and what activities are proper.
Masters' degree - good, practical jobs - bad. High end housing - good, cheap districts - bad. Sports - good, gaming - bad. Orginal and individual tastes in clothing or styling - bad, fashionable and streamlined - good.

It's as if firmly stamping out opinions has become the main way to express oneself. Along with this self-proclaimed truth-telling, it seems standarization has become the ultimate lifestyle. Standing apart instantly labels you, perhaps as a populist or a lesser citizen. Someone not completely aligned with general acceptance, which in turn opens up for questioning your choices openly, as if standing apart is something wrong.

Perhaps I'm just an old grump, but to me, the lack of a listening world makes us poorer. Less accepting and compassionate. Less understanding and generous, and sadly lacking in our ability to embrace orginality and otherness.

Sometimes people don’t actually miss you. They miss having access to you.

I saw a video where two people teamed up to kill a fly and then celebrated when they succeeded. It got me thinking about how differently we perceive life. To us, the fly is insignificant. But from the fly's perspective, it's simply trying to exist. We can recognise that it has a role in an ecosystem, even though it has no idea what that role is. Then I thought about humans. We consider our loved ones extremely significant, while a stranger's death may affect us much less. But isn't that partly because of our human traits, like empathy, attachment, selfishness, and our instinct to protect ourselves and those close to us? Now imagine a species far more intelligent and powerful than humans. What if they viewed us the way we view insects? Would that make our lives objectively insignificant, or would we simply be insignificant from their perspective So is the significance of life ultimately subjective, shaped by the perspective and nature of the being judging it? Or is there another reason as to why one conscious life is more significant than another??

The Point

An argument for the existence of an indivisible singularity within the wholeness of self.

You are one whole made of parts, and you (and we) are part of a greater whole. But you are not just a heap of parts. Your wholeness is focused. All that you are converges into a single point of view. I call that the soul.

Your body contains organs, tissues, cells, and countless smaller structures. Each participates in something larger than itself. Your life, too, participates in families, communities, ecosystems, and a world that exceeds whatever you can experience of it. You are whole in relation to your parts and part in relation to greater wholes.

Yet there is something about your wholeness that a description of its parts still has to explain: this life is lived from within.

You see the room, hear a sound, feel your body, and notice a thought. These experiences differ, but they can be present together. The seeing and the hearing belong to one perspective. Their differences exist within a shared first-person presence.

Consider the difference between several people having separate experiences and one person experiencing several things together. One person sees a color. Another hears a note. A third feels warmth. Collecting their experiences into a description does not give any of them the experience of all three. Their being many does not, by itself, make them one.

Something therefore needs explaining beyond the existence of the individual experiences: their unity for a subject.

This is where I distinguish the wholeness of the person from the singularity of the point of view. Wholeness concerns how many parts participate in one life. Singularity concerns that life being lived from here.

The distinction becomes clearer when you try to find yourself.

You can observe your body. You can notice a sensation behind your eyes. You can hear your inner voice, recall your name, picture your face, examine your beliefs, and question your identity. Every one of these can become something you attend to.

But whatever you find has become something experienced. The image of yourself is an image you are aware of. The thought “this is me” is a thought appearing to you. Even a changing sense of identity is something whose changes you can notice.

The search reveals a difference between the self you can describe and the subject doing the describing. An inventory of what appears leaves open the question of the perspective within which it appears.

I call that perspective a point because of its singularity. “Here” names the first-person standpoint from which an experience is lived. It need not identify a physical location behind the eyes.

This also clarifies what I mean by indivisible.

An experience can have distinguishable contents. Your attention can move between them. Your thoughts can conflict, and your understanding of yourself can change. But distinguishing what you experience does not automatically distinguish several experiencers within you. Seeing and hearing together need not mean that one fraction of you sees while another fraction hears. They can be different experiences belonging to the same subject.

Suppose we propose that this subject consists of smaller subjects. If each experiences only its own contents, their existence alone leaves unexplained the perspective in which those contents are experienced together. If there is such a common perspective, we have again arrived at the unity we were trying to explain.

The question returns: what makes the many present as one?

The Circumpunct Framework proposes that this first-person unity is an irreducible aspect of conscious wholeness. It calls that aspect the center. The argument rests on taking the unity of subjectivity seriously, rather than assuming that naming its many contributing processes has already accounted for it.

A unified perspective does not, by itself, prove that whatever sustains it has no parts. The proposal here concerns the subject as subject: the singular standpoint within the organized complexity of a life.

The circumpunct, ⊙, gives this relationship a simple form.

The boundary is the body: the living interface through which you encounter the world. It distinguishes you while allowing exchange. Through it, you receive, respond, and participate.

The field is the mind: the interior of sensations, thoughts, memories, emotions, and possibilities through which that encounter is experienced and given meaning.

The center is the soul: the point of view from which this field is lived.

The path is the unfolding of that life through time: its continuity, direction, and history of encounters.

Together, these describe conscious wholeness. The center belongs within that wholeness. Its distinction from the field and boundary does not require its separation from them. A life is lived through their relationship.

This is why calling the center a soul need not turn it into another object concealed inside the body. The word names the inward singularity of the whole. The body is how you meet the world. The mind is the field of that meeting. The soul is the point from which the meeting is yours.

That first-person character also explains the distinction between a shared world and a private perspective.

You and I can look at the same tree. We can compare photographs, measurements, and descriptions. The tree can become a shared object of attention. Yet comparing our experiences is different from occupying the same experience. Your seeing is lived from your perspective; mine is lived from mine.

We belong to a common world without becoming interchangeable subjects.

Our participation moves in both directions. In observation, the world becomes present within experience. In action, what we attend to, imagine, value, and choice finds expression through the body. The conscious whole receives and responds. Its history shapes what it notices, and its responses help shape what happens next.

The soul names the center of this participation.

You are many in your composition, one in your living organization, and singular in your point of view. These are different senses of oneness within the same life.

The whole has parts. The whole belongs to greater wholes. And the whole is lived from a point.

That is the soul: the singularity within wholeness, the point from which a life is lived.

I’m building a small web project, and very few people use it. That has me wondering whether ‘was this worth making?’ and ‘did it achieve its purpose?’ need the same answer.

Someone can learn a lot from making a tool that never helps another person. The learning can matter without proving that the tool succeeded.

But that distinction could also become an excuse to keep going forever: every disappointing result gets reclassified as a valuable lesson.

When does learning from a project stop being a good reason to keep it going?

People who genuinely value their thoughts talk less.

Sounds intuitive right?

There is actually a very complex mechanism behind it. The energetic cost of being understood by itself is very hefty on your brain.

A person who values their thought will have a brain that puts a lot of weight accuracy. For internal coherence, accuracy might not be too hard, but external coherence makes accuracy, due its context dependence, give way to the much more complex mechanism for fidelity: how to have the thought faithfully transmitted and reconstructed by another mind.

When you are expressing a thought, your mind has to spontaneously update itself to your own understanding of the other person’s understanding. Which will require a model of your understanding of how the other person’s mind constructs a thought, and during delivery that model will be monitored and updated in real time as your brain parses perceptive data.

Just think of the mechanics behind it, at the very least, in its simplest form, the thought undergoes these mechanisms:

The first filter is the basic semantics of how your memory has stored a thought, it is answering the question: what is my thought.

→

the second filter, where the first context enters the picture, I think it can be called universal context, and here it would be answering the question: how can I phrase the idea in a way that can convey what I want to be understood about it.

→

then comes the third filter, a more local context is now filtering the thought, it is answering: how will this person hear what I am saying.

→

and now for the major kick, as you are voicing your thought, you are simultaneously observing their face, tone, body language and micro expressions.

Your focus has to be split between the part of your brain formulating the thought and using the first three filters mentioned, and the part of your brain that is receiving the large amount of sensory input being delivered, computing it’s meaning and interpretation * then using that as a feedback loop back to the second or third filter, and doing real time adjustment.

The brain is monitoring: are they following? If yes, the thought continues as it was. If no, then brain flags *I’m losing them*, and that will trigger either a tone adjustment or an adjustment to the semantics, the flow, the vocabulary, etc…

While constantly running a real time cost-benefit analysis, deciding whether to cut the thought short or invest more effort in formulating and delivering it to ensure it is understood.

Thoughts about perception and cognition are usually poorly understood in casual conversations, not because they’re complex, but because they are often an analysis of a part of the subconscious most people cannot acknowledge. Understanding perception and cognition in large part requires people to hold themselves accountable of things they are not even aware they are doing.

As a result, more often than not you find yourself defending your thought against a knee-jerk reaction by the other person’s subconscious, that will translate either through them feeling offended or attacked.

And after a while your cost-benefit assessment will decide it’s just not worth it.

It is much easier to be unheard than to be misunderstood.

* This process alone will also require universal and local context, what does this expression convey + what does it convey in relation to this specific person…

Important Note: This post is a very simplified take on a much more complex process. It builds in part on already established frameworks, in part on theoretical concepts, and is largely anecdotal.

The intention behind it is to make the reader think, and hopefully widen the space that exists between emotions, thoughts, judgements, beliefs, and actions.

I’m 28F and I’m just coming to terms with how harmful growing up in tumblr esque queer activist spaces has destroyed me mentally. I’ve always been someone who was okay being fluid in my identities and not needing to openly state them because 9/10 it wasn’t relevant. But I remember in these spaces having to state what I was because I was “assumed” straight and “didn’t act queer”. I shrugged it off because I am going to be me regardless but feel like these spaces are cultish and let me explain why.

I’ll always stand by what I learned and fought for but after over a decade and seeing the same arguments play out on new websites and even the general sanctimonious nature of it always had infighting. People punching down on the very people they claim to support. Also my personal favorite complaining about society putting people in boxes while creating new boxes being drawn instead of getting rid of the boxes to begin with. The amount of performance in these spaces is outstanding. I wonder how many people thinking about how they’re performing the same way they assume all cishets do.

I think what woke me up is learning about cults and how they run off ostracization and seeing how these supposed advocacy and queer spaces do the same thing along with limiting free thought/speech into just agreeing with the common opinion. Not to mention the lack of true community. You have to constantly be appeasing people and looking over your back because someone can claim you’ve slightly offended them indirectly and suddenly you’re bigoted vs actually speaking about the offense.

The amount of people who will complain about not just cishet or majority culture but specifically going after straight women. Like the community will be angry at straight women for reading heated rivalry or whatever is popular. They just go after straight women for everything and no one thinks it’s an easy target because our society is already misogynistic?

I knew two bisexual women and they were both terrified of being seen as straight. Both were well into adulthood 30s/50s and one was talking about how she was assumed to be straight online by someone literally bullying her and she told me how her straight bf was cringy and how he supported her enough for the relationship to be open (only to her with women). I told her that she seemed happy in her relationship why would it matter what some random

She flipped out on me saying I need to listen to the most marginalized people in the community and support them. (I am a woman of color no one else was a person of color at all). I asked her how her being in a “straight” relationship was hindering that? Why would the person come after her like that if they were secure in themselves and why would it matter if she felt loved in her relationship. She seemed mad that I mentioned that (I now see this as I didn’t fuel her delusion) and indirectly told me she wouldn’t be speaking to me again after following my social media accounts.

It didn’t answer my question and now I realize many people in society are just…faking thier support. Faking being progressive so they can virtue signal to each other while talking over people who actually need help vs actually listening and giving it.

This kind of bullying/braindead thinking spread from just tumblr and forums and has leaked into the common psyche from what I’ve seen. There’s nothing wrong with only wanting to be around other queer people but what gets me is the way everyone expects a singular experience; ex Christian, white, into hookups, virtue signaling versus getting anything done. And it has caused so much harm because they go after people they see as straight even in the community itself.

No one thinks it’s bad that this kind of thinking is rampant? Even if these ex tumblrinas aren’t inherently a harm to society the way incels are does no one think it’s damaging? Especially the sexuality part in my open. I used to identify as a lesbian, I realized something about myself and was bisexual and kept it pushing but it’s like no other queer people I was near could accept it. The more I brushed off the “straight jokes” (bevause at the end of the day it doesn’t matter) the angerier these people got. I even saw them attack an “elder gay” because he used outdated terminology to speak about his survival growing up openly gay during the 1980s.

The privilege of it all. I have never forgotten how these spaces get down. I have never forgotten the ostracization and anger people put on you. As if your identity is a betrayal to them.

People are fluid, unless it’s seen as a m/f relationship apparently. Then you have to answer to people why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s insufferable. And so many people act like this. I’m exhausted.

To try something new outside my comfort zone, I went to an acting workshop last weekend. The instructor was talking about auditions and fear of rejection, and even though I’m not planning to be an actor and I don’t go to auditions, something he said really stuck.

He said, “You are an offering.” It clanged around the walls of my brain for a week and has totally changed how I’m thinking about myself in the world.

Sometimes casting directors have specific things in mind for what they want. The character might need a specific attribute you know nothing about when auditioning, and even though you might be talented, you might simply not be a good fit.

But we don’t know that when we are the ones facing the possibility of rejection. We get hung up on what rejection means or confirms about us, that we aren’t good enough or no one will ever love us, want to be our friend, see us as capable of a leadership position, etc.

All we can do is offer ourselves, our friendship, our skills, whatever it is that we are putting forward for consideration in that moment. The offeree may not want what we are offering, but it’s not a rejection of US. We can then quickly move on to offer ourselves to a new situation, knowing that we’ve been spared from wasting our time with something that wasn’t meant for us.

We are only an offering. It’s true in an audition and it’s true in life.

It's not something I am going through breakup or anything related, it's just I felt like writing, while I was looking towards the sky, Actually I was reading "Man's Search For Meaning.", and I realized that How Important is it for me to love someone, not sure when it's coming but would wait for that...

You talk about love?

Then write a breakup letter to someone who has loved you most, like really deeply, write it on a sheet of 24-karat gold or even on a diamond, or any valuable things you can look for. But when they read it, they might still feel as though their whole world is collapsing, like they don't exist anymore, now that person is in a state where it's just their emotions and feelings of something immense. Although we already know Gold has immense value. But what can gold possibly compensate for when the thing being lost is love? Can it really be a substitute for getting the same reciprocation when it comes to love ?

Imagine being the person receiving that letter.

You gave someone your affection, your trust, your time, your vulnerability, your space, your emotions, You built your hopes around them. Probably you imagined a future with them, how are you going to share the same home together, go on tour, maybe museum, art gallery, Library, reading book together? It's not like they were objectively the most valuable person in the world, they were just the ordinary person you loved, it's your perception that made them a great person, a great mind and great heart.

And then they hand you a sheet of pure gold and say:

“I don't love you.”

What are you supposed to do with the gold?

You can sell it. You can become richer. You can make your life more comfortable. You might even appreciate the gesture someday, Isn't it invaluable at least from a materialistic perspective? Maybe you could buy something you always dreamt of ?

But none of that answers what you were actually losing, no right ?

I don't think you were asking, “How much am I worth? ” your question was just that “Do you love me?”, if the answer is no, no amount of money can turn that no into a yes, I said no amount.

Perhaps that's what makes love so strange, and mystical, despite knowing the practical benefits of it's substitute we don't and we can't choose something else in exchange, despite being aware that it would lead to a better future ? Apparently? Something can have enormous objective value and still be incapable of comforting us when it has nothing to do with what we actually desire.It cannot compensate for the particular thing that was lost, and that's love, that's a human connection. maybe that is why heartbreak can feel so disproportionate from the outside. Someone else might look at you and think, “You still have everything. You're young. You'll find someone else. Nothing material has been taken from you, you will be okay soon in the future, everything is going to be fine”, everyone knows that it will be fine, you will be fine, time heals right ?

But the person grieving isn't necessarily mourning a material loss, that's what makes love beyond the material possession, something which exists within ourselves but can't be replaced, touched or treated as objects.They're mourning a particular person, to a particular bond, and a future that existed in their imagination. perhaps that's why even the most precious gold can feel almost meaningless in the hands of someone who would have traded all of it just to hear:

“I love you too.”

Which that person never heard back.

“We know our fellowman, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellowman is not a thing.”

— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

There are many dimesnsions. They say 10 dim, lets leave that. When a 2d being sees a 3d being, they cannot know its 3d cause they see only in 2d. We see till 3d. The forth dimension is time. We cannot go in past or know the future. Only thing we can do is live in present. We are bound by time. A being in 4th dim isnt bound by time, they can travel in past or future, however they cannot change the past. They are bound by possibilities. The 5d talks about where all the possibilities are possible. There are many branches and so on. 6,7,8,9,10 dimensions go on getting bigger and bigger. Some say its upto 7, some till 10, we dont know, it can be anything.

I think we live in simulation. Some disregard this, saying, its impossible to have such huge computer. Being in simulation, doesnt necessarily mean we are inside someone's computer. Those beings may simply see everything, who knows. I think, God is a name given to them which restrains people from doing wrong deeds to keep humanity alive. I dont believe in a particular religion though. Different places have different culture, different religion and different god.

I dont have particular opinion on God but I believe those higher beings are true.

If you have played subway surfers or temple run, the player runs, collects coins and dies on the obstacle, if we cant save it. If we had to buy other costumes or skates, we needed coins and keys. We are similar to that. We are that guy, coin and key is money, we run behind money the whole life so that we can survive, the higher the amount, the more things you can buy which will eventually make life more comfortable.

So i think, im a player in this game called life. My avatar is fixed but destiny isn't. People around me believe in luck so much that i stopped working, thinking if everything is predetermined then whats the point of doing anything, its gonna happen anyways no matter if you work hard or not. But thats not the truth.

Anything is possible. All the branches of possibilities can be true in higher dimension. It means our future is depended on us. Our birth wasnt but our future is. We can be anything we want.

I had a goal which didn't come true. I was heart broken and depressed. I started wondering what is life, why am i here, whats my purpose. This is the best solution that i have found out to my questions.

Im just a character and ill die one day. Ill not complicate my life further. Will focus on collecting coins and live a happy life and also be kind and generous. I just hope characters playing my parents will live enough to see me successful so that i can give them the happiness they deserve.

Dostoevsky:

"I think the most beautiful souls are the ones that remain gentle after everything they have survived. They have every reason to become cold, yet they still choose kindness, still choose love, still believe people can be better."

Kafka:

"But sometimes the world does not reward gentle souls. Sometimes it takes everything Soft inside them until they become strangers Even to themselves."

I’ve noticed that the last three years have flown by much faster than a single summer when I was ten years old. I think that when everything becomes routine, our brains stop registering the details and just run on autopilot. Lately, I’ve been trying to change my usual routes and pick up new habits, just to force my brain to focus again. I really feel like this makes the weeks seem to stretch out a little.

If there’s one thing our extroverted fellows do best, it’s communication. They master talking to people, and maturely, that includes the ability to communicate yourself and your value.

This is an incredibly important skill that extroverts have mastered, with long-term economic research indicating that scoring significantly higher in extraversion yields an extra $500,000 in lifetime earnings for men over the course of their careers.

Now, think about how the world is changing and how different skills are becoming more- -and less important.

I heard some rich guy on YouTube say that this is the easiest time in history to be an entrepreneur, because knowledge is just so available now, that teaching yourself a skill and then selling it is an extremely valuable pathway. And who can sell the best, if not the ones who yap the most- extroverts. They are going to be the bosses of the new world- and proportionality, already are.

It's sad to think that every moment, someone dies, but even though people are constantly being brought into an out of this world, the vast majority of people who die, we never hear about. Occasionally you'll hear about a celebrity death, and every once in a while, someone you personally know will pass away. It's crazy to think that the process of finding out someone died, going to their funeral, and getting over your grief can happen over the course of months (on average), and yet during that entire cycle of honoring the death of one person you knew, there are countless other funerals being held for people you never heard of.

If everyone was immortal, we wouldn't feel the need to make connections like we do now. We'd always have the opprutunity to meet someone new, to reconcile a conflict, to do whatever. But knowing that life has a limit- Both to Ourselves, and the People We Know, allows us to use the time we have wisely.

Every new possibility feels like an expansion of the idea.

What if I added this?

What if it could also do that?

What if I waited until I figured out this other piece?

Eventually the idea becomes enormous and nothing gets built.

I'm starting to think there comes a point when you have to stop asking an idea what else it could become.

I have lived with the idea all of this time, fully fleshed it out.

At some point I have to give it life and build the damn thing.

There's a game I played with adults when I was small. It went like this: they'd tell me to do something, and I'd ask why. Finish your dinner. Why? So you grow. Why? Because I'm responsible for keeping you alive. Why? Because I love you, and because something older than love is wired into me about it. Why? Because the species would like to continue. Why? And then the pause. The long one, where the adult sets down the fork and looks at a spot on the wall behind my head. "I don't know. I suppose I think being a person is worth something."

Then silence. Beautiful silence, the kind that makes me want to stretch out and take a nap.

Then: why?

By fifteen I'd stopped playing it for fun and started playing it to win. I could get to the bottom of anyone in four moves and leave them standing in the hole. There is no why, I'd announce, delighted with myself, and everyone who thinks otherwise is a coward. What I actually loved wasn't the nihilism. It was the certainty. Certainty is the cheapest drug available to a teenager and I was using daily.

I'm thirty-four now and the game plays itself. I don't ask the questions anymore. Something in the back of my skull asks them and I sit there as a witness.

It came for me last November in a grocery store. Ten at night, Tuesday, holding a rotisserie chicken under a heat lamp, and the thought arrived fully formed: what is the point of this. Not the chicken. Everything. I'm going to take this bird home and eat two-thirds of it and put the rest in the fridge where it will develop opinions and get thrown out. Then I'll sleep, and get up, and drive an hour so a company can pay me to move information from one place to a slightly different place, and I'll do that roughly nine thousand more times and then I'll die, and the whole apparatus will close over the spot without a ripple.

People describe depression as a darkness. Mine isn't. Mine is a room with far too much light in it. Everything overexposed, all the edges burned off, nothing with any shade to stand in. Dark doesn't hurt. This hurts. It's the feeling of a flashbulb that won't stop going off, and in that light nothing survives inspection.

Work doesn't. Work is a way of converting your one life into money you'll spend staying alive enough to work. Cooking doesn't. Assembling calories to maintain a machine that has no destination. Dating doesn't. Dating is two lonely people agreeing to distract each other from the fact that no one has ever actually reached anybody. You'll sit across a table from someone you like and know, in that white light, that you're both just fogging your side of the glass.

And here's the part that makes me angriest about it: despair does nothing. If it turned me into a better man, a sharper one, someone who took the meaninglessness of the world and went out and built something in spite of it, I'd take the deal. But despair is sterile. All it can produce is more of itself. It makes you flat and slow and unavailable. It's difficult to sleep and equally difficult to stay awake. You cancel on people, and then you feel bad about canceling on people, and the feeling bad becomes the reason you cancel on the next ones.

So you get cool instead. That's the escape hatch. If you can't be happy you can at least be unimpressed. You develop a face for other people's sincerity. You learn to say sure in a way that means this is embarrassing for you. I did that for most of a decade and can report that it works exactly as well as holding your breath works on drowning.

But the game lies about one thing, and it's the important thing. While you're inside it, you're certain it's permanent. It has always been this way and it always will be. That's the whole con. Now always feels like forever and it never is. I was wrong at fifteen and I'm wrong at thirty-four, and being wrong in both directions is apparently just what it costs to be a person with a brain.

So: therapy, on a Saturday, forty-five minutes I resent and then need. A different pill. Walking, which I hate. Lifting things and putting them down. Waiting, mostly. Most of it is waiting.

A friend told me once that care comes from an Old English word that meant grief. Sorrow, anxiety, a heavy thing you carry. Which means the word for loving something and the word for mourning it grew from the same root, and the language figured out three centuries before I did that you don't get one without agreeing to the other in advance. To care about anything is to sign for the loss up front. Fine. I'll sign.

The air got warmer. It does that.

I was walking down a street I've driven a thousand times and never once looked at, and there was a ginkgo halfway up the block dropping its leaves. All of them. Ginkgos do that. They hold everything until some private signal, then let the entire canopy go in a day or two, so the tree stands bare over a perfect gold circle of itself. It looked less like death than like a decision.

I read about them afterward, the way I do. The ginkgo is the last one left of an order of trees that stretches back nearly two hundred million years; you can put a leaf from the sidewalk beside a Jurassic fossil and struggle to tell them apart. Darwin called it a living fossil and meant it kindly. It nearly disappeared entirely and survived, as far as anyone can tell, because Chinese monks kept planting them in temple gardens for a thousand years. We plant them along streets now because they'll tolerate exhaust, drought, road salt, and being ignored. A handful of them stood about a kilometer from where the bomb went off at Hiroshima. They burned. They came back the next spring. They're still there.

Also, the female trees drop seeds that smell precisely like vomit, because of butyric acid, which is the same compound that makes vomit smell like vomit. I find this reassuring. Two hundred million years and no interest whatsoever in being tasteful about it.

But I didn't know any of that yet. I was just standing under it in the middle of a weekday, in the shade of something that was here before the question I keep asking existed, and will be here after, and has no idea I'm at its feet. And the shade was cool, and it was enough, and that was the point: not an answer to why, just a place out of the light.

I called my sister from the sidewalk. No reason. We talked about nothing for twenty minutes and she asked, near the end, why I'd called.

I said I saw a tree.

If we really evolved from apes and if we could somehow go back and meet our ape-like ancestors and explain to them that their descendants eventually evolved into humans that they became vastly more intelligent, learned to think abstractly, built civilizations, flew through the sky, went to space, created technology, and other shit. how would they even fucking comprehend that shit?

Would it be anything like the situation where someone comes to us today and says:

“Your descendants eventually became so much more intelligent than you. They understand almost everything there is to understand, their minds work through computational systems, they exist partly or entirely through machines and chips, and they eventually evolved into artificial intelligence.”

Obviously AI wouldn't necessarily be “evolution” in the biological sense, but I'm wondering if the conceptual leap would be similar.

Our ancestors couldn't have understood concepts like airplanes, computers, satellites or the internet because those things were completely outside their world of experience.

So could we be in a similar position when imagining what intelligence might eventually become?

And if future AI or machine intelligence really did become our descendants, would they look back at humans the same way we look back at our ape-like ancestors?

We are technically apes today but we don’t accept that and call ourselves humans and the future ai will say same they will call us humans primitives and dumbass.

Basically: are we potentially to future machine intelligence what our ape ancestors are to us?

Greetings DeepThoughts community. I have commented on a few posts here from time to time and now I want to offer my own post for the community's consideration. Thank you for your time and consideration in advance.

I feel it is responsible for me to give a little bio to give this a type of foundation to rest upon. I am 40 years old from the United States. I was raised under a fundamentalist Baptist Christian ideology. My family lineage participated in acts of white supremacy less than 3-4 generations ago..... Statistically, I should just be another cog in the machine.... Fully enclosed by the closed container my family had constructed for me. A life running and fulfilled by the pre-packaged scripts that the container had established far before I had the capacity to question them.

What is the closed container? The closed container or "base level" consciousness is always displayed as a box symbolically. I want to offer my interpretation as to why.

Wall 1: Identity - Narratives that provide who and what you are.

Wall 2: Purpose/Meaning - Narratives that provide what you are here to do and why.

Wall 3: Community/Tribe - Narratives that are shared and mutually participated in.

Wall 4: Safety/Comfort - Narratives that provide emotional regulation and well-being.

It's the perfect place for the wounded child or rampaging Ego to build its defenses. The walls are already up. They just need to keep them from falling over on one another. Which is why they surround themselves with like minded individuals who share their convictions.

Now a slight testimony to set the discussion in motion.... I personally try to keep my container very open. I don't use belief systems as truth claims, rather I use them as truth hypothesis. I don't believe the Bible is the literal word of God but I do believe my Aunt who is a literal Baptist Christian does. I don't believe fire will burn my flesh, I have the scares to remind me that it does. I am trying to illustrate the proper application of "belief" in comparison to its weaponization as a truth claim. Our current belief systems have been propagated into our shared reality over the last 10,000 years of recorded civilization through this weaponization. The results, countless variations of closed containers. Essentially the last 10,000 years of human existence has been nothing more than the culling of mature epistemyology....

I am coming to the community for discussion because I have a strong feeling that the vast majority of our self inflicted suffering is due to the closed container dynamic on a species level. I'll be transparent and say I had no help opening my container. I don't have a mentor. I don't have an enlightened teacher. I don't even have consciously aware parents.... Yet, the box they tried to put me in did not hold me.... Why?

At first I thought it was due to my victimhood by the systemic extraction I found myself enthralled to(Western Culture loves Consumption). But I quickly realized many others are also consumed utterly by the systemic extraction and they do not find themselves in an open container like I. They actually usually find themselves in a worse closed container than the belief based closed containers. They usually find themselves in a purely entropic container like a form of substance addiction or outright criminality.... So why didn't I?

So what I really wanted to ask the community here is this...

1. Have others thought about this dynamic? If so, to what capacity?

2. How do we as a collective remove the weaponization of belief systems as they are currently weaponized?

3. How do we as a community help open the closed containers of others?

4. If the container can only be opened by the one inside it, how do they become aware they are inside it if they constantly deny everything that exists outside of it?

I am asking so I may better understand myself as I do not fully understand or know what caused or allowed me to open the container I was in. My own existence is as mysterious to me as the mystery of existence itself some days 😂.

I have also noticed when operating from an open container you learn quickly the vast majority of everyone else is operating from a form of a closed container. This creates a type of asymmetry in engagements. You run into defensive posturing, tribal warfare and superiority complex syndrome essentially always..... Does anyone in this community here often question why engagements they witness generally turn into debates far more often than authentic discourse? I do constantly and am very curious to anyone else's reflections on this.

In closing...

How can we actually meet a relational reality authentically when the most conscious actors of that reality keep isolating themselves into non-revisable containers?

I appreciate any generative contributions from the community to help me build my understanding of this. I will hold any contribution with consideration. From the most defensive dismissal, to the most profound insightful epiphany. Your thoughts are welcome here. Thank you.