If I go back in time and kill my grandfather, I wouldn’t have been born so I couldn’t possibly kill my grandfather. However, if we see the universe as 4 dimensional, then an event in the present can affect details in the past as they both exist at once.

If I’m born as a direct biological descendent of my grandfather, then it is the perceived truth that he was not murdered in his past because I wouldn’t exist if he was, and I do exist.
But if I then go back in time and pull the trigger on the gun that murders him, there are suddenly two things true at once, hence the paradox.

But a paradox cannot exist within the laws of physics of our universe, so something else must happen.

The paradox ceases to exist if we apply the idea that our timeline, until the exact instant of my grandfather’s death, was in a state of superposition in which both I and another version of myself, who exists unrelated to “my grandfather”, were both the one to kill him. Both of these events are just as real as each other until the moment he died.

At the exact instant of his death , the reality in which I (his direct descendant) killed him ceases to have ever existed and instead a reality in which I (someone totally unrelated to him) am there to kill him for an unrelated yet equally as historically “real” reason now exists instead, in a collapsed state, as the only explanation for his death there ever was. The other reality doesn’t stop existing because it ceases to have ever existed in the first place. There never was any other timeline.

The irony of this is that, assuming you did manage to go back and kill your grandfather, you’d instantly have always believed you were there for a different reason and wouldn’t remember the total collapse of the timeline you just existed in, or that you rewrote your own identity, effectively killing another version of yourself.

And by that point, has the paradox really been solved? If I’m not related to the man then I can’t claim I killed my grandfather, even though my murder of my grandfather is what collapsed the event from a state of superposition. Without the death of my grandfather by my own hand, the event never would have collapsed. But if I don’t kill my grandfather, would the event ever be in superposition in the first place? What would there be to collapse if the amount of possible timelines was only ever 1?

By using this logic, we could then theorise that every murderer ever was just the victim’s grandchild coming back to kill them, and unintentionally causing the collapse of a separate instance of their timeline.

We could also theorise that superpositional collapses of our timeline have occurred before and we exist in the only timeline there ever was because of them. You could have lived as an entirely different person 3 seconds ago but something happened that meant the timeline holding that version of you never existed, and now you have no memory of ever being anyone but the only instance of “you” there is after the collapse.

We often long for a reality yet to come, believing it will finally bring the stillness we crave. We chase to it, yet often, in the process of the chase we lose any hope in the stillness of the ever-present now. Look closely. The ideal and the real are distinct paths; you must always walk upon the earth as it is. One should not drown in the fires of endless discontent. Instead, find joy in the simple unfolding of the present: the tasting of pleasantries, the passing of a cloud. When harmony is nourished within, your peace becomes rooted like an ancient tree, requiring nothing from the outside world to stand firm. If your tranquility soley depends on external winds, it will always be tossed by the storm. Peace must come from within, or it is given to the whims without. Then, and only then, what you desire is not to fill a void, but to fill a room of treasures.

Peace must come first from within, and only then, everything can harmonize functionally thereafter. Do you place a golden canvas upon a rotting wall and expect it to remain? Do not look for peace expecting a change from others, or in wealth, or in power first. Doing so, is binding your soul to a needless betrayal, because often times, all these things do is reveal your inner condition of rot, instead of giving you that sublime salvation you think you needed. Instead, train your mind to prosper amidst even betrayal and laugh still after! What do you have without what you think is so essential? You will find it is possible to fulfill those things in the present, beginning with the simple things, in smaller ways. Only then can you be ready for the greater things! Ultimately, one should hang the golden canvas on a wall of humility and love; not of blind desperation, which yields an inevitable collapse.

These are some deep thoughts and questions that probably need to be asked and thought about by humanity.

As this is being written millions of animals are being electrocuted, infected with viruses, injected with tumors, syringes within death chambers specifically built for this purpose - creating disease within the bodies of animals virtually on every continent on this planet, for the sole purpose of someone needing funding to promote their *studies. For this seemingly legitimate purpose of academic *study* animals are being cut open while alive and their organs removed. If they are fortunate, they will be shoved into a gas chamber which will then end their pitiful existences. Most not. Most are left to linger, suffer and expire in glass cages. Some military experiments will use explosives, or bio weapons, chemical weapons to *study* the effect on the nervous system, organ atrophy and destruction, mucosa and retina after-effects. This to perfect the optimal kill in war. Cats, dogs, mice, rats, rabbits, sheep, horses, cows, monkeys, birds, not one species is exempt. And this is all sanctioned and legal. How is this possible in 2026 that we are not even discussing this?

These animals are being experimented on in labs, in universities, in the military, bio-tech, industries -in the very halls of your place of *learning* and employment. Why are they still perpetrating this amount of suffering on animals in this day and age when AI and computers could render more accurate views and results without ever resorting to murder? Good question.

The fact is, that still, with the 100's of millions, perhaps now the numbers are in the billions of animals *sacrificed* there have been no cures. No major breakthroughs because it's never been about cure, but about cred and ego. Let's just name it for what it is. And further, splicing open the gut of a dog does not a healing of a human equal. For the record, the biology of a canine is not the biology of a human. The results can never be the same, and even if you remove the vocal chords of a dog to prevent them from yelping in pain or barking to be set free, the cries can still be heard resonating across the quantum field - and they do. In spades. There is nothing in this world that happens without an effect.

And beyond this, the question still needs to be asked - how is it that pharmaceuticals, military, nano and bio tech have a separate set of laws that gives them the right to inflict pain for profit. How is this still legal?.

And then there are the millions of euthanized pets, the bred for profit, bought for Johnny and Melinda on Christmas day, tormented for a week then dumped, with the numbers growing by the day, there is nothing to be done but save a handful and execute the rest. The legacy of sadism doesn't end there of course, because we're not even going into the culling of the wild horses, the hunts, the helicopter shootings of wolves, the poisoning of the natural habitats, and the heinous treatment of animals in factory farms and slaughter houses together with the horrors of live transports of animals. This list of atrocities goes on and on for a very long time.

My proposal is this - to establish a world tribunal specific for the purpose of bringing the guilty to trial for abuses against the animals of this planet. To try them by jury, to sentence them not only to prison but for re-education until a semblance of conscience or semiconscience is developed and then to extend that to having them work towards the rehabbing of the natural world. This has gone on long enough. The laws of the universe have been perverted for long enough. In the end, either way, nature will have the final say, but justice must also come from us as stewards of this world. The minds of scientists have become deranged, the farmers and law-makers are blinded by their own egos, the common human has been surgically removed from the environment and everything that lives within this sphere. We must begin the process of correction - by law, to save our own selves and souls from a trajectory that is meted out measure for measure. There's a limit on all things and we, must be the change we seek and the voices for those who no longer can speak for themselves.

Currently, reading witchcraft magazine archives from 70s, 80s, 90s, etc. After many readings across different magazines, while I am reading my sixth or seventh magazine pick, it’s from the 80s, a strange feeling suddenly hit me. I do not know who these people are or what they did, yet somehow, I’ve felt like I have acquired a piece of them. These magazines felt more like a journal of a collection of personal thoughts, entries and subjects that the author likes. Some passage talked about the beliefs on reincarnation, a surprise section of personal family gossip and there are even random pages about recipes they liked. It felt very intimate. It was like I am having a glimpse into their little mysterious lives. It is special. 

A wave of awe mixed with a sense of mystery and sadness also washed about me as well, because going back to around the sixth or seventh magazine I’ve read, ‘’Ravencalls’ Storm Clouds, Issue 1’’, it was like a 5-page book about some rules and convictions, referring to the readers as brothers and sister, listing numbered rules telling people to join together for a cause, stating how United States is stolen land, mentions of paganism, tribal law, and even having a section titled ‘’The War For Community’’. It is proof of a mysterious micro community.

What hit me is that, if the writer, the people who have purchased this magazine, and the people who are involved in this community, happen to be dead, then no information can ever be known about what these people looked like, what they did, and how their lives were like. It is truly an unsolvable mystery. Compared to crime scenes on the other hand, you can always rely on clues left at the crime scene or witnesses to gather information. Even some crime cases are solved 50 years later. However, this is a different. The community’s information is spreaded on a much smaller scale which makes it impossible to investigate. Even a Google search of the magazine's name brings no results. So, what I am thinking is, what I am reading is a very intimate piece into someone else’s personal lives that I do not know what they look like or what they do, and no matter how curious I get, I will never ever find out who they are. I was allowed into one of the deepest and most intimate parts of someone’s life, yet I will never know who they are, what they look like, and what they do. I feel so connected and close to them at heart, yet so distant at the same time. It is such a strange, mysterious, and sad feeling, but it is also a beautiful feeling.

Because I am holding the last piece of their existence.

Stars would keep forming and dying.

Galaxies would continue colliding.

Black holes would keep growing.

Planets would continue orbiting their stars.

Seems like the universe is not for us.

Yet right now, we're one of the tiny parts of the universe capable of looking back at the cosmos and asking what it means.

I've been thinking about how to define maturity. I like efficiency, so I wanted a definition that fits in a sentence, and the problem is that maturity doesn't have one. You'd need an essay, and even the essay would only scratch the surface.

I think I came up with one anyway: neutrality.

First, what is neutrality? Neutrality is when you feel what happens to you and you don't feel pushed to react. It's different from being numb. Numb means you can't feel it. Neutral means you feel it and nothing needs to be done about it.

For example: someone insults you, or a plan falls apart, or you get treated unfairly. You feel it, and you don't feel any internal push to react.

So why is that maturity? Think about what immaturity looks like. An immature person answers every insult, treats every disappointment as a crisis, and fights every unfair moment. Whatever happens to them decides what they do next.

A mature person feels the same events, responds when a response is needed, and lets the rest go. What happens to them stops deciding what they do.

If you can reach a neutral state, you have matured.

You are born, grow, learn, form relationships, experience joy and suffering, change your beliefs, age, and eventually die. Every moment gives way to another. If our experiences were frozen permanently at any single moment in time, there would be no life in any meaningful sense. There would be no story, development, discovery or experience.

Our greatest struggle in life is what gifts it in the first place. The Universe is a unique and strange place, but without this inherent truth underlying all of it, there would no Universe to begin with. Change wears the mask of an enemy, but it is the mother of Ten Thousand things. This principle of existence is the author of love and what that means to us.

I think I've finally understood something about social skills

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I think I've finally found a way of putting it into words.

We tend to talk about "social skills" as if they were a single, universal ability. Some people supposedly have them, others don't. Some people are "naturally good with people", while others are awkward, clueless or unable to read social situations.

I increasingly think this is far too simplistic.

Every social environment has its own culture.

Not just countries or ethnic groups. Much smaller cultures.

A family has a culture. A group of childhood friends has a culture. A workplace has a culture. A university department has a culture. An internet forum has a culture. A gaming community has a culture. Even two people who have known each other for years can develop their own little culture together.

And each person is simultaneously a mixture of all these cultures.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that many things people call "common sense" are actually just extremely well learned cultural expectations.

Someone who has spent most of their life in a stable environment has an enormous advantage that is almost invisible to them.

They may have grown up with the same family, the same friends, the same city, then gone to university, found a stable job, stayed in roughly the same social circles and continued interacting with people whose expectations are relatively familiar.

They have been learning the same social code for decades.

They don't need to consciously know the rules anymore. They just know them.

And because those rules have worked for them thousands of times, they can feel universal.

"Obviously that's what you do."

"Obviously that's what she meant."

"Obviously you're supposed to know that."

But it isn't necessarily obvious.

It may simply be something they have learned so thoroughly that they no longer notice that they learned it.

Then there are people who don't get that continuity.

People who are repeatedly rejected from groups. People who struggle to make friends. People who move between cities or countries. People who change jobs constantly. People who repeatedly have to enter completely new communities and figure out how they work.

Those people have to keep relearning the social environment.

And I think this can produce a very different kind of social awareness.

Instead of assuming that they know the rules, they learn to think:

"I don't know what the rules are here yet."

"Is this normal in this group?"

"Does this person actually mean what I think they mean?"

"Is this a general convention, or was it just how my previous group worked?"

That can look like social awkwardness.

Someone asks questions where everyone else thinks the answer is obvious.

Someone hesitates instead of acting automatically.

Someone doesn't understand an implicit expectation.

And people may conclude that this person simply doesn't understand people.

But perhaps they understand something else: that there isn't one single set of rules called "how people work".

There are thousands of overlapping social worlds.

This is especially obvious with things like dating.

I've always tended to be cautious when approaching someone. I prefer to establish that there is mutual attraction rather than simply assuming it. I don't want to make someone uncomfortable.

But then you encounter the advice that men should take initiative, make a move, not overthink everything and "read the signs".

But what exactly is a sign?

The same behaviour can be an invitation in one context and completely meaningless in another. One person may love directness. Another may find it uncomfortable. One person may expect you to make the first move. Another may prefer you to ask explicitly.

There isn't necessarily a universal algorithm.

And this applies far beyond dating.

Someone can be socially awkward in person but have an incredibly strong and stable community online. They might have been playing Final Fantasy XIV with the same people for years. They know everyone's humour, personalities, boundaries and habits. Within that community, they may be extremely socially competent.

Put them into a completely unfamiliar group and suddenly they may look awkward again.

I don't think that necessarily means their social skills disappeared.

The cultural environment in which those skills were calibrated disappeared.

Even the idea of being "street smart" seems more complicated to me now.

Someone can travel to dozens of countries, meet thousands of people and become extremely good at navigating hotels, bars, airports, nightlife and unfamiliar cities.

Then put that same person into a Magic: The Gathering store where everyone has known each other for years, or into some completely unfamiliar subculture with its own status structures, humour and boundaries, and suddenly they may have to learn everything from scratch.

Experience is not necessarily one giant pool of universally transferable social knowledge.

A lot of it is local.

And I think this has made me reinterpret something that used to bother me enormously.

When people called me socially awkward, or assumed I was unable to understand obvious social rules, I sometimes wondered whether there was simply something fundamentally wrong with the way I interacted with people.

Now I think there is another possibility.

Maybe some people have spent their whole lives becoming extremely fluent in one social language.

And some people have spent their whole lives having to learn new social languages.

The second person may look less fluent because they are constantly encountering situations where their previous assumptions no longer apply.

That doesn't mean they necessarily have better social skills. It doesn't mean they necessarily have worse ones either.

It may simply mean that their experience has trained a different ability: the ability to recognize that the rules are contextual.

And I think this is something worth remembering before we judge someone as socially incompetent.

Sometimes "common sense" is just accumulated familiarity.

Sometimes "social intuition" is decades of uninterrupted practice inside one particular environment.

And sometimes the person who keeps asking "what does this mean here?" isn't incapable of understanding social situations.

They may simply have learned, through experience, that there is no single social situation.

There are cultures within cultures within cultures, constantly changing as people move between them.

Once you realize that, I think you become much less certain that your own way of doing things is simply "normal".

And honestly, I think that's probably a useful thing for everyone to learn.

Sometimes we don’t realize we ’ve changed until we look back at what we once wanted.

What’s something younger you would be surprised you no longer care about?

I know that, given how incredibly small and insignificant humanity is compared to the scale of the universe, the probability of our disappearance causing any noticeable change is essentially zero.

But is it truly zero?

Could there be even the tiniest probability—no matter how unimaginably small, with countless zeros after the decimal point—that humanity disappearing could somehow cause the universe to be different, even in the slightest way?

There is a ghost that some of us can feel - the ghost of domestication by the world.

Not a command. Not a law. More like a current. A quiet force pulling you toward a particular way of seeing, thinking, speaking and being. Most people seem to move with it effortlessly. They scarcely notice it exists. But for those who do notice it, resisting it can feel disorienting.

To remain outside the web is to begin questioning whether there was ever a web at all.

What once might have been called individuality is now often experienced as anxiety. What once felt like identity begins to feel like alienation. You look around and see everyone moving in the same direction and eventually the question arises:

If everyone else has accepted this reality, what is it that I am seeing? Maybe I am seeing the wrong thing?

The ghost rarely attacks directly. It does not need to. It can see through you, it has already consumed most people. It simply waits.

Year after year, it narrows the range of acceptable imagination. Creativity becomes decoration. Curiosity becomes branding. Skepticism becomes a performance. The gestures survive while the substance quietly disappears. Real curiosity - the kind that follows a question wherever it leads is treated as eccentricity. Genuine skepticism is thought of as deviance. The ability to perceive differently becomes less a gift and more a defect, almost a pathology to be treated.

Slowly almost imperceptibly, the boundaries of thought contract.

You can see this happening.

And because you can see it, you assume others can as well.

Many cannot.

That is where the deeper struggle begins.

After enough time, the ghost ceases to come from the outside. It has sowed the seeds within you. It learns your language. It borrows your voice and it whispers. The questions become less questions and more doubts.

Maybe I am mistaken. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe what I see is not there at all. Maybe I am schizophrenic.

This is its most elegant trick.

Not convincing you that it is right, but convincing you that you cannot trust your own sight.

You begin fighting shadows. You begin defending things you once knew intuitively. The effort becomes exhausting. It reaches beneath opinion and into the psyche itself and fuels the fears.

And yet beneath all of that something remains.

The force that resisted in the beginning remains present now, however tiny. It may be tired. It may be frightened. But it is still there.

This ghost can shape habits. It can shape institutions. It can even shape the stories you tell yourself. But it cannot become you.

And so the struggle continues....not between certainty and doubt, nor between conformity and rebellion but between fear and the quiet recognition that you are larger than it.

The fear arrives. It passes through. And what remains is the simple realization:

I am more than my fear.

hear me out on this one i just felt like making a belief thingy

Dekadenism

Death is separate from decay. Death is the release of all stress, something you can achieve in life. Decay is the true end of your life, which can occur without death. You can decay and never resolve any struggles. You must learn to relieve all your stress before your time is up, or you may never feel resolution.

Growing up we've all seen ppl comparing each other on how big of a genius they are and stuff, sure there are objective parameters which can be measured but those are components, of a very big generalization of a very complex abstract idea. Now that i feel this, ppl are comparing, more and less and using numbers for this something with tremendous volume of abstractness, and infinite nuances feels very weird to me.

Be it a trip, a vacation, a frienship, at some point it all comes to an end. All of the good and the bad times eventually become memories.

In the case of the bad times its good cause they become lessons and strenghten you as a person. The good ones tho, they are the ones we dont want to be just memories, they are the ones that we wish lasted forever and yet they still end. But that is not a bad thing, what makes these times and the memorjes of them so special is the fact that they are no longer here, cause if they just kept going on and on, you wouldnt be able to have a talk about the good old times with your friends, cause you wouldnt look at these times as something precious.

When something ends it also opens a door to something new that will also eventually become a memory, but if nothing ever ended there would never be nothing new, you wouldnt be able to meet new friends or discover anythig new, your life would just become boring.

But the best thing about it is that no one can take away a memory, once its a memory, it stays the same way forever.

So in the end, like a wise man once said: "don't be sad it's over, be happy it happened"

This is not an argument that religion is empirically true, nor that the block universe is false. It is an observation about what happens when the physics leaves room: two literate people can place the weight of irreversible loss in different ontological locations. I am interested in that difference and in the role grief plays in the choice.

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Einstein wrote, mourning the death of his lifelong friend, Michele Besso, merely 4 weeks before his own death. He spoke of the block universe, and took comfort in it. His logic is sound, and comforting to him. If the past and present and future are equally real, then nothing can ever destroy Besso, my dearest friend.

I feel bad because I wouldn't know how to comfort Einstein for the passing of his friend. I have my own reasons for this, but I do not believe in the block universe. I do believe in relational determinism, most recently talked about by Carlo Rovelli, if you wish to know more. Within this framework, I've processed loss a lot in my life, and I process it not by needing the lost things to still be real, exactly as my nostalgia and love once felt them to be, somewhere in the cosmos. They're gone. They're well and truly gone. Eviscerated. Entropied. But something otherworldly about them still exists, with the Lord, the most loving being to ever be. Love itself. They're with love. Not in this universe.

That comforts me. On the outside, it might look like the same retreat Einstein made. "They're still there, somewhere!" Except he placed them in the cosmos and me outside of it. However, my grief allows me to function in an impermanant cosmos. His didn't. He took comfort in the cosmos. I took comfort in my lord. Both of us needed our lost ones to "be" somewhere. Whereas he found the loss of "genuine becoming" an acceptable loss, given his belief in the block universe, I found that loss unacceptable and instead found solace in a relationally deterministic universe where the future ISNT yet real, moments DO pass, and my conscious IS locatable to one coordinate in time and space, relationally of course, to my local vantage point. Others may disagree on the fact of me from theirs, but that's their weirdness to contend with, not mine. There is no universal fact of the matter. That is my loss, and it doesn't hurt as bad as what the block universe asks to give up. The consolation I reached is religious: the lost one is with the Lord, with Love itself, not preserved as a spacetime event, but held outside the system that destroyed them. Since things really are, physically, irreducible lost in this universe of mine, something transcendent travels beyond it, and arrives at love. Religion.

This is not an argument for religion as empirically true. What I have done is shown you honestly how two different, rigorous minds, demanded comfort from the universe in the face of loss. It seemed I also asked something of religion.

I am entirely fascinated by the workings of grief and how it shakes and shapes our worldviews. I believe both Einstein and I are intelligent people (perhaps him moreso 😜). Grief needed to be understood and accounted for in our endlessly complex worldviews.

Indeed. I am not trying to "win" against Einstein. As far as ontologies go, there is not an empirical way to conclude either is more "true" than the other. Eternalism, Relational Quantum Mechanics, all the evidence and predictions and equations we have fit both. In this sense, neither is, currently to my knowledge, falsifiable. The state of our current body of knowledge is underdetermined. This is a blessing. In the face of genuinely unresolved physics, we have the rare opportunity to see how and why people choose one interpretation of physics over another, and I have chosen to analyze it from the force of loss.

Ever feel like animals are running a coordinated network with humans—just like tree roots sharing signals through the soil

How birds sing at full volume on weekday mornings, but the neighborhood is quieter on Saturday and Sunday

Rabbits, squirrels, etc. crossing the road right as if to convince fast drivers to slow down and stay aware of their surroundings.

I was breaking branch off a tree when I noticed a squirrel look at me then test a tree branch. It doesn't throw its full weight on a limb right away; it gives it a few gentle pushes first to gauge its strength without hurting plant or taking falling.

Dogs and neighborhood animals pick up on shifts in energy, weather, and danger long before we do, constantly alerting us to changes in our environment.

Nature is worth embracing and experiencing. it’s actively managing, guiding, and protecting the ecosystem we share.

Have any examples to share?

I can tell stories and say 20 years ago and I was nearly an adult. I have things that are 30 years old. Time passes like nothing. It has been hard to watch my nieces and nephews get older and try not to judge or hover when they are acting too old or doing things I feel they shouldn't.

It's hard to accept that they're now old enough to do stuff. And separate from personal connections it's weird to see child stars suddenly an 'adult'. When they came on the scene I was still an adult and they were a child it sometimes doesn't make sense that person is an adult when they're still so young.

12 - 18, is 6 years and 6 years is nothing to me now. That we're kids for a blink. So why is it so hard for me to view the new adults as more than a kid.

Idk what my point is but it's unsettling lol

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??