1:51 p.m.
--
With great difficulty, I could probably k-
I can't say it.
That must mean it to be untrue.
I don't want to die.
Here's why:
I could get sniped in the head through my bedroom window in 10 minutes or fall down the steps next time I go to leave the apartment and crack my skull on a stud in the drywall. That's exciting.
Or I could just end it now, decide all future experiences null and void based on no rational reason other than that this is all truly not "worth my time," to put it lightly. This is not how I feel, by the way. It's just one available option in a pool of what-could-have-beens and it's not a pool we can choose from. For me, what keeps me going is that 10 minutes mentioned earlier and what could happen within them.
Maybe I just prefer the mystery and others who choose the easy way out can't handle the cosmic whirlpool of infinities and how our arbitrary conclusion will be only one little microcosmic happening in the grand scheme of things, if there is some grand scheme assuming this is it. If not, then would killing ourselves in that case mean nothing? Even so, it’s my opinion that it would seem disrespectful to assume, even posthumously, that our actions have no consequence in its effects on other people's lives, even more importantly than how it would affect our own (permanently). Even more disrespectful to assume there would be any consequence and then not care at all. It’s like, seriously, get these people help. I get you might want to kill yourself but it is only your life and your reality, we are all struggling with something and all have only one Earth to share. Your life, our world. At the same time, who can really blame someone who is or was deeply wounded for not wanting to bear that cross anymore. Whatever it was, it must have been really bad. You could argue that none of us asked for this life, which is true, but it’s still a cheap excuse because we’re all out here.
Nonetheless, we will never truly know what is going on inside someone else's head. So when you meet new people, you don’t have to be kind, just open your mind. I do believe that if and when you get to know someone closely over many years you can begin to truly understand who they are on the inside apart from who they present; like understanding how they think or why they do the things they do. This happens through actually understanding yourself by perceiving yourself through your perception of them, if that makes sense. That happens through the process of projecting each own self onto one another and that specific energy exchange allows for a rapport to be built between egos on a subconscious level while the personas of the two people get to know each other on a more surface level and this happens over the course of months, years, and so on. In other words, when two people establish and maintain a reciprocated or consummated relationship (whether it be a “healthy” or “unhealthy” relationship- the pain is what actually connects us, but I'm getting to that), they will begin to understand each other on a level that is nearly spiritual in sense at it happens autonomously, consciously and unconsciously. Even if the relationship ended sour, you may have really gotten to know the other person or they really got to know you, potentially even better than you know yourself. That’s why people who have a better understanding of themselves tend to be more secure in their attachment styles. My theory is that so much of our connection is based on unconscious projection-ties as soon as people meet and begin to find "similar interests." I understand why so many people have such bad social anxiety now that face-to-face interactions have decreased in popularity- it’s because meeting someone in person is literally an exchange of energy. People tend to stick to small talk because once you cross that threshold of getting to know someone actually, that’s when all parties understand it’s a legitimate investment at that point, whether or not they care. It’s not just a simple casual interaction every time, it’s complicated and requires practiced social skills and oftentimes adds to our larger mystery of life. (It can be an exhausting and extensive process to unpack but it can help us gather a further understanding towards social dilemmas within multiple-party interactions). This also explains introverts and extroverts, one is drained by the art of conversation while the other is boosted by it. The art of the energy exchange as a whole is why we get especially frustrated or flustered (can be in good or bad ways) over people we feel especially connected to or in love with. Or even worse- want to connect with but don’t know how. Because there is so much about that connection that is beyond the people involved and we don't understand it. Just like sometimes we do but sometimes we don't understand why we are so attracted to someone and it's frustrating. But just like life, love is especially beautiful because we don't understand it. Just like anything else in life, we try so hard at it because we want to understand it and be good at it and be liked and sometimes it feels good and sometimes when it doesn't feel good then we grow from it. Just like some other things in life, like God, the harder we try and understand it, the farther away we really get from the truth.
The older I get, the more I see a lot of people, if not everyone, fighting a mental battle to some degree. I've struggled with depression my entire life, but I don't say anything, because apparently so has everyone else.
All of the systems we have created in society are broken, fractured, or imperfect in some way. I get now that it is because we are all imperfect as well. Just like us, just like our relationships, so our social systems are also broken but we love them and we want to work on them, usually for the greater good. Again the macrocosm reflects the microcosm, chaos and order, all of the time. It is impossible for imperfect people to create or establish a perfect system, let alone maintain it over the course of years, decades and generations. That being said, when you take groups of people who are all raised into different ethics and morals, skills and intentions, etc., you can imagine that it must be really hard to run a business, big or small. That doesn't mean it has to be consistently difficult but disagreements are bound to happen more or less regularly. I mean, Jesus Christ, you take a group of old, broken and emotionally disconnected men and tell them to run the country, what do you think is going to happen? Take that with a grain of salt because I understand it’s a bit of an overgeneralization to get the point across. So I do credit, at least the ethical people, who are out there making it work, again for the greater good. I'm not implying our imperfect systems are bad, it works as it does now in the American political system because the majority of the public might think of some politicians as "corrupt" at worst but have otherwise pledged their loyalty, or pledged their blind faith. But not think of them as fragile, or broken, or emotionally disconnected (and some of them are not), but that is how a lot of men are. I should clarify in case it is not obvious that I am more so addressing the issue of unhealed trauma and untreated emotional wounds from childhood that manifest as greater evils later in life as opposed to simply saying masculine fragility or emotional vulnerability needs to be more present in the lives of men. As time goes on, thanks to evolution in both the human biological sense but also in how we've evolved technologically, we (some of us in the general public who have the ability to think for ourselves) seem to be able to do a good job at seeing through the B.S. that is presented to us in the media more largely on a political and cultural scale and then on a smaller person to person basis through social media. What I'm saying is that it's just harder to get away with anything anymore, unless you have money or are a person of power. That's the American way. Hide every single flaw we have and present the version of ourselves that is as close to perfect as possible. Should work out great, right? I mean, for starters, it just leaves a lot of people with zero access to money or power feeling oppressed, whether it's their problem or not. They already had nothing to begin with, so on a larger scale, a lot of us who see a corrupt government or famous celebrities as sort of the overseers of all things that we are allowed to say or do, are kind of scratching our heads wondering what's going on because we’re beginning to see their imperfections broadcast everywhere and realizing they are not so different than us. You can run but you can’t hide from who you really are deep down. So might as well not lie about it. Now that we have access to emails, tax documents, bank statements, etc. we can see how some of these people act and it's not always the most objectively moral behavior. Maybe it’s not that we wish we were them or think that we could do better than them but really we just see ourselves in them… That's not my point here though. My point is that these are the people that have all the control- over everything that controls us. Broken people taking control of broken systems is going to create some suffering somewhere if not everywhere, sometimes if not all of the time. That's why when we see corrupt or messed up behavior, at least based on objective moral agreements, we need to keep calling it out when we see it. On the smaller scale of social media and the more person-to-person or “profile-to-profile” basis, people are just getting better at recognizing what is real and what is inauthentic, or fake. Due to so many people desperately wanting to be liked or fit in, there tends to be a lot of the same unoriginal content, filters, or trends you'll see of people representing lives that are usually not their own or just not true to themselves. In this age of our minds having to constantly process information, it gets tiring seeing people whom you know to be fake or representing an unreal lifestyle. I’m wondering too if as a society we are getting tired of “beauty ideals” constantly being warped and shifted to the point where now we don’t have anything to strive for because it’s okay to be whomever you want. Which sounds great until you have fat and ugly people on the outside and cold and broken people on the inside who are confused as to why they still hate themselves because they were told they shouldn’t have to change and it’s not about you changing for the world, it’s about the world changing for you. Unfortunately, you’ll probably still get bullied with that attitude because it’s really not about either and people just need to be cool with the fact that it’s more complicated than that. I’ll stop there on the topic of beauty ideals because I’m getting into grounds I do not wish to go at this time. It can also be exhausting to see the same unoriginal content over and over represented in the same or different ways, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. We are yet another generation that craves originality and we are desperate for that raw emotion in the content we for some reason love to snack on. We love our short-form content because, if perceived actively rather than passively, it has the potential to be distracting, educating, and entertaining at the same time. I’m unsure though that diversity in the content we consume is any better than a strict diet because it all gets boiled down into the same pot by the unconscious at the end of the day and more ingredients doesn’t necessarily make for a better soup, our dreams being how we process and digest the things we’ve consumed throughout the day. (Hence why sleep is so important).
When we find that thing or that person that leads us to that special feeling which accompanies or goes just beyond a mutual understanding or a non-verbal agreement, there is something there to that connection that often goes unsaid because we can't exactly understand how to put it, but it connects us when we see or sensibly experience something that feels real. Real recognizes real and it happens without really having to force it, that's how you know. Also, what connects the larger scale to the smaller scale is “cancel culture.” I believe that you can be anybody, real or fake, famous or a nobody and still get canceled. You can be a "good" or a "bad" person and get canceled either way just depending on what you believe in and what you're willing to put on the line for it. Another symbolic representation within society to show us that we all folly. Words carry a lot of power but the other side of that coin is that we’re all apparently entitled to our own opinion and have the ability to express that even if nobody asked. Ironic how one can be so envious of someone with power not realizing that with power usually comes status and with status means your true colors will eventually show and you better be ready. After all, don’t we all have something to hide? So be careful what you share and who you share it with because the real ones will either have your back or see right through you.
Regardless of who we are, what is it that connects us then? Connects us to each other, like on that real emotional-mental level that makes us click. My thoughts are that it starts on the inside and goes back to that sub-perceptual realization between two egos within the bonding of two souls and it happens without us having any idea unless we actively take mental note of it while it’s happening. I think it manifests on a more conscious and noticeably apparent level either during the initial conversation or after quite a few when you think to yourself, "Dang, I actually really like that person." The connection may either die out or compound on itself from there but some initial connection happened regardless. Anyways, I'll get to the point. I think it's pain that connects us on that level. Our ability to endure, create and especially recognize it is what allows us to understand it. Those who understand pain on a level that does not lead to destruction from within themselves onto others but rather takes that understanding and uses it to help others- those are the people that had just as much to gain from those who've had the privilege to experience excruciating joy and lived to tell the tale. Except pain hurts more, so I think we'd have more to show for it after enduring long periods of suffering. We don't often experience joy in vain so it's more so just something to relish in and appreciate when you're in that state. Joy is the positive consequence to understanding how to put up with pain long enough to get to live out those little bits of happiness here and there. Somehow those little bits add up to enough positive energy that it makes it worth living. The human experience is strange because it would probably be boring to be in a constant state of overwhelming joy or perhaps any joy at all because what would there be to appreciate if that's all you've ever known. Except we have Hell to compare it to- so that's Heaven, minus the boring part, what we just described. So how do we get there? Well, all stories throughout history say that there is a price to be paid for this human experience and that price is either accepting the pain and suffering as a consequence of sin but feeling somewhat okay about it because the original sin was already paid for and those who believe in that just get to go to Heaven as long as they agree to adopt a certain lifestyle. It is deeply rooted in symbolism and allegory but for some reason other people take the Word of God very literally today and I think that dogmatism has ruined religion. There are other stories before and after that tell the same tales in different metaphors, created in some sense just to give us some cosmic comfort. We really don't know at the end of the day but we just really do feel like something must be out there. It would at least help explain consciousness a little better just not in a very scientific way other than maybe metaphysics. We only know what we've created so that we may perceive it and allow ourselves the ability to provide an illusion of meaning to what we've created but things would have been fine had we never created anything at all. Could have been all peace, all of the time. It couldn’t have been though, because no human has ever perceived a life without pain, not since the beginning of time.
As humans we just have to suffer. Your ticket out of it is up to you- end it all, selfishly (unless it’s not selfish) or take some leap of faith into a god of your choice, but be seriously careful of false gods (things that make your life worse instead of better). I'm not even going to get into the stories and religions created to justify all this suffering and make sense of it because that is outside my area of expertise, I’ve already gotten carried away in that subject enough here. I suppose the other option is radical acceptance of the absurd, which is to say that life sucks, but it also doesn’t, and live life in spite of that. Either way, we suffer, for some reason, all of the time. So if that's kind of the first and foremost fact of being human, then my thought (forgive me if I am so wrong to assume) is that pain would be the first point within us from which the initial projections are made via a connection to another person. It would work both ways if, as humans, we are in a constant state of suffering but not in a constant state of joy. This would imply a constant state of pain somewhere within but not a constant state of happiness also somewhere within. Even if one was to reach a state of constant contentment, say through meditation, they would still be experiencing that underlying natural state of suffering, even if they are to combat the feelings of pain via methods of mediational practice. This is actually something to strive for though, as you would achieve that harmonious balance between chaos and order within you so that you may project as much harmony onto others after the initial connection through the recognition of mutual pain. As opposed to putting others down to make yourself feel better because you don’t understand your own emotions, let alone the self at all. Notice how you feel about someone, ask yourself if it might be a quality of yourself you are seeing in that other person, it may teach you a bit about yourself.
It's something that should be paid more attention to, mainly because it happens automatically. Focusing on similar interests to build rapport for the persona is the point of the initial conversations between two people so that part will stay how it is but if we just pay more mind to the thought that "this person is also hurt" when having that conversation then it will prevent you from projecting too much of your own pain and might prevent them from doing the same because you've allowed your ego to stretch out it's hand and ask their ego to do a little dance in the realms where minds meet that we cannot see.
Once you get to know someone and you know you can trust them, be open about your pain if you feel comfortable, so that they know they can also be open with their pain. After all, that is what connects each and every one of us. Maybe it will help the world become a better place. Maybe not.
-j.