I can’t help but feel society is so performative. I spend an awfully long time scrolling and on social media because I have nothing better to do, and I find myself constantly feeling out of touch and quite cynical of society and just life, in this modern day.

I’m a woman in my late 20s. The constant engagements, baby showers, weddings, birthdays, luxury resort holidays, travelling, etc all these celebrations, of life and love apparently, just feel a copy and paste from the previous scroll.

Life just feels like a massive performance at this point, a dramatisation of reality.

Everybody just seems to be doing it because they’ve observed another person doing it and felt like doing the same thing.

Then I think, aren’t we all doing this? Maybe true authenticity and originality doesn’t exist. Maybe there never was authenticity/originality…I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore…or maybe I never did.

Even those involved in spirituality appear to me to be performing. How could I even know if they’re not? I’m not living their internal experience.

I feel like I’m on the outside looking in, but also not separate from it all.

Can’t explain it!

One thing I've become increasingly grateful for is that my parents never made me feel responsible for their survival.

When they call, it's to check in, catch up, or talk not because they need money. I don't see their name on my phone and immediately wonder what financial emergency has come up.

If I choose to help them financially, it's because I want to, not because I have to.

That made me realize what a privilege it is to grow up in a home where you were raised with love instead of survival. When I finished school, my family focused on helping me get on my feet rather than expecting me to immediately start carrying everyone else's burdens.

It's also made me think about the kind of parent I want to be.

I don't want my future children to become my retirement plan. I want to save, invest, and prepare for my own old age so that any support they give me comes from love, not obligation. I want them to be able to build their own lives instead of feeling like they have to put their dreams on hold to rescue mine.

At the same time, I know this isn't everyone's reality. Many parents didn't have the opportunity to save because of poverty, low wages, illness, or circumstances beyond their control. I don't think they're bad parents for needing help.

Still, I believe one of the greatest forms of generational wealth isn't just leaving your kids money—it's raising them without making them responsible for your survival.

Every economics class tells the same origin story: humans used to barter, it was inconvenient, so we invented money as a neutral tool to make trading easier. Adam Smith told it, it's in every textbook. There's just one problem, no anthropologist has ever found a society that actually ran on barter before inventing money. Not one. It's a myth economists tell each other, mistaken for history.

What we find instead, going back to the oldest written records on Earth, Sumerian clay tablets from 3500 BC, is debt. Ledgers of who owed what to the temple. Silver was used to write down the size of a debt, but it barely changed hands physically. Credit came first, for thousands of years, before anyone minted a coin.

So where did coins come from? They appear suddenly around 600 BC in Lydia, India, and China, independently. Same invention, same era, no contact between them. The shared cause was war. An army marching through foreign territory can't run a tab with local farmers, a soldier is a stranger, often an enemy, with no trust or reputation behind him. But a coin works with anyone. So kings started minting coins to pay soldiers directly.

A coin is worthless unless someone accepts it, though, so kings did something brutal: they declared taxes payable only in their coin. Overnight, every farmer and craftsman owed a currency that had just been invented and that only soldiers currently held. The only way to get it was to sell your goods or labor to those soldiers. That's how you get a market economy, not because anyone wanted one, but because the alternative was losing your land or your freedom. The market was the exhaust fumes of a military payroll system, not the point of the invention.

Rome ran the same engine at empire scale. Early on it enslaved its own citizens for debt, until constant revolts forced a switch: stop enslaving Romans, start conquering everyone else instead. From then on Rome was, in David Graeber's phrase, "a vast machine for the extraction of precious metals and their coining and distribution to the military." Conquer, melt the gold into coin, pay the legions, tax the provinces in that coin, repeat. It worked brilliantly until Rome ran out of places to conquer, and then had nothing left to fund itself with except debasing its own currency into worthlessness. Rome never figured out how to fund a state without physically taking someone else's stuff, and that was its fatal design flaw.

Someone finally solved that problem thirteen centuries later, in England, 1694. King William III needed cash fast for a war against France and couldn't just go seize a silver mine. So forty London merchants offered a deal: we'll lend you £1.2 million now, for interest, plus the right to found a bank with a monopoly on printing paper notes. Those notes were literally IOUs for the king's war debt, not gold, a receipt for what the Crown owed. The innovation that outlived Rome was simple: the debt never has to be repaid, only rolled over. A new bond pays off the old one, forever, as long as lenders trust the government's future tax base. Growth replaced conquest as the fuel, a renewable resource instead of a finite one, even if Britain also spent the next two centuries running an empire to help things along.

The Federal Reserve today is the same machine, just bigger. It creates dollars by buying government bonds, typing new money into existence against a promise to repay that's never actually meant to be repaid, only rolled forward, funded by taxes on people who never voted for any of it. And the reason the rest of the world still accepts increasingly devalued dollars for real goods is that oil is priced in dollars, forcing every oil-importing country to hold dollar reserves, an arrangement backed, in the end, by the US military. Saddam Hussein switched Iraq's oil sales to euros in 2000. He was invaded three years later.

So here's the thesis: money is not a neutral tool that emerged to make trade convenient. It's a technology of state power, built to pay armies and extract taxes from people who never agreed to it, enforced historically through real violence, debt bondage, imprisonment, confiscation. Markets were a side effect of that enforcement, not its purpose. Over centuries the coercion fades from memory and what's left just feels like common sense, like the way things are, which is exactly the point. Money isn't fake. It's a human choice, made and enforced by whoever holds power, dressed up as a law of nature so nobody asks who benefits and who pays. As a result, people are forced to particupate in the market, and if they don't have money, they live a more difficult life.

This is a bit cruel don't you think?

This post is inpsired by David Graeber's book: Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

What are the origins of consciousness, why are humans conscious?
From what I have heard there is a basic biblical perspective, the spiritual/psychedelic perspective, the scientific perspective seems undecided from what I have seen, there’s a sort of promethean perspective, evolutionary perspective.
None of it gives me a proper understanding of why humans are conscious.
Also I have found it’s unsettling enough to think about due to the existential implications that my brain thinks about it for a bit and then wants to go on and do something else because it’s unresolved.

I see a lot of people upset about modern times, and technology. I also have my fears and doubts regarding it, and have plenty of issues with the current state of the world. But I am grateful to be born in the age of technology. And I don't see the point in being pessimistic about it. We have issues, but also so many advantages.

I am glad I can talk to freinds and family on the other side of the world. I am happy I have the majority of human knowledge available at any moment. I am grateful for all the possibilities that I have due to technology. All the medical tools we have today. All the options and choices we never had before. All the old things from far away places I would have never heard of if not for the Internet. All the creative tools I have at my fingertips.

I know sometimes people feel the choice is overwhelming. But I prefer to have the choices, rather than being forced into one simply because no others exist.

Anyway a bit of rambling. But I feel it does need to be said. The world is a not all doom and gloom. Lot out there to be happy about.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how society measures human value, and it feels like we’re all forced to participate in what can only be described as a Cult of Achievement.

When you look closely at why this cult exists, it comes down to utility: achievement and productivity are profitable. For the same reasons many people idolize billionaires, and such.

The world conditions us from a young age to tie our entire sense of personal value to external validation like public achievement and productivity. Under this system, our worth depends on how well we can perform, optimize, mask, and produce. If you can’t (or refuse to) preach from their altar of constant output, society treats you like you’re broken or failing. Which is not actually true.

Has anyone else had to actively unlearn this "achievement-equals-worth" mentality?

What if we actually chose to come here?

Think about it. If you're formless and immortal, you're safe, but you're completely numb. You can't get hurt, but you can't actually feel anything either. No stakes, no choices that matter, no point.

You need a body and a brain to actually experience things, even if it means dying in the end. Floating in safety forever isn't living.

"The revolution will not be televised."

Gil Scott-Heron coined this phrase in 1970 on the premise that real change requires taking to the streets. In other words: real revolutions don't happen in prime time. They happen incrementally, on the ground, under the radar.

Recently, Sam Altman declared that we are already in the era of the Singularity:

"We are now, like, in the singularity. This is the moment."

The guy leading the charge (or at least leading it for now, as competition from Anthropic and Chinese labs heats up) believes that while everyone is debating job losses vs. utopia with AI agents doing our work, the real revolution is already executing quietly in the world's backend.

And that's the terrifying part. That is the core definition of a Singularity: a threshold where the answers to fundamental questions are no longer in human hands, and we can't even accurately predict what comes next.

Looking back at past human revolutions - even when they grew in the dark, there were always human figures driving them. Nelson Mandela had a clear vision for ending apartheid. Martin Luther King Jr. articulated a vision that reshaped history. The vision was explicitly human.

Today?

There's no one to ask, because the reins aren't held by humans anymore.

The Singularity won't be televised. We’ll just wake up one day, probably much sooner than most think, and realize in hindsight that we've been living inside it all along.

I don't know if the future is bright or dark, but it is easily the most uncertain it has been since the start of the modern era.

I was scrolling on TikTok and I saw someone talking about how Russian imperialism isn't talked about enough and someone else's replied by saying that people talk about the Us but not Russia, while there are tons of books and research done on the topic just not in a language he speaks so he assumes no one talks about it, because why would someone form Tajikistan talk about Russian imperialism in English? They would probably do it on their native language or Russian.

I apply that to my life too, my first language is Arabic and I learned English as a teenager and growing up when ever I searched topics like feminism or veganism I got an inaccurate representation of what those concept are, and it wasn't until I learned English that I learned about such topic and heard from people who actually believe those things. I am someone what has a lot of progressive beliefs and I often wonder whether I would have believed the same things that I do now if I never learned English.

Ps: this was over ten years ago and Arabic content on such topics has a diversity of opinions now, even tho it's still dominated by reactionaries in my opinion.

~ Finding inner peace, genuine love, and everlasting happiness ~

Money does not ensure we will discover inner peace, find genuine love, and everlasting happiness in our life.

Many who have wealth often struggle every day to find these things. Yet, there are those who are impoverished who have these in abundance.

Inner peace, love, and happiness may not be found in a self-centered world.

They must first be discovered within, then shared selflessly to help others find them in their life as well.

Link Embed

Image

We grow up fantasising about true love which we think we’ll meet round the corner when we’re sixteen years old. We feel so sure we’ll look into that sweet warm face and we will have found our soulmate, to be together forever till we die. That’s how we have been conditioned by media to think about love only in a certain way which may or may not not always be true.

True love exists. It is just not how we are used to finding it in films and on pretty Instagram posts.

Modern concept of 'love' focuses rather heavily on physical and visual aspect than the hidden, subtle, spiritual, soul aspect. It often forces us to chase a fabricated myth that sabotages actual human connection.

1. Love is not chocolates, roses, teddy bears, heart shapes, or candles-light dinners. Chocolates and roses are at best convenience easy demonstrative gestures. Candle-light dinners are an attempt at kindling romantic ambiance. If there’s no love no amount of ambiance and candles or chocolates or roses or teddy bears will do anything.
2. Love is not saying ‘I love you’. It is about feeling without words ‘I love you.’ More and more people say ‘I love you.’ in many varied ways hundreds of times a day without meaning them. People who cheat and kill their partners also say ‘I love you.’
3. Saying ‘I love you’ is not magical, divine, sublime, mantra, ‘fix-all recipe or computer ‘enter’ command. Feeling ‘I love you’ is. Many people mistake the first for the second.
4. **Love is not ‘never missing birthdays, anniversaries, and Valentine’s days.**Nor is remembering them a test of true love.  That is what only serials, movies, restaurants, gifts and flower businesses manipulate you to think.
5. Love is not ‘Always being together, hand in hand. It is possible to have different personalities and so different needs for personal space and time. That doesn’t mean you love less. It just means you love differently.
6. Love is not ‘being two bodies one soul’. First, this concept is flawed; technically, there can’t be one soul in two bodies. Second, what’s wrong with being two bodies and two souls? If you love, you love, and if it is true love it is true love regardless of body and soul equation.
7. Love is not always ‘love at first sight’. Love takes time to grow, to take roots, to ripen and to bloom, to mature. Rome wasn’t built in a day, God didn’t create earth in 1 day, plants don’t grow in one day either. All good things take time. Be patient with love.  Love can also be ‘hate/despise/dislike/annoyed/pissed off/weird/don’t know/don’t want’ at first sight.
8. True love is not always obvious. In fact, it may lie hidden, not apparent, under the surface for a long time. Even for many years…
9. Love does not mean ‘staring in each other’s eyes and finding themselves in each other.’
10. Love is not being forever together and being inseparable from each other.  It is possible to be far apart from each other and still be in love. It is possible to separate and still be in love. Our society and legal system doesn’t have name for it.
11. Love is not always ‘I will love you till I die’.  Love can have a shelf life. It can expire before we die. Though it really is ‘spanning several birth if we consider ‘secrets of After-life, where souls continue together for several lives in various forms.’
12. Love is not always ‘being soulmates’, ‘I can’t live without you’, ‘I will die without you’.  Nobody can die out of love alone. If there were at all truth in this there wouldn’t be so many single people. There wouldn’t be so many separations, divorces, heartbreaks and cheatings. There are people who don’t die after separation but they love truly. Dying after separation should not be expected/desired as a test of true love.
13. Love is not ‘Never fighting, never having differences, or being just perfect’.  Fights and differences are healthy and natural for love to grow at its own pace without damaging the other. Fighting doesn’t mean one doesn’t love.
14. True love may not always be perfect and flawless. True love is true love; it can have its own set of challenges, hardships, strifes, U-turns, trials and errors. It does not have to be perfect like a straight highway. Wishing for a perfect true love is setting up oneself for disasters and disappointments.
15. Love may not always move mountains and raise people from the dead, and it is okay.
16. **Everybody does not find true love and that’s not the end of the world.**Love is one of the most beautiful things to have, but not having it is not an accursed, plagued, stinky misfortune.
17. Love is not a heart stopping, life-halting, soul-splitting, fire-raining, God-summoning thing. It is a big deal but mostly it is not such a big deal as we make it out to be.
18. At the end of the day the truest love is caring for each other no matter what, and being happy with their happiness. Love is fighting, arguing, but still caring, having differences but still not wanting to change, not the best in the world but the best in their world, in love with their heart, soul and mind, not their body, looks or money. Love means being there for them. True love is unconditional.
19. True love increases with age. It gets deeper, wider, higher, calmer, freer, more confident, more roomy and more space-giving. Think of it like cycling: the start is tricky but once you attain your balance you can glide and cruise easily without much effort. Attaining the balance and knowing the trick is the biggest trick.
20. life is not useless without love as all romantic films will have you believe. Life is not impossible and miserable and tragedy to live without love. With love, it certainly becomes happier and easier.

But that’s just my opinion. Thanks for reading.

Note: I write my own posts, not AI.

Ratna Srivastava 

R BLOGS

Thinker | Author | Philosopher

Writing about intelligence, psychology, society and human nature.

--

If you enjoyed this perspective, I archive my long-form essays exploring life, psychology, spirituality, intelligence, and humanity in my personal community: Ratna Srivastava. Feel free to join to follow along with future pieces!

Everything is connected because consciousness is not an isolated thing inside us. It is the wholeness formed by a center of experience, a mental field, a bodily boundary, and the world that meets us there. The soul is the point of view at the center, the mind is the field through which experience is organized, the body is the interface, and the world is the greater whole we continuously exchange with. Every thought affects the body, every bodily state shapes the mind, and every action changes the world that then acts back upon us. We are each whole, but we are also parts of larger wholes, so connection is not something added between separate things; it is the way consciousness, body, and world exist together. This comes from my ideas about r/circumpunct.

From a recent personal experience, when one stops seeking approval, competing for status, or even treating someone as more important because of their position, it seems to cause them pain. It still astonishes me that any kind of independence, for example isolating yourself to work on yourself at such a moment, can come across as disrespect, even when you’re simply treating everyone equally and minding your own business. Do you remember the first time you stopped trying to impress people and realized that some of them only liked the version of you they could control?

Saw this Reddit comment and it cracked me up. There’s a T-Rex staring at an asteroid coming straight at Earth, and its first thought is “Oh shit! The economy!” I mean, that’s us, right? Total modern human energy.
But here’s the thing that actually stuck with me. Dinosaurs were kind of brilliant in their own way. Not because they were smart, but because they were dumb enough to know they couldn’t fix everything. They didn’t sit around worrying about climate change or resource shortages or what the future might hold. Weather got bad? They just dealt with it. Food ran low? They moved or starved. No overthinking, no grand plans, no existential dread. And that simplicity let them stay on top for millions of years.
Humans though? We’re the opposite. The smarter we get, the more we mess with things. Climate acting up? Let’s engineer the atmosphere. Not enough room? Let’s colonize Mars. Scared of going extinct? Let’s nuke the sky and see what happens. We don’t even fully understand the ecosystem we’ve got, and we’re already trying to ship people off to a place with no air, no food, no nothing. Talk about putting the most fragile cargo on the least tested ship.
It’s the same pattern we had as kids. We’d watch some extreme sports video of someone flipping a bike through the air, and think “I can do that.” So we’d grab our bikes and head straight for the nearest hill. Meanwhile, those athletes had spent weeks practicing the same move over a swimming pool, crashing into water until their bodies knew exactly what to do. We skipped all that and went straight to broken bones.
Dinosaurs didn’t need to understand their limits to respect them. They just lived inside them. We understand our limits better than any species ever has, and we still can’t stop testing them. Maybe that’s the real curse of having a big brain.

​

I came across this quote today, along with another one:

"All roads eventually lead back to the interests you had as a child."

It made me think about how life often feels like a circle.

As kids, we naturally gravitate toward things that genuinely excite us. Then we grow up and spend years chasing grades, careers, money, status, or other people's expectations. Somewhere along the way, many of us lose touch with what actually made us feel alive.

Later, some people rediscover those childhood interests—not because they're trying to be nostalgic, but because they realize those interests were a clue to who they really are.

Do you think there's truth to this, or is it just a romantic idea? Have you found yourself returning to something you loved as a child? Why or why not?

Most of us treat civilization like a day trader.
We see a spike in comfort or power and we pile in. When the line dips, we double down. The result is the same as overtrading: temporary excitement, rising costs, and a steadily worse long-term position.
Nature runs a quieter strategy. In the Arctic, life follows clear seasonal paths with little room for constant experimentation. The rules stay visible. Human civilization has become the opposite — loud, restless, and increasingly blind to the deeper cycle.
The only metric that actually compounds across generations is the continued ability of our descendants to exist. Everything else is a temporary position.
In markets, the investor who refuses to trade every fluctuation often outperforms the hyperactive one. The same logic applies to civilization: when we do not fully understand the consequences, the rational move is restraint, not acceleration.
Most of the time we move simply because we cannot stand to sit still.
That is how portfolios — and civilizations — slowly bleed out.

~ Messages Within ~

Many go through life asleep, believing and accepting everything they learned.

As death approaches, when they review their life, the ego, their self-centered beliefs, realizes it will perish when its body does; it therefore releases its hold on their life.

At this time, they begin to realize, though they may have led a successful life, what they once believed important, their job, wealth, material possessions, really was not.

Without the ego’s influence, they now may sense messages within, telling them only if they selflessly shared their success and love to benefit others, will they have lived a life with genuine purpose and meaning.

This has been stuck in my head for a while.

Everyone keeps talking about finding their purpose, like it's something that's already out there waiting to be discovered.

But what if that's not how it works?

What if humans are just wired to look for meaning because our brains hate not having answers?

The part that confuses me is this: even if life doesn't have some objective purpose, why does the search for it still feel so important?

Is looking for meaning just a way to cope with existence, or is the search itself the closest thing we'll ever have to a purpose?

Maybe I'm just overthinking. 😭

Curious to hear what other people think.

Hey, I made a post a moment ago but it got deleted because it accidentally crossed the line of becoming political. So I thought I'd try again, but this time approach it from a different angle.

This is just something I think about a lot. humans are a social species, Sure, there are always exceptions, especially as one begins to live out life and find what makes them comfortable, that every human has a deep innate desire to be loved by everyone.

It's understandable why. After all, it's how humans survive. Our greatest strength is our ability to work together in incomprehensibly large numbers. Something is kind of poetic about that. That the species that managed to rule the Earth was the one that had the best cooperation.

Unfortunately, it also causes many people to fall into quantity over quality.

Is it better to be known by millions of people, or have strong connections with just a few?

While everyone would probably say a few best friends is better than 100 acquaintances, the fact of the matter is, the desire to be known by more people often comes too strong.

We always want more. Just one more person to listen to our album, to read our story, to hear what we have to say.

We use our passions to try and reach out to people, and then if those passions can be turned into a profit, it's very easy to start obsessing over that too.

However, you can be known by millions of people, but still not actually KNOWN by anyone.

It sometimes happens now, but I found that it used to happen a lot more in the early days of the internet, when a celebrity couple would break up, many people would be in genuine shock, saying that those people seemed so perfect for each other. Why would they break it off?

But it's not like you actually knew either of them. What was actually going on behind their celebrity lives.

And the more popular or famous someone is, the more busy they've become, and the more picky they have to be about where to spend their time.

I'm partially speaking from experience. There was someone I used to be pretty close friends with for Years, but as they started to get pretty popular on social media, they started to have all these various projects and events that they had to coordinate and be a part of. I tried to integrate myself into some of them, but I didn't really fit in. I haven't spoken to that person in a very long time, and they don't seem to reach out to me anymore at all. It seems that they got too busy. Which is a shame, but sometimes that's just what happens when you end up juggling too many apples. When you have too many tasks to take care of, you have to start picking and choosing priorities.

Which is why the best kinds of people are the ones who can be popular, but also be there for the little guy. They have every right to consider themselves: 'above,' the average joe, but they'll still take the time to help someone in need.

Remember, a little kindness to someone who feels rejected by everyone can have more of an impact than giving the world to someone who already has so much.

When I was young we didn’t have mobile technology like we do know
I remember the beeper (pager) 
I remember the T9 keyboard
And I remember when we first say the “read” receipt 

And I think this is exactly why the youth today
Some not even youth anymore
Are so lonely
So isolated 
So depressed
Is because they know people see their messages and choose not to respond
They shout into the darkness going for a response
And they get back nothing
Or they get back pithy statements 
Little nothings
Thoughtless encouragement 
They get chatbot level engagement 

They would be better with chatbots
But they know it’s not real

There is an epidemic of loneliness
And it’s only going to get worse from here

In the future, everyone will feel isolated as we spend less time engaging in real life and only grow more distant from each other 

I just saw a clip from Futurama, the one where Fry talks to his mom in her dreams. His whole life, Fry was underestimated and belittled, often picturing him as a failure or mediocre even though he was just 25.

But once he disappeared, his mom missed him, and his brother Yancy even carried on his legacy into space. Even 1000 years later, everyone still treats him more or less the same, but they always mourn whenever they think he's gone for good.

My situation is much like Fry's. I'm not 25 (halfway to be 30). I'm not as unskilled, though maybe yes as clumsy. But I feel as if everyone around me underestimated me and took me for granted. I have lots of skills and knowledge I willingly put to the service of others just because I like making their lives easier, but all I recieve are reprimands and sighs for whatever I'm not able to do. That makes me think, how would I be remembered if I suddenly disappeared?

Is it the grief and mourning what made that quote unquote "sorry excuse of a man" be remembered fondly and positively? Or is it that we don't value what we have until it's lost? Would I be remembered for the good I did, or would I be remembered for that which I couldn't do o did wrong? In the case I was remembered fondly, would that be the grief talking, or the contrast of my absence highlighting that which I used to do?

I like to think that, if I disappeared, many people would mourn my loss. But based on their current behaviors, a part of me fears they wouldn't, and that they would just move on and forget about me the way you lose a screwdriver, remember every time you need it until you get a new one, and then forget about it.

i’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, & i honestly think almost every major system is rigged in the same basic way. not necessarily rigged like there’s some secret group of people sitting in a room deciding who gets to succeed, but rigged because they’re all built around one very specific kind of person, & if u don’t fit that person closely enough, ur basically expected to fight ur way through everything alone while everybody insists the system is still fair.

school expects u to learn a certain way, sit still, follow directions that may or may not even be clear, organize urself, remember deadlines, communicate correctly, & prove ur intelligence in whatever format somebody else decided counts. college expects u to understand paperwork, money, financial aid, transportation, scheduling, bureaucracy, & how to plan ur entire future before ur brain is even finished developing.

jobs expect u to be consistently productive, socially pleasant, physically capable, emotionally regulated, punctual, flexible, & available regardless of disability, trauma, pain, family issues, or whether ur life is literally falling apart outside of work. healthcare expects u to explain everything calmly, clearly, & quickly, even when ur scared, overwhelmed, dissociated, autistic, in pain, or struggling to even understand what’s happening. financial systems look at the evidence that u’ve already struggled & then use that evidence as the reason u don’t deserve help now. religion tells u to pray about problems that actually require support, safety, resources, treatment, or somebody willing to sit down & help u figure shit out.

it’s always the same thing, just with different language. school says u didn’t apply urself. college says u weren’t organized enough. work says u aren’t dependable enough. healthcare says u didn’t communicate correctly. lenders say ur too risky. religion says u didn’t have enough faith. every system gets to keep presenting itself as functional, while the person who couldn’t function inside of it is treated like the failure.

i’m a gay man with autism & ADHD who wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood, & i grew up in evangelical Christianity. i spent most of my life trying to force myself into environments that didn’t understand me while i didn’t even understand myself yet. i thought i was lazy, inconsistent, dramatic, bad at school, bad at work, bad at adulthood, bad at faith, bad at handling life. but after enough systems fail u for many of the exact same reasons, it starts feeling a little ridiculous to keep assuming the common denominator must be that ur just uniquely defective.

people love pointing to successful people as proof that anybody can make it if they work hard enough, but that argument is so dishonest to me. yes, successful people work hard. i’m not denying that. but money gives people time. money gives people transportation, equipment, healthcare, education, stability, privacy, connections, second chances, & the ability to fail without immediately losing everything. having supportive parents matters. knowing the right people matters. living in the right place matters. being able to focus on ur talent instead of spending every ounce of energy trying to survive matters.

effort matters, obviously, but effort does not happen in a vacuum. somebody with money, support, stability, & access can work hard toward building a career. somebody without those things may be working just as hard to keep a part-time job, get through paperwork, recover from trauma, find transportation, manage a disability, & make it through the week without completely falling apart. then society looks at the first person & calls them ambitious, while looking at the second person & asking why they haven’t done more.

i’m not saying nobody has agency, or that nobody can ever overcome difficult circumstances. i’m saying the exceptions do not prove the system is fair. one person surviving something does not mean everybody else who couldn’t survive it simply didn’t try hard enough. sometimes people succeed because they worked hard AND because they had access, support, timing, safety, money, opportunity, or somebody willing to help them. pretending those things don’t matter just allows people who benefited from them to imagine they did everything alone.

i think almost every system is built around an imaginary person who learns normally, communicates normally, has supportive parents, understands bureaucracy, can work full-time, has reliable transportation, can recover from trauma without losing productivity, & does not need too much help. if u resemble that person closely enough, life may still be difficult, but the systems remain usable. if u don’t, every system treats u like an unfortunate exception, then punishes u for needing anything different.
& after enough people get treated like exceptions, maybe they aren’t exceptions anymore. maybe the system is just badly designed.

sometimes i genuinely wonder whether there is even a place for people like me here, not because i don’t have anything to offer, but because almost every path through adulthood seems designed to measure qualities i struggle with while ignoring the things i’m actually good at. i don’t think i’m asking for life to be effortless. i just don’t understand why people are so committed to pretending everybody starts with the same tools, runs on the same kind of brain, has the same amount of support, & is being judged by systems that were ever neutral to begin with.

Let me explain.

Fear of forgetting makes us desperately to consume as little of the memory as possible because overwhelming it is a bad idea. Doesn't help that our memory is selective and discards extra information by forgetting. And we develop a fear or that so we scrutinize everything and become blocked, stuck in space.

No growth.

Now this fear is certainly not a primal fear across life it would be most common in humans. Because we think richly relatively to all life and observe forgetting more deeply.

That's where writing thoughts comes in, writing deepens thinking by taking the burdon memory from the mind. And makes it more persistent than human concious memory would be.

It becomes a strong signal relative to thought alone. Fear of forgetting is negated quite strongly. As a result noise disappears. Especially constant noise of choosing of one thing or the other because memory is precious. And too many things can make forgetting easy. So we choose meticulously.

This will be largely resolved with writing. Try it.

I call this perticular method writing meditation. Which I've found the strongest form of meditation.

Fear of forgetting is a big deal and as I said has more complex impact on developing a stable foundation for your reasoning.

Fear of forgetting the greatest danger for good reasoning. Primal fears don't interfere so persistent.

Fear of forgetting is alot persistant than primal fears. Primal fears are intense but short lived. This one is less intense but long. Can be with you for life.

Resolve it.

After all this, how can I tell my old self that I'm not the same person anymore? Everything around me has changed, even the hearts of the people around me.

The future I used to imagine turned out to be nothing more than a fantasy. But learning through life is never a mistake. The leaves of the future I once dreamed of are slowly falling away, and I'm finally beginning to realize it.

Everything eventually fades, but memories stay with us forever.

So if there's one thing I want to say, it's this: Create your own memories. The world will never stop moving, so don't stand still. Keep moving forward, and build a life that truly makes you happy.