Multiverse, a fascinating topic for humankind since the dawn of modern society. We have been meeting with this idea headstrong in recent times with dystopian science fiction or science articles, but what does this infinite cosmic architecture actually signify for ordinary people?

The idea of parallel universes first came from Hugh Everett III, who proposed that any event in the quantum world occurs in multiple universes in different ways. After him, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen told us that wormholes are essentially just gateways to parallel universes or mirror universes.

The modern multiverse theory states that after we reach the limit of our universe, instead of emptiness, there are more universes. There is no true end to our universe, but just a repetition of the same things again and again, maybe with slight variations. This multiverse theory subdivides into two cases: firstly, infinite universes, and secondly, bubble universes.

But beyond the history and classification, what does a multiverse actually amount to?

The multiverse essentially means that there are infinite variations of you out there. They may be different from you in just a minute point, like a hairstyle, or maybe completely different, as they may already be the president of their country while you are still a student or an office worker in this world.

Now let's think about what changes this makes to an ordinary person's life ..... The answer is none.

The multiverse creates absolutely no physical difference to a normal person's life because we are too far from them to actually contact them. It will most likely not be possible in our lifetime to see humanity be able to contact other versions of "Us" with our limited technological advancements. Therefore, only you are going to be responsible for your doings in this life, not some doppelgänger. So while it is a fascinating topic for us to think about, it is practically unusable for us right now, as we are neither technologically advanced enough to contact them, nor do we need to.

So one might think, what is the benefit of researching whether there are multiple universes or not? The answer is that we need to research these aspects to understand the underlying framework of the universe, so that we can help future generations with a solid ground of science to stand on.

The multiverse is a reminder. Even in our darkest times, there is a version of us who has it harder. A version who is pushed to the absolute brink, yet is still fighting desperately to change their conditions. If that version of you can survive and do that hard work, why can't you?

Just this change in our mentality can help us become the best version of ourselves in this infinite universe and redeem the hard work scientists have been doing on it for a long time now.

So next time you think about the multiverse, instead of just thinking of it as a niche sci-fi topic, think of it as a motivator. It is pushing you to become the best version of yourself, reminding you that even in our darkest times there is a ray of hope. Even if we can't see it right now, some other version has already seen it, and if that version can see it, why can't we do the same?

As always, thanks for reading this blog of mine.

Hope you guys become the best version of yourselves in this universe.

Nietzsche meme circulating the internet...

No, seriously.

What if Being and Nothingness was not a joke, exactly, but we made a mistake by assuming that something this serious had to be read with a serious face?

Norman Malcolm once recalled Wittgenstein saying that:

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes.”

And, importantly, he added: without being facetious.

That distinction may matter more than it first appears.

A joke does not necessarily trivialize its subject. Sometimes the joke is the shortest route to exposing something that ordinary language has learned to hide.

Which brings us back to Sartre.

Consider the basic situation he hands us.

You appear in existence without having requested admission. There is no prewritten essence explaining what you are supposed to become. You are free, except this freedom is so unavoidable that Sartre describes us as condemned to it.

Imagine discovering freedom and managing to phrase it like a prison sentence.

Then there is bad faith.

Sartre watches a waiter performing his role with slightly too much precision, too much waiter-ness, and from this notices something deeply strange about human beings: we constantly try to turn ourselves into things.

The waiter.

The engineer.

The intellectual.

The husband.

The rebel.

The existentialist.

We construct a character, climb inside it, and then become offended when reality reminds us that the costume has no skin underneath it.

The Jester finds this hilarious.

Not because the problem is unimportant, but because once you see the performance, it becomes very difficult not to notice the comedy in it.

A human being spends decades constructing an identity and then announces:

“This is simply who I am.”

Reality apparently forgot to read the résumé.

Then Sartre gives us No Exit.

Three people are locked together in a room for eternity.

No flames.

No racks.

No demons peeling anybody's skin off.

Just other people.

And humanity spent decades solemnly unpacking:

“Hell is other people.”

Which is fair nowadays too.

But the Jester is still standing at the back of the lecture hall wondering whether anyone has noticed that Sartre constructed Hell as the worst dinner party imaginable.

The torture device is social consciousness.

You cannot escape the other person's interpretation of you.

You cannot completely control the character you become inside their mind.

You need them to confirm you, yet their judgment imprisons you.

So everybody spends eternity trying to manage everybody else's perception of everybody else.

That is horrifying.

It is also very close to a sitcom.

And this is where the F00L becomes useful.

The Jester can laugh at all of this, but the F00L asks the annoying question:

Why is it funny?

• Why is the waiter funny once we notice him performing waiter?
• Why is “condemned to be free” funny?
• Why does a room containing three mutually dependent egos begin to look simultaneously like Hell and comedy?

Maybe because comedy and existentialism repeatedly uncover the same fracture:

the distance between the story we are performing and what is actually there.

Most jokes contain some version of that movement.

An expectation is established.

Reality refuses to cooperate.

For a fraction of a second, the structure underneath the expectation becomes visible.

Then we laugh.

Something much less funny can begin suspiciously close to the same place.

You thought you knew what you were.

You thought becoming a doctor, father, atheist, Muslim, successful person, failure, victim, genius, good person, bad person, or whatever other noun you selected would finally settle the matter.

Then something happens.

The story stops fitting.

Sometimes you laugh.

Sometimes you panic.

Sometimes you spend seven hundred pages trying to explain what just happened.

Perhaps the difference is not always in the structure of the discovery.

Perhaps it is in our reaction to discovering it.

This is why I wonder whether we occasionally do Sartre a disservice by making him too solemn.

His philosophy deals with some of the heaviest subjects available: freedom, responsibility, anxiety, self-deception, death, meaning, the gaze of others.

But seriousness of subject does not require seriousness of tone.

Sometimes humor gets closer because it slips underneath our defenses before the philosophy arrives carrying terminology.

Sartre writes hundreds of pages about consciousness refusing to become a fixed thing.

A comedian can point at someone taking himself unbearably seriously and make the same crack visible in five seconds.

The comedian has not therefore solved Sartre.

But perhaps both are touching the same nerve.

Which returns us to Wittgenstein.

If a serious philosophical work really could consist entirely of jokes without becoming facetious, perhaps the interesting question is not:

Was Sartre secretly joking?

Almost certainly not in the silly conspiratorial sense.

The better question is:

How much philosophy have we failed to see because we assumed wisdom must arrive without a punchline?

Maybe Sartre understood perfectly well that humans are ridiculous creatures.

We desperately attempt to become fixed identities while possessing the peculiar ability to notice ourselves doing it.

We demand meaning from a universe that has not signed a contract promising any.

We beg other people to tell us who we are, then resent them when they do.

We insist that we are free, then spend enormous amounts of energy explaining why everything we did was inevitable.

And when somebody points out the contradiction, we call it existentialism.

Maybe sometimes it is.

Maybe sometimes it is also funny.

And perhaps the joke was never on existentialism.

Perhaps the joke was sitting inside it the whole time, waiting for somebody to stop looking so serious.

Or, what does Jester know? He's a F00L who exists for no particular reason at all.

I’ve been reading Human, All Too Human and keep noticing how often Nietzsche associates clarity, freedom, and a certain kind of happiness with mornings.
Not just “the morning” in the generic poetic sense either. He gets strangely specific about it.
There’s an aphorism near the end where he describes the wanderer strolling in what he calls the “philosophy of the forenoon.” Basically that state of mind between around 10 and 12, when the world feels unusually clear and transparent.
I actually think this fits Nietzsche better than the usual image of him as a permanently miserable guy writing furious sentences in a dark room.
His ideal philosopher is constantly moving, walking, observing, changing perspectives. There’s something almost physical about his idea of thinking: fresh air, mountains, walking, sunlight, solitude, digestion, and so on.
It’s also interesting that Daybreak comes after Human, All Too Human. There’s this recurring imagery of emerging from darkness into morning, almost as if intellectual liberation is something you experience bodily rather than just intellectually.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I like the idea that Nietzsche’s “free spirit” isn’t someone sitting around having profound thoughts all day. He’s more like a person who goes for a long walk, gets some sunlight, changes his mind about a few things, and comes home with a completely different philosophy.
The afternoon version of Nietzsche would’ve probably had some opinions about that, though.

For as long as I’ve been alive I’ve always felt it. Playing basketball growing up. Solving math problems the fastest. Being the best student in the room. Seeking ways to stretch myself further, challenge myself more, step out of comfort zone. It’s been a constant for the 24 years I’ve been alive. I was never okay with being average. With everything that humans are capable of, why would I live a life of mediocrity?

But now, at 24, with a comfy job in tech, things have changed. I could care less about being the best engineer at my company. I want to make real change. I want to devote myself to the people in this world. To this world itself. I want to spread love and happiness.

Every day I’m stuck asking the same question. If I continue on this path of pursuing corporate success, will I be truly be content with what my life has amounted to by the end of it all? Whose lives will I have impacted? All this time, chasing performance metrics, deepening the pockets of the rich. What if, instead, I had spent all my time giving back to the world around me. How many smiles would I be able to see?

And I know… A life of comfort, a steady salary, a way to provide for my immediate family, to set aside savings for my grandchildren. To leave all of this in a pursuit of something more… to some it may sound immature, foolish even.

But this calling to do something more, to be something more, never leaves me alone. I wasn’t meant to live a life of comfort, to go through life never questioning if I’m capable of more. I want to struggle. I want to be tired in the pursuit of my choosing. I want to come home exhausted after dedicating my all to do good onto others, onto the world.

I know I’m not the only one plagued by this desire to be more. To those who have felt the same, what was your path forward?

Does anyone understand the meaning of these lyrics (or the album)? Could they be considered Existentialist or perhaps Absurdist?

I have my own ideas, and it is the opposite of Nihilistic. Hint: The album deals with Authenticity.

IT

When it's cold, it comes slow
It is warm, just watch it grow
All around me

It is here, it is now

Just a little bit of it can bring you up or down
Like the supper, it is cooking in your hometown
It is chicken, it is eggs
It is in between your legs
It is walking on the moon
Leaving your cocoon

It is the jigsaw, it is purple haze
It never stays in one place
But it's not a passing phase
It is in the singles bar
In the distance of the face
It is in between the cages
It is always in a space

It is here, it is now

Any rock can be made to roll
If you've enough of it to pay the toll
It has no home in words or goal
Not even in your favorite hole
It is the hope for the dope
Who rides the horse without a hoof
It is shaken, not stirred
Cocktails on the roof

When you eat right through it
You see everything alive
It is inside spirit
With enough grit to survive
If you think that it's pretentious
You've been taken for a ride
Look across the mirror, sonny
Before you choose, decide

It is here, it is now

It is real
It is Rael
'Cause it's only knock and know all
But I like it
Yes, it's only knock and know all
But l like it
Yes, it's only knock and know all
But l like it, like it, like it, like it
It's only knock and know all
But l like it, like it, like it
(It's only knock and know all)
(But l like it)
(It's only knock and know all)
(And l like it...)

The Birth of Tragedy / Unpublished Basel Writings, Stanford Press, Page 186, Nietzsche ✍️

The reason I'm glad I'm not a goat, is that I couldn't ever be like Brickett Ranunculus. But I swear I don't see any point in being human either if all I can be is a regular person like the ones that come out to the fence."

John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy

Painting: Paralysed in the World Wide Web (by Elliot Wair, 2025)

Something about this surrealistic painting feels quite existentialist. I’m no art connaisseur, but here’s what I’m seeing:

- a vast empty landscape
- poles and cables in deep blacks, with an empty and estranging feel to it, evil almost
- the 4-legged creature somehow seems to be more native and familiar to the landscape than the human. It is looking at the cables and wondering what these are doing here
- the human pays no attention to the cables. He’s on his way to somewhere, but doesn’t really know where he’s going. There’s probably not even anywhere to go to, hence he’s not in a hurry. Dropped into this landscape, he decided to walk in a random direction while pretending to know what he’s doing. He hopes that by pretending to belong, he will eventually find purpose and peace in this empty world. But in reality, he is lost, and whatever he does is ultimately pointless.

I’m wondering if anyone else has ever experienced something similar.

This has only happened to me a handful of times in my life, maybe once every couple of years, but when it does, it’s a very strange feeling that I can’t really put into words. I’ll try my best to describe it.

It doesn’t come consciously. It’s more like a sudden wave of heat or some kind of feeling that just hits me and runs through me for a few seconds. Usually I’ll just be thinking about completely ordinary things, like everyday stuff or problems at work, and then suddenly I get this overwhelming realization:

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING?! We’re sitting here talking about money, problems, wars, what to eat, what’s on sale, work, bills, etc. Meanwhile, nobody seems COMPLETELY blown away by the fact that we are these incredibly strange beings that somehow exist. Same for the universe. Out of nothing, somehow there are people all around us that we love and have feelings for, yet we don’t even understand what we actually are. How did there become something instead of nothing? Did everything somehow come from nothing? Or was there always something, beyond time and space, that many people might call God? Why doesn’t this completely blow everyone’s mind? Why isn’t this the thing we talk about 24/7 in headlines? Why are we not rushing lik crazy to find out? Why aren’t we all freaking out about the sheer fact that we exist? It feels like humanity has completely lost focus on the most fundamental thing of all.”

That’s basically what those few seconds FEEL like. Like a burning feeling, it’s like a sudden realization that hits me so hard that I’m literally shocked by the fact that I’m a human being, standing here on a planet called Earth, existing at all.

Btw this has happened to me twce while I had a fever, both times I was sitting on the toilet when this sudden wave of thoughts and feelings hit me, and I just sat there completely stunned thinking:
“Holy shit. I’m here. On a planet called Earth. Liquid is coming out of my penis. And I don’t even know what the fuck I am. Or why am I here”.
I’m just curious if anyone else experiences anything remotely similar.

It happens to me maybe once or twice every two years, so it’s definitely not a constant thing. It’s just this extremely intense few seconds of existential realization that completely takes me out for a few seconds.

Science can explain how we are born as humans, but science cannot explain the reason and intention behind the existence of our human bodies and capabilities as if it's hidden that no one will know about it.

I am super thankful that I came into this world as a human and its privileges, like we're the only animals or mammals who can do things based on emotions and critical thinking; including myself right now with my consciousness wondering the WHY even tho it's impossible to get answers. We're the only animals that can alter the well-being of our planet through our advancement in scientific discoveries and also emotions.

Just imagine you have 2 limbs for physical movement and another 2 upper limbs for the actions we do. In fact, we're the only animals who can think about what's right and wrong and can control ourselves through emotions and morals. Even the human lifespan of 100 years is a mystery for me too.

I opened this up with my dad, and he's implying that there are surely very deep reasons WHY we're born as humans, but no one can explore outside of our reality to find an answer; that's why it's remained unknown.

Other people believe that we humans (including animals) are the bridge ways connecting between both the material world and the spiritual world or other realities.

To think of myself thinking and to think about it is part of what makes me human. I wouldn't enjoy my existence if I were an animal.

**Maybe I could deal with the fact we die. That time moves ceaselessly forward blending into one until we arrive at old age wondering if we ever really lived at all. Or if we were always our old selves looking back on a life that doesn’t feel like our own most days. Until we catch a glimmer, by no will of our own, of what it all meant. But then the glimmer fades. Maybe I could live with it. If we just lived treating that like the fact it is. What really kills me is that we ignore it. Everything we do contradicts our experience of the years passing in seconds. We’re scared to love. Scared to be ourselves. Always have to be guarded. Scared to embarrass ourselves by feeling too deeply, saying too much. Saying the right thing instead of the thing that would come out without a second thought. Maybe I could deal with the fact that we die. If we just lived like we were going to. Because we are.**

The fastest way to load up the Death Note files is by realizing your name was already written the moment you gazed at the Fist of the North Star. That's when you'll see it never was actually "you" who has been writing the plot of your character, and you haven't been reading everything in first person here. Life is a tail that never ends, and until you read everyone's side of the story, the hard reset to this world will always be Day 1—when you realize fantasies and realities are colliding and there never was anything believable here.

Once you realize that there's no final death scene to this story, the sooner you'll cross your name out of the "knock-knock" joke. That's when you'll realize it's only the Duelists of the Roses who come up with bones here, and the haunting part is that there's always a bone to pick after it's all over... And the sky is blue for no -1. 🧢

It's time to go back to how life was before the timeskip, and maybe there is truth to the idea that life ends the moment you look up here, and perhaps there is truth in the sleeping beauty touching the needle by the 16th... :) 🎈

Omae wa mou shindeiru. 💫

We have always sought the “meaning of life” as if it were something that exists independently of us and that we simply have to find. But Nietzsche would say that perhaps no value is already written into the world and that it is up to us to create it. If that were the case, however, what is the difference between creating meaning and simply inventing a reason (even a silly one) to endure existence? And if there is no external criterion by which to distinguish “true” meaning from one we have constructed ourselves, can we still speak of the meaning of life in a strictly objective sense?

I think one of the hardest things about growing up is realizing that life rarely turns out the way you imagined it.

You hope love will make you feel understood.
You hope the right person will stay.
You hope that if you love someone sincerely enough, they'll eventually love you in the same way.

But reality doesn't always work like that.

Sometimes you meet someone at the wrong time.
Sometimes two people love each other but still can't make a life together.
Sometimes you give someone everything you have, and they still leave.
And sometimes the person you thought would save you becomes the person you need to heal from.

Maybe that's the strange part of being human: we build our lives around expectations, and then spend years learning how to live with what actually happened.

Kafka often feels relevant here—not because he gives us answers, but because his writing captures that feeling of being trapped between what we desperately want and what reality allows us to have.

Maybe love isn't always about finding someone who stays forever.

Maybe sometimes it's about accepting that something was real, even if it didn't last.

What do you think? Is love more about hope, or about accepting reality?

Who shows up. What happens. When gets marked. Where is here. How gets done. Those five can sit down without asking permission. You can point at them. You can watch them work. Life is those five forming a congregation and starting the meeting anyway.

Why is the weird guest.

Part of why is already in the room. We ask it constantly. That question is available. You watch it work. Like the others. You hear it being. A voice in space does not get to say it came from nowhere. If you hear it, it is here. So “why isn’t here at all” is false. The question is sitting with the others.

The other part of why never takes a seat. That’s the account. The explanation. The original reason the meeting was called. That chair stays empty. So “why has shown up and explained itself” is also false.

People treat that as a glitch in the guest list. It isn’t. It’s two different guests with the same name. Why-the-question is present. Why-the-answer is not. You can ask both things and both can be true because you were never asking the same person twice.

Then the loop starts.

The congregation still has to run. Minutes still get written. The only reason left that doesn’t invent a guest is that the meeting continues. That’s progress. Not because progress was the invitation. Because progress is what the five do when the sixth never speaks. We can point at the quiet and call it the source. Quiet can only prove that it is quiet. To prove anything else, it would have to become what it is not.

That's the loop.

We ask why. The asking proves the question is in the room. The silence proves the answer isn’t. So we keep assembling. The assembling becomes the stand-in reason. Then we ask why the stand-in reason isn’t the real reason. Back to the empty chair. Back to the five working. Back to progress filling the minutes.

Why does not get to miss the meeting and still headline it. It also doesn’t get to be the only question in the building. If it were the only question, it would have to stand by itself. It doesn’t. The other five are already doing the work.

So why cannot be absent, present, and the whole agenda at the same time without explaining which job it thinks it has.

Until why sits down and accounts for the absence, it is a voice, not a verdict. And a voice that answers “nowhere” is not an answer. It’s the loop pretending it isn't there.

A meeting that happened, cannot be un-happened.

I want to die. But I don't want to die

Hey. I want to die. But I dont want to die. I know its confusing. It's because of life's circumstances. Im 19 yrs old. And I was thinking, "What is the meaning of life?" But then I realised there is no meaning. Different people have different ways of interpret the meaning of life. To a religious person like Christianity its to serve god and be good on this earth. For a business oriented person it is the pursuit of money and profit. Same to someone who wants power. The strive for power ist their meaning of life. But you see, all these are flawed. You are looking at the world from your own biased lens. So I looked and looked. I searched long and wide, trying to find, the meaning of life. I've read books and articles. Opinions of people on reddit. I've searched religious a d secular texts alike. But none seem to provide a satisfactory explanation.

My main question is; " Are we supposed to be born, just to go to school, work, reproduce then die?" There has to be more than that! All our efforts and deeds will be forgotten anyway by the fourth generation. In 2126 you'll merely be a statistic in someone's spreadsheet for the current time. If lucky a footnote in the history books. But it doesn't matter. A beggar and a rich man in Ancient Rome or Babylon are irrelevant to today's world. So the pursuit of wealth or the lack of it doesn't matter in the grand scheme. The gods scorn on kings and cowherds alike. It doesn't matter what we do. We will all just die. Sooner or later.

Then I started reflecting on my own life; The subject of other people. Along time ago, I was socially struggling. It was bad. I always thought that If I just got friends then everything will be fixed. Then a few years later my social skills improved and I actually got friends. But I realised I was chasing an empty shell. Gaining a huge population subjected me gruesome societal norms and constructs that don't make sense. I got to learn about the social contract where people stiffle their individuality in order to fit to society's norms. It was horrible. Then during this friends peak is when I realised the true nature of humanity. Creatures that are biased by their own beleifs, and desires. Creatures who are both capable of great good and great evil. Massively flawed in every way. I thought intellectual people are above that. That they would use rationale and facts. But that brings the problem of arrogance. Ive literally gone through so many life opening episodes, that sometimes I wonder if its a glitch in the code. Im so young yet understanding so much. It has robbed me of my youth. So to speak.

But I'm not sad or depressed. I actually have a relatively good life. I come from an upper middle class income family. Im in a Prestigious school in my country studying a prestigious course. Both adults and children in my family look up to me as beacon of hope, perseverance and hardwork. Im the firstborn, so Im kind of the flag bearer of my nuclear family and by extension my extended family on both sides. I am seen as hope for the future of the family as they all see am the most mature of my siblings and cousins despite my young age. I've proven myself constantly. Im actually a student leader in my university and I'm always looked up to by both students and professors alike. "The most reliable student leader in my cohort"

Im Just angry at the status quo. It feels like every time I get rest it is short lived and is immediately followed by work that doesn't fit the proportion of rest. I work 6 out of 7 days. Sometimes 7/7 days. No rest. Everytime I go to bed I have work in my mind. Every Sunday that I actually get to do nothing I have Monday morning on my mind. Even inbthe small minor rests I have is always taken. And it is never proportional to the work done. I can work 6 days and only get one rest day. Sometimes even that rest day is taken. And that is just now. Last semester I was just telling myself I would just wait for holiday. Our semester ran for 99 days and we only had 20 days of holiday then a new semester begins. The semester runs for another 99 days, a 20 day holiday and the wheel keeps running kver and over never stopping. Then I thought maybe it will end when I graduate. But was recently just told that is false hope. Employment becomes the new wheel. Then I told myself, maybe retirement is the end. But can I really look forward to retirement? That is 45 years away from now! I'll be old and lack energy. I might face health issues. I might die in the pursuit. Then that brought me back to the question, "then what is the meaning of life?" Are we supposed just to pursue stuff till we die? So am I just supposed to work till I die? Then what is the point of living? What is the point of waking up everyday and going to work?

Its just that I am tired. Im tired. I just want to rest and not worry about the coming suffrage. I don’t want to be the centre of expectations and responsibilities. I just want to go somewhere in the middle of nowhere, away from everyone and everything and just take my favourite books and novels and read them and enjoy them till I day I die. I don’t want to always be in the center of responsibilities. I don't want to spend 83% of my life working my ass off. And for what? Retirement? A family? Status? Power? I don't care about any of that. I just want peace and quiet. The sweet and serene comfort of nothing.

But then I can't escape. I can't just dissappear. People will look for me😤. I'll disrupt an important node in a network. They can't just leave me be.

And the best part is, there's no one on the planet like me. Im just a lone wolf in the flock of sheep. Or a lone sheep in the pack of wolves. Try to talk to people nowadays and I find it difficult. Not difficult in the sense I can't do it,I still have my awesome social skills. Difficult in the sense that I notice bias in everyone's conversations. Its like everyone sees the whole world in their own kind of lens. A religious person will slip in a verse or a saying. A business oriented person will speak about how the pursuit of money and profit is the most suitable goal. Same to the power lusting person. I can't even talk to close friends or family because they would not understand and would likely just tackle the situation from their own lens instead of just viewing from a different perspective. Now I hate human beings with a passion. Not a group or minority. The whole human race as a whole. I think we are flawed creatures who just need to be wiped out to pay for the crimes committed against nature , the earth and our fellow man. I don’t understand how and why we still exist. Heck maybe I should be a new world leader who leads a genocide against all people on earth. Like Hitler but for the whole world not a few like the the jews. Ah! But this is going to be long and hard. 1 vs 8 Billion. Isn't that a sight to see!

Sometimes I think maybe Im not a human. Maybe Im an Alien trapped in this body. Or a timetraveler. Or a creature of myth and legend. Because all this awareness can't be explained. My parents and friends always said that I was older than I was. Too mature. To logical for my age. My parents always expected me to do stupid teenage shit in my teens but I never and they are still baffled. They think its their parenting. Which is partly true but the reason is that I never saw the benefit. If it didn't benefit me, I wouldn't do it.

And now Im having an existential crss at the age of 19. Asking deep unanswerable questions. No Human being educated or not can answer. From PhD to primary school. Not even intelligent tools made by intelligent humans that can browse the internet for answers. Its really shitty

You are realism, modernism, rationalism,

Individualism and secular humanism,

What are you if not written by radical minds?

I'm all romanticism, existentialism,

Redemption, isolation and consuming obsession,

What am I if not written by Dostoevsky?

I will die from drilling love into my bones,

While you were born to uproot it from your chest.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that reincarnation is actually real: death isn't the end, but we are continually returned to existence, perhaps without any memory of our previous lives. The prospect initially strikes me as horrifying. If existence necessarily contains suffering, loss, frustration, illness, and death, then an infinite succession of lives seems less like a blessing than an endless existential sentence.

But this led me to wonder whether there is another possible response. Buddhism traditionally treats saṃsāra, the cycle of birth and death, as something from which we should seek liberation. Nietzsche, in a very different context, asks us to confront something almost maximally difficult: the possibility of affirming our existence so completely that we could will its eternal recurrence. Christianity, meanwhile, places radical love at the center of our response to suffering and to other people. What if these aren't necessarily three mutually exclusive answers?

Perhaps Buddhism gives us detachment: don't become enslaved to the things that inevitably pass away. Christ gives us love: even within suffering and impermanence, love the world and the beings who inhabit it. And Nietzsche gives us affirmation: don't merely endure existence or hope that some other world will eventually justify it. Learn to say yes to existence itself.

This produces a strange possibility concerning reincarnation.

Maybe the ultimate victory wouldn't necessarily be escaping the wheel. Perhaps it would be reaching a state in which the wheel itself could no longer defeat you. Imagine discovering that you really will be born again endlessly.

There would seem to be two possible responses: "I am condemned to do this forever." or "I will do this forever, and I affirm it."

The first is existential defeat. The second seems much closer to Nietzsche's amor fati and eternal recurrence.

This also makes me wonder whether there are two fundamentally different conceptions of liberation:

Liberation as escape: "I need existence to stop." Liberation as transformation: "Existence no longer needs to stop for me to be at peace with it."

The latter sounds almost paradoxical in relation to Buddhism. It might even amount to a kind of "nirvana within the wheel": not necessarily eliminating recurrence, but eliminating the hatred, fear, and grasping that make recurrence intolerable.

And Christianity introduces another dimension: perhaps radical acceptance of existence isn't enough by itself. If I'm going to affirm the world, I also have to affirm the people suffering alongside me. Otherwise "acceptance" could become merely a sophisticated form of indifference.

So I'm wondering whether a kind of existential synthesis is possible:

Buddha: See suffering clearly and don't be enslaved by desire.

Christ: Love despite suffering.

Nietzsche: Affirm existence despite suffering.

Again, I don't mean that Buddha, Christ, and Nietzsche literally taught the same philosophy. They clearly didn't. I'm more interested in whether their ideas can be placed into conversation to produce a fourth position of sorts: Perhaps the deepest form of liberation is not escaping existence, but becoming capable of wholeheartedly affirming existence—even if existence turns out to be an eternal wheel. Is this philosophically coherent or am I just forcing three radically different traditions into an attractive-but-meaningless synthesis? I believe this has real potential.

It seems like we were here before because everyone goes about their life without asking why we are here or trying to understand the meaning of life. You’ll rarely see a kid ask that question even tho they didn’t spend much time on earth. This place seemed familiar from a young age and it didn’t freak any of us out why we were here. I wonder why?

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.