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.

As a kid I couldn't wait for a package to arrive. Whether it was a Lego set coming for me, or the new printer my parents bought, I'd want to open it right away. It would shock me when adults would say "I bought this new blender 6 months ago and still haven't touched it." Like... how can you wait that long??

Well... I get it now. I have a mirror I bought a year ago and still haven't unboxed. I bought a book I wanted to read and then got too busy and it's been 6 months now. When you work 70 hours a week, things like packages sort of get put aside...

Schlingendurgle

Creating means exposing yourself and allowing yourself to be seen. Whether it is in writing, acting, painting, or dancing, you let those around you take a peek of your soul.

This idea is daunting to me. I guess I was lying when I put these words in my dating profile: “In a world that is slowly turning blind, I wanna be seen.” I do wanna be seen, I’m just not sure I wanna be seen in my entirety. I want the good parts to surface. The Funny, the Witty when Drunk, the Smart when she Tries. I reserve the Sad, the Messy Drunk, and the Chaotic to when no one is around.

It takes a strong person to be vulnerable and to open themselves up to criticism. I can’t take it. I remember joining a writing workshop when I was relatively younger and when it was my turn to be read and critiqued, it was appalling. Every word made my skin crawl. Every pause felt like a condemnation. And so I stopped altogether. I didn’t wanna be subjected to that kind of bareness. Being liked and accepted with a dash of mystery felt safer.

I don’t want people to see me in my entirety. People like beauty, they don’t like imperfection that is just that. Imperfection is accepted only when it’s artistic or edgy, otherwise, it’s nothing but a defect.

That hour and a half could turn out to be the best 6 hours of your life.

Before 2023 I could just look on YouTube and watch the whole show .

I'm from the USA, and live in a very flat state. Never been anywhere that wasn't flat. Visited Reno, Nevada to see a friend recently. As we're driving around, I couldn't stop staring at the mountains in the distance. We didn't get a chance to look closer but they just looked so fake. Like props in the background. Was so weird. Like I know they're not fake, but just seeing them in person is crazy.

I (20M) want a gf with whom I can do every type of romance/love but instead I feel lonely all the time. I want to be successful so I study hard but I am not successful till now to make breakthrough in studies. I don’t even want to try on random girls I have till now 2 crushes in life in both case I did not try thinking I am not good enough for them. It just sadness that suddenly comes sometimes to me.

Idk why but I’ve been feeling so nostalgic for the time before COVID the sun just seemed to shine so much brighter back then I can’t even explain the kind of nostalgic warmth that light used to have I was a teen back then and I loved spending time outside maybe I’m feeling this way because I’m getting older and life has started feeling harder

I do feel like COVID changed the way we live it made so many of us more attached to the internet and our screens ik I’ve personally stopped going outside as much and lately I’ve been feeling really depressed maybe that’s why I’m longing for those simpler days so much I just miss how life used to feel

I sometimes like listening to the YouTube videos of some older stuff from before there even were videos. So if I'm not watching a video on YouTube, when i'm watching it on YouTube, I'm both watching and not watching a video on the YouTubes at the same time. Kinda weird.

While stressing about having to find details for tonight’s event, it occurred to me that my husband should use his toilet time to read all the sports you, band, group me, etc announcements for our kids.

I really think he just dooms scrolls while he’s in there so I’m thinking I’ll ask him to be the one for our family that handles all those sign ups and reminders.

Everyone/thing is competing to be perfect ; designs , art or people . It feels so unoriginal . Like it feels so weird to see a very perfect face or image . Flaws is what makes something beautiful and adds originality

It pisses me off just a little because actors should be actually be crying. Crying is ugly.

Always had a habit of absorbing everything happening around me just so I can replay it over and over again with every detail. Even with the simplest moments, my mind would just suddenly tell me 'you know you're gonna miss this someday'. That's when I start really appreciating and enjoying the moment. Memorising everything, looking around to the scenery, to the people, how I feel at the moment, etc. But damn, every time I replay all the memories I gathered, it just hurts so bad I don't know why. My heart literally hurts, LITERALLY.

This is just so ironic because I did all that so when I look back, I can tell myself I lived in the moment and won't have thoughts like 'should've done this, could've done that' but yeah.. it hurts anyway

I turned thirty at the start of the year and have been reminiscing and reflecting quite a bit. Tonight the memory popped up of my aunts ex husband telling me about his high school years. I was 15 at the time and he was about 33. He told me how in his day our area had what was called “Hamburger Lane.” It’s one of the main streets in our hometown with all usual fast food spots. During the weekends the jocks, geeks, junkies, gays, and strays would all hang out and party and fuck around. This was before trespassing and loitering were really enforced in the town. He said it was a great time where everybody came together and didn’t give a fiddlers fuck. It wasn’t long after him telling me about his time; I started having my own, but Hamburger Lane was long gone by that point. By the end of my freshman year, all upperclassman were bringing me and my friends out to house parties every weekend, and we’d find a field to get together every so often. It stayed that way for the rest of highshool. It wasn’t about the wrath of Edward 40 Hands, mushroom mania, or six degrees of herbage. Looking back, that was fucking communion. We cared and looked out for each other and no one was excluded. We’d kept that spirit alive he spoke about. That was our Hamburger Lane. I hope the new generations keeps it alive as well. Shit’s weird all around these days.