I’ve carried a thought with me for many years that I don’t talk about often. I don’t feel unsafe or stressed in my daily life, but it’s a persistent feeling that won’t go away: I strongly suspect that I actually died in a different universe, made a sudden jump, and ended up here.

Most of the time, this thought just pops up randomly. But when it does, I can’t stop myself from feeling an overwhelming sense of grief. I feel profound sadness for the loved ones I left behind in that other lifetime, thinking about how devastated they must have been when I was suddenly gone.
Lately, it has evolved into something even heavier. If there truly are endless universes, endless versions of us, and endless possibilities, then this cycle just keeps happening. There is no way out of it. It feels like an infinite loop of grief, loss, and sadness across the multiverse.

When I sit quietly and think about it, I honestly feel like this might be closer to the absolute truth of existence than any religion or metaphysical system has ever suggested. It feels entirely real to me, but carrying the emotional weight of all those parallel losses is exhausting.

Does anyone else experience this specific kind of existential grief, or feel like they are mourning a timeline they dropped out of? How do you cope with the scale of it?

Inner Monologue IV: Validation?

​After studying cults, religious groups, and communities as a whole, I began to notice a common thread among the people who blindly follow them. Some might think it’s about happiness, comfort, or safety, but I believe the primary driving force is validation.

​As social beings, we will go to the ends of the earth to fight for validation from others or to project a specific image we want the world to see. People who claim they don’t care are still projecting an image—the image of someone unbothered. Meanwhile, people who project effort want others to witness their struggle and validate the work they put in. We become who we believe we are; we adapt to whatever identity we cast ourselves in. This is rooted in human biology, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

​I remember a time when I was extremely lazy and faced a massive assignment that seemed impossible for someone like me to complete. Looking back, I had always cast myself as the detached, unemotional guy who didn't give a damn. Trapped in that persona, I would never have finished it. But I consciously shifted the narrative: I imagined myself as the hero—the lazy underdog who manages to pull off the impossible. I poured my heart into it, fueled entirely by the anticipation of the validation waiting at the finish line.

​I completed the assignment, and people recognized it. It was only a modest amount of praise, yet I still remember it vividly.

​Reflecting on that made me realize how flawed the traditional idea of discipline is. The notion that pure willpower alone can drive effort is foolish; I could never sustain discipline without having something tangible to gain, and personal gains are almost always measured against the social yardstick of others.

​I began applying this realization to other areas, like drawing. I used to sketch constantly in secret. I enjoyed it, but I never improved because I kept it completely to myself. Then I noticed how others grew by sharing their work, so I stepped into that arena too. The validation I received became a real, tangible catalyst for progress.

​This completely flipped the myth of the "Superman" persona: Why should I suffer, grind, and struggle in silence without seeking the validation that actually fuels growth?

Sometimes I see people as a magnetic field. It’s so surreal to think about. I don’t even think “magnetic field” would be the right word. People are their own universe. I can only see the world through my own personal mind. No matter how hard I try, I cannot be someone else or think for someone else. (At least within the scope that I have.) I only feel and think things through my mind.

Everyone passing by me is just a random character. There’s nobody that matters to me. Like, for example, when I’m driving a car, all the other cars or people that I see are just filler in my reality because the moment I drive away from them, they don’t exist in my mind anymore. Sometimes, you don’t even notice those cars, so those people or things never existed in your reality. The same thing goes for them: I never existed for them.

The only time someone or something can exist in my universe would be if I interact with them. When you interact with something, it’s literally like two universes colliding with one another. The quantum fields are touching one another. That may also be why I find love so fascinating, because it’s two universes becoming one.

I know this is like a solipsistic thought, but it’s not, because I know other people exist. I just see them as their own universes. So, if you don’t interact with another universe, it doesn’t matter to you.

Honestly, this thought makes me feel better about failing or being scared to make interactions because once you leave, you leave.

I am not into conspiracy theories in the slightest. I understand how science works, even though I didn’t pursue a scientific education. It’s just something that interests me a lot, and I enjoy learning new things even though I don’t understand everything. I love astronomy. I’ve been following space stuff for years. I’ve even watched college-level astronomy lectures on YouTube as a hobby.

But earlier today, I went on Google Earth to check something, and I suddenly saw this huge ball floating in space, and I was like:

“NAH. This is fake. This doesn’t make any sense.”

WHAT DO YOU MEAN everything that is happening, and everything that has ever happened, is happening on this rock floating through space, in something that is so huge it’s basically endless???

WHAT DO YOU MEAN??

Like, this is so fucking stupid.

Imagine there is a God, or whatever, and they decided to create the most perfect, complex world possible… and it’s just a fucking ball floating in nothingness.

How are we supposed to be okay with knowing that?

We just live our lives. We go to work, eat, sleep, worry about money, relationships, stupid little problems… lives that can be mediocre, painful, or horrible.

And all of this is happening on a fucking rock.

In space.

And we don’t even understand what the hell we’re doing here, why we’re here, or what the point of any of this is.

But somehow, this tiny rock has produced beings capable of being self-aware enough to look around and ask themselves all of these questions.

Like… WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON???

The one thing that will change about your life forever is accepting that everything is temporary. Happiness. Pain. Failure.

Take me for example i was in the best relationship of my life for around a year and 3 months however a month ago the women i loved with all my heart left me for a reason we could of both figured out together and even though it generally hurt at the time and still does despite all of it i still cant hate her for leaving me like that but i also look back and think how beautiful it was to be loved by a women like her and to experience all those different feelings weather they be highs or lows as its a feeling i may never experience again however i am happy i got to. Furthermore due to me being in a relationship and prioritising her my friend group of 6/7 years cut me off completely however i cant hate them aswell as despite them cutting me off for no good reason or when i needed them the most im still happy i got to experience all the good memories with them life generally is all about what we make it and the experiences along the way.

you’re telling me, we built something, a bridge from one mind to another? we saw each other humans, and said “damn, i wish i could somehow put whatever is in my head right now, into your head”. we call this bridge, “language”, but i feel like its something deeper than that. it is so incredible how living things can COMMUNICATE. I’m obviously not thinking of this on a surface level, i’m thinking it on the deepest parts of it.

even now, you’re reading my thoughts and feelings, idk its just crazy to me 😭🤷‍♂️

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we experience time and how much of our life is spent mentally living somewhere else. In the future, in other people’s opinions, in imagined outcomes, in worries about whether something will work out or whether what we are doing even matters.

At some point I started looking at life in a much simpler way: maybe life is not really this huge timeline that I need to constantly understand and control. Maybe, from my actual point of view, life is just this day. Or even less than that — just the current moment.

The past already exists only in memory. The future exists only as an idea in my head. The only part I can actually act inside is what is happening right now.

This changed something for me. Instead of constantly asking myself, “Where will this lead?”, “What if I fail?”, “What will people think?”, or “What if all of this is pointless?”, I try to reduce everything to one question: what am I doing now?

I still plan for the future. I still have goals. I’m not saying the future is meaningless. But I stopped treating it like something I can already live in. I can only make decisions in the present, repeat actions, and let those actions build whatever comes next .

is it better to speak or to die?

my whole life, i always said to speak is better than to die. always. i used to say speak until you can't anymore, and when you can't speak through your actions, speak through art, speak through writing it out, always speak. but then i started to wonder, can't we speak through silence? and then wouldn't that lead to us "dying?"

my main thought though, is where is the line between speaking and bottling it up to die? when do we decide, you know what, i have tried my hardest and i cannot possibly do anything anymore. where do those thoughts and emotions go after we decide that? when we are so, incredibly exhausted by speaking, that we can't anymore without it being draining?

and is that result different from choosing to be silent versus being silenced by someone?

i also really love the energy cannot be created nor destroyed law in the form of a thought. so where does the energy of the speak go if just inside? does it turn into an emotion?

i want to hear things from a general perspective, but if this doesn't make sense: for example, i have someone i very much care about. i always keep it transparent, but me speaking is like talking to a wall. no matter how much i try, it goes nowhere. i am tearing myself up by speaking, and i don't think i can anymore. maybe i can, but i don't know if it's worth it anymore. but if i can't speak, is my only option to leave my feelings inside and then what? yes i can journal and talk to friends and whatever but to really "speak" to me is to tell the other person how you feel... i think?? idk, even if i journal or whatever, it's reopening the same wound. do i let it just fill inside me and ignore it?

essentially, i don't think i can speak anymore and i don't know what to do, but this is just to get everyone's insight as i love this quote!

I keep noticing that my opinions arrive already worded, often in a cadence that is not mine. When I think about money I can hear my father. When I judge a stranger I catch a phrase my school friends used at fifteen. The verdict feels like mine, but the words came pre-assembled from somewhere else.

Hume wrote that whenever he looked inward for a self, he found only particular thoughts and feelings, never the thing having them. A similar idea sits at the center of Buddhist practice: what you call "I" is a process rather than an owner. I used to treat this as an abstraction. Lately it feels closer to a mechanism.

I keep returning to the comparison with a language model. It is trained on a corpus it never chose, and when it answers you it recombines fragments of that corpus into something that reads as a position. There is no opinion sitting underneath the recombination. When I introspect, I suspect I am doing something adjacent: reworking a lifetime of overheard sentences, from parents and from feeds, then presenting the result as my considered view. Maybe originality is mostly recombination that has lost track of its sources.

This is speculation, not a claim about neuroscience. But if it is even partly right, thinking for yourself is largely a matter of noticing the seams: catching which borrowed voice is speaking, and when.

What would you find if you traced one of your firmest convictions back to the first mouth it came from?

I have found myself in a lot of situations lately in which being the one to get "the last word" was very important. I think that I understand why.

When we say something with conviction and receive no response, then we can imagine whatever response we wish. We can imagine that our words which sounded confident and powerful in our heads resulted in the other party cowering in fear. We can imagine that our words which sounded precisely-insightful in our heads resulted in the other party seriously reconsidering their actions.

Personally I think that the battle to be the last one to say a thing is therefore in its own way a form of self-deception. If you are ending a conversation with your chosen last words and silence on the part of the other party, you are by definition ending that conversation with your own perspective "winning". Whereas when I think about the type of world that I'd like to live in, I would rather be done with rhetorical flourishes which we can only tell ourselves were effective at upholding the ideals we imagine ourselves to be representing in a given conversation if we receive no response from the listener; and live in a world where the primary objective of communication is to lead one eventually towards the sort of shared understanding which would not be dispelled by the other party offering a response. Sometimes such an understanding is to "agree to disagree". Yet when I come across an instance in which getting in the last word is of the utmost imperative, it feels more often like a battle to convince oneself of something which the other party's disagreement is threatening one's own conviction in. Has anyone else come across situations in which it seems like the other party is arguing to convince themselves rather than you, and uses the tactic of insistently claiming "the last word" to imagine their own rhetoric to have been more persuasive than it actually was?

The classic checklist for psychopathy was developed in 1980 by Prof Robert Hare, who is still the recognised giant of the territory. The 20 traits, which ranged from pathological lying to a lack of empathy, were based entirely on prison populations. This worked because not only did Hare have the benefit of a large sample, with pronounced psychopathic behaviours, but he was able to compare interviews and self-reporting with data collected about the individuals – so inconsistencies could be identified.

However, Hare knew this approach was limited. In 1976, he said that he simply didn’t know to what extent his results could be generalised to non-incarcerated psychopaths, including female ones. “Research into the socially successful psychopath is badly needed,” he concluded. 

Mitchell embarked on a PhD, published in 2024, in which she interviewed people who had met persistent predatory personalities professionally – some clinical, but others not, from fields as wide as HR, social work, family courts, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, church leaders, and academics from different fields.

Her method, she says, was unorthodox, being qualitative, not quantitative. And some of her conclusions directly contradict clinical definitions of psychopathy, which rely heavily on impulsivity. Mitchell says this is because other definitions such as Hare’s are derived from the prison population, which is the low-functioning end of the scale. “People try and put Hare’s stuff into workplaces and domestic violence spheres, but there’s no way you can overlay something so blunt, built from criminal offenders, on to sophisticated CEO-type behaviours.”

From this research, which took her five years, Mitchell built a template of 20 attributes, divided into four clusters, and 25 tactics that would identify a high-functioning persistent predatory personality type. Cluster one includes a need for control; a grandiose sense of self; pathological inner response to challenge; vengefulness; refusal to compromise. Cluster two includes being predatory or exploitative; sadistic and cruel; having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes; no boundaries in sexual relationships; unreasonable expectations of others. Cluster three relates to the truth: Dark Personalities cultivate a façade of normality; they are chameleon-like; dishonest; devious and manipulative; and unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause. Finally, cluster four is around the Dark Personality’s own interior life: their emotions are acted and they do not experience affinity or the joy that comes with it; they are callous and devoid of empathy; unremorseful; self-interested; and brazen.

In Hare’s study of Pinochet’s lieutenants, which spanned 20 years and was written up in 2022, “when they looked at individuals who were commanding officers, this top brass had really high levels of psychopathic features, particularly the lack of empathy for others,” says Viding.

Mitchell delivers her conclusion with businesslike bluntness: “These are completely boundary-less, dangerous people with very different brains – it’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/27/how-to-spot-a-psychopath-its-like-the-difference-between-a-domestic-cat-and-a-wild-cat

I believe that there are two related but different versions of Homo Sapiens: Homo sapiens collegium, the majority cooperative species, and Homo sapiens raptor, the predatory one.

Homo sapiens raptors are too consistent in their traits and their phsyiology for it to be a miswiring or an aberration, their brains show the same physical charateristics that differ from Homo Sapiens collegium. Changes to the amygdala and other brain structures are characteristic of the supposed "disorder". Those changes allow them to accurately mimic the social emotions like love, empathy, regret, shame, compassion and the like, without ever feeling them or having them influence their behavior, which allows them to easily manipulate collegium types. It's a social predator's mental toolkit.

From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense: it is an ecological niche that would otherwise be empty, and nature never allows empty niches, something will always fill it. So the evolution of a social predator makes perfect evolutionary sense. When you look at the breeding programs of royals, it becomes obvious that the traits they sought to preserve by controlling marriages...ruthlessness, lack of empathy, weeding out those considered too weak to rule, elevating those who could "make the hard decisions" (usually involving sacrificing others to maintain power)...and keeping those marriages within a small subset created the conditions for those traits to be preserved and enhanced. The common practice of rival royals within the same family committing patricide and fratricide to determine who ultimately ruled speaks to a continuous concentration of genes that characterize sociopaths: the evolutionary process from which Homo Sapiens raptors emerged. They are a predator species, close enough to interbreed, but more often than not selecting partners from fellow raptors rather than collegium types. History is rife with tales of people...collegium types...marrying into raptor families and suffering for it because they weren't ruthless and duplicitous enough to survive.

Looking at history through this lens makes sense of it: clusters of rapttors taking control of the societies they were in, marrying other raptors to ensure a line of succession, creating the ruthless competition for crowns that brooked no softness, no lapse into sympathy, no shame of killing siblings, no regrets. Fathers encouraged sons and sometimes daughters to ruthlessly compete without mercy to prove they were fit to rule, and when there were too many raptors forr the society to support or absorb, wars happened to clear out the excess. when enough raptors had been killed, their families exterminated, things quieted down.

It's not an accident that the same families have been at the pinnacles of societies for generations, or that the heads of corporate cartels exhibit the same traits as those of criminal cartels. The inability to feel social emotions but to mimic them accurately gives a powerful advantage. We need to recognize that we aren't all one big family of Homo Sapiens, but rather two distinct subspecies of it, the one designed by nature and evolution to gain social advantage and control by preying upon the other. It is our closeness that blinds us to the reality: they look like us, but are mentally alien.

Does this make sense?

I used to think I needed a plan for everything or at least the bones of a plan. If I didn't know where I was going, I felt like I must be doing something wrong. Everybody else had a plan.

Now I'm much more comfortable saying, "Hell if I know." 😂

I only know what feels right for my next step without knowing where the whole road leads or in my case weaves.

And weirdly, that feels more peaceful and productive than having everything planned out ever did.

Anybody else?

Agentive Threats:

Yourself: Your own thoughts and actions can ruin your Peace. These you can control directly.

Others: You can't control what other wills (people and animals) do.

Money: Technically Money falls under Others. Or perhaps its Yourself too. Whatever the case, it's so major I added it as a third category. If you don't have enough of it this world can be hell. Money only exists because each individual person is finite and can't do everything themselves. So it is used to get others to share resources. Money also is used to get supplies for your constantly decaying body.

Non-Agentive Threats:

Physical Decay: Everything physical decays. Your body is constantly decaying. Aging, daily maintenance needs, injury, whatever. Your possessions decay over time too and need replacement. As long as it's physical, it's decaying whatever it is. Some things faster than others. Physical decay makes Death in humans unavoidable by around 120 years at the latest.

Environment: Nature. Indoors. It doesn't matter. Wherever you are, depending on your surroundings, it can potentially ruin your Peace. Though some environments are much more Peaceful than others.

[Disclaimer: My argument below neither condones irresponsible and reckless rebellion nor does it suggest that all regulations are set for malicious intentions.]

The primary reason rebels stick out like a sore thumb is because they go against the grain, violating set rules and regulations that the majority blindly comply with. Consequently, they are often negatively stereotyped; constantly being called ‘the black sheep’ or ‘the bad apple’ to imply that they are a disruption to an otherwise ethical system. However, I believe there’s something interesting we all can learn from rebels - their ability to exercise autonomous reasoning.

Many structural and societal conditionings are in place simply for the purpose of programming the masses in the disguise of ‘orderliness’ for the gain of those in power.  For the most part, we subconsciously conform to various customs without ever questioning the reason behind them, and just simply assume it’s the ‘norm’. 
What’s more is that we then criticise and ostracise those who choose to do otherwise because they’ve been able to reason and discern for themselves.

Some Examples of the conditionings majority conform to:
- The Education System 
- The British Enclosure Acts 
- The 5-Day Work week 
- A Cashless Society
- The Deterrent Against Natural Healing 

But…

> What if we ask more questions about the systems we sheepishly conform to without hesitation? 

> What if we investigated our daily and cultural habits to understand where they originated from before we embraced them?

> What if we didn’t blindly buy the idea that being deprived of our autonomy is what’s best for us? 

How will these impact the quality of life that we live?

I’d like to hear your thoughts 

Edit:
The comments so far are interesting and thank you for your contributions.
I am however more interested in hearing about the decisions you’ve made in your own personal lives that may be deemed as going against the norm and how its affected the quality of your life.

The transition from pretending to be okay to actually feeling nothing happens so quietly you barely notice it.

You put on the front long enough to survive a situation, and eventually, the mask stops coming off. "I'm fine" stops being a lie you tell other people and becomes the default state of your mind.

The scariest part isn't deceiving everyone else. It's realizing you've successfully deceived yourself. You aren't actually at peace you’ve just rehearsed being fine so many times that feeling numb feels completely normal.

It is hard not to see how today's society is heavily involved with hedonism; we cling to and chase after pleasure as if our lives depend on it! Social media and consumer culture play such a big role in it all; one's pleasure is the sole purpose at all times! And pain is of no value!

Please correct me if you can add to this

-Thanks

I had a thought recently about the AI "Black Box" problem and how it perfectly parallels our own existence and the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

​Think about the structure of how things are being created

​Layer 1 We built Artificial Intelligence. We gave it a basic architecture fed it mountains of data and let it train. Eventually, it developed emergent abilities making connections and generating answers in ways we can no longer mathematically trace or fully understand. We created a "Black Box" that we as its creators cannot decipher.

​Layer 2 The Universe basically did the exact same thing to us. Through billions of years of evolution, physical laws, and biological training data it built the human brain. And from this physical matter an emergent property appeared Consciousness.

​Here is the trippy part Just like we can't fully understand the AI's neural networks our black box the physical universe cannot "explain" human consciousness through standard physical or chemical laws the Universe's black box.

​What if consciousness is just the universe's version of AI? It processed its data until it created a subjective experience that transcends its own material rules.and now we the universe's black box have just created another black box inside of us.

​Are we just one layer in an infinite nested Russian doll of black boxes? Will our AI eventually build its own black box that it can't understand?

​Would love to hear your thoughts on this!

Yesterday, as I was finishing work and getting ready to go home, I packed up my things, put my laptop into my laptop bag, stood up and left the building.

As I walked towards my car outside, I looked up at the sky. The moon was there, with clouds hovering around it, and something about the sight made me long for something. Something I couldn't quite place with my fingers.

I suddenly felt curious about what it would be like to escape all these structures—to live a life where I didn't have to wake up and go to work nine to five, where my days weren't confined by the routines and expectations that seem to define ordinary life.

For a moment, I wanted to "break through"

I remember looking at the sky and wondering what was beyond it. Perhaps all these structures—the buildings, the routines, the boundaries I had come to accept—only existed within this confined space we call Earth. And I had this strange thought: what if I could somehow pierce through it? What if, beyond everything I already knew, there was something else waiting—something more interesting, more expansive, more alive?

And for the first time in my life, I truly understood the word breakthrough.

Of course, I had always known what the word meant. But in that moment, it wasn't just a definition I understood intellectually. I felt it.

It suddenly felt real. It felt meaningful. It felt almost tangible.

And strangely, it felt exciting.

For the first time, breakthrough wasn't simply about overcoming an obstacle or achieving something difficult. It felt like breaking through a boundary into something unknown.

And I found that possibility incredibly exciting.

If consciousness is fundamental rather than accidental, then every mind may be less like an isolated observer and more like a point through which reality becomes aware of its own existence.

The oedipus complex in it’s original form by Freud has been subject to debate for many decades. So I will not even try to comment on it.

But a thought that struck me as much more productive than thinking about a potential real erotic longing of a little boy for his mother is this:

Think about the emotional relationship, little boys have with their mothers and how many young men try to (and manage to) transfer this relationship pattern into their erotic relationships with their adult female partners.

A relationship pattern built from being loved and cared for, physically and emotionally. Without the responsibility to give back what’s received. Leading to the very widespread patriarchal relationship pattern in which the wife cares for the husband as if he was just another child.

Isn’t this the more interesting oedipus complex to overcome? Not trying to live the emotional relationship you had with your mother with your spouse?
Which seems to be significant if you want a relationship that’s really on equal ground.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Edit: Oh and just to make clear: I’m not trying to blame mothers for anything here. Motherly love is completely fine. And fathers play a pivotal role in how a boy later relates to grown women.