People like to make it out that the West has done away with rites of adulthood and all that, but they are still there, just tweaked for the always-connected world.

This is how it is, you get to an age where youthful recklessness and idealisation can no longer carry you through life, you can continue with your half-assed childish ideals and live a miserable life, or you become an adult. You either throw yourself entirely into your ideals and give up the reckless way of your past or, do like most people and just focus on you and those people that are important to you; you spend a few hours every other year to cast your vote for a better world (and fail at it), you watch the 6 o’clock news, but your dedication is friends, family, and community.

Is this what we’ve to look forward to for God knows how many more decades? Narcissistic, image-obsessed people posting the most frivolous excrement online? Is that what we get? Don’t take me wrong, I’m thankful about not dying of some disease at the ripe old age of 30 or seeing my city sacked and torched by invaders — but fuck — what a shit time to be alive.

I’m tired.

You didn’t want to be loved. You hated touching people and being touched. When someone hugged you I saw you make a face. You hated being complimented, and you tried to ignore it when it happened. When someone put time and effort into doing something for you, you were grateful but I could tell by your expression and your tone that you wished they hadn’t bothered. Sometimes I would see you turn down invitations or offers to hang out with people. Other times I’d notice that you tried to prevent others from getting close to you, or sabotaged relationships with them deliberately.

The more I study the works of men in their institutions, the more clearly I see that, in their efforts after independence, they become slaves, and that their very freedom is wasted in vain attempts to assure its continuance. That they may not be carried away by the flood of things, they form all sorts of attachments; then as soon as they wish to move forward they are surprised to find that everything drags them back. It seems to me that to set oneself free we need do nothing, we need only continue to desire freedom. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

Very frequently I get flashes of “This is exactly how I saw this when I was a kid” about random things. Sometimes specific things, like if I watch a video of a game I used to play when I was a kid, I’ll have a sudden flash of “how open the world seemed to me, how amazingly full of possibilities it was”, etc., along with a lot of (this is almost impossible to describe) “how just this weird shiny red patch on the health bar seemed so important, or special, or amazing”. I think I’m basically remembering fragments of a child really thinking and believing things like “If I just had a shiny mech suit like that I’d be so happy” or “I want to live in this space-sim world where everything is just chrome.”

My great-grandmother had ten children, eight of whom lived to adulthood. When none had yet left the household, she used to bake golden-brown dinner rolls before dinnertime, cooling them in a towel-lined basket from which the smell of the rolls inside would waft through her whole house, announcing that the meal was almost ready to eat. Afterwards, if any of the rolls remained, the children would grab them out of the basket as a snack or to eat at lunch.

My grandmother had six children. Her mother passed down the recipe for those same dinner rolls down to her, and in the same fashion, she would bake them in the early afternoon and leave them in a basket on her kitchen countertop after meals were done. The table in her and my grandfather’s house, in time, hosted dozens of family friends, guests, and cherished extended family members, all of whom would end up having one of my grandmother’s dinner rolls at one point or another. Each of her children, just like she did when she was younger, would sneak a roll from the basket throughout the day, until all that was left was a pile of crumbs lining the bottom.

Last week I noticed there’s a cat outside, so I buy a bag of dry food and a can of chicken, but the cat’s gone. Couple nights later the cat’s back. I give her the chicken. She came back tonight.

I sit next to the cat on the stairwell as she eats. A few things come to mind. How does she survive out here alone? I guess from eating the odd garbage here, few rodents there. But also from people like us. I’ve known for years that cats are just opportunists. When they rub themselves against your calf or sniff your hand, or you run your hand on and along their smooth backs into that surprisingly stiff tail muscle, it’s all for show. They learned to do this because we like it and reward them with food – nothing more. Because it looks like love, they do it for us, and we give them food. Thousands of years later, this relation stands unchanged. The Egyptians even revered them as gods. But really, they’re just cats. They sit, they eat, they shit, they sleep. And this is all just a transaction.

Life is just the intersection of fate and free will. We call that destiny.

The fate part can be hard to swallow depending on what it is, and free will can sometimes feel more of a burden than a joy. But we should recognise it for what it is and understand that we are the captains of our ship. We can’t change the weather but we can steer the ship. And there’s some comfort in knowing that we have a bit of control and aren’t simply fated to be tossed around by the waves of life. If you feel like you’re being dragged down under, maybe it’s time to shift your focus to the steering wheel. You could be missing safe harbour just off the horizon and all you’ve got to do is turn hard. Do something different with your life.

Have the courage to be a loner. Maybe things will work out for you better than you could ever have imagined.

I no longer believe that I will get to live in the future I dreamed of when I was growing up.

I grew up in a low-to-middle class suburban area, just few kilometers outside my country’s capital city. On a warm summer night, if I listened hard enough, I could hear the city buzzing - a siren from a police car, an occasional motorcycle screaming down the street, a helicopter sometimes, an airplane if we were lucky. But that’s the city.

I grew up in a two story house that my father and my grandfather built themselves. We had a nice backyard where mother used to plant flowers, a garage for the family car. The whole street was like that. I was a kid. There were so many kids, I couldn’t even count them all.

Everyone took care of everyone.

• Moving back in with your parents in the town where you grew up after a career failure.
• Leaving your bicycle in an alleyway after an injury that left permanent damage.
• Selling your guitar and amps after getting kicked out of the band.
• Moving to the flyover states and living in a rural property with a propane tank on the front lawn after the startup you worked at went under.
• That last night at the job site sharing a drink with the guys after finding out that the construction firm is laying everyone off once the project is done.
• Hanging up the uniform and putting your framed medals in a box under your bed.

As soon as a (human) civilisation becomes advanced and “rich” people start to realise that life is meaningless and they always existed in a relative, post-modern condition. They struggled for so long to discover that. To evolve out of a cave that just floats around. Human history and evolution as a mere Truman show, but also as a stepping stone - to finally see reality for what it is, one must go through heavy narrativism to even survive and evolve to this point. Who knows how many organisms went through the same thing in the universe.

And normal people are drawn downward toward the false synthesis (merely tolerating contradictions’ ambiguities) while you, my friend, are drawn upward (actually trying to reconcile them in higher syntheses, coincidentia oppositorum rings a bell?). When you are talking to a normie he’s showing you his normie brain and you are sensing the normie-sewer-system he is a part of, in which all normie stuff is mingled together and everybody partakes of the muck, and you are trying to show him the higher ineffable syntheses in which contradictory principles like “Duty at all cost” and “Don’t people have a right to be happy?” ought to be reconciled.

How are you feeling today, friend? When was the last time somebody asked you this one simple question?

Are you feeling demotivated, because all the values that kept generations moving are all destroyed and dead now, family, friendship, love, ideology, religion, parenthood, life goals, any sort of belief, honesty, kindness, love, morality, everything is absolutely dead? Because nothing brings satisfaction the way it did before, there’s an abundance of everything one can dream of, but no one can feel the joy from consuming and owning things anymore?

I guess this could be the reason why many try hard to show off what they read, eat and wear, because the only way they can feel something is by reacting to a reaction. What else can we feel? There’s the scent of last times in the air, like something is about to happen. The society is no longer seen as a community of civilized people, but rather as a flock of egocentric, greedy, mercantile, selfish scumbags.

In an effort to make everyone focus on the one thing they do best, we created a society of children who are experts in things that interest them and clueless in most other things; as soon as the economy loses its ability to ensure all the human rights, infrastructure and conveniences these require, there will only be a minority of people who can clearly judge the value of certain things - those who didn’t have them for granted. An utopia where nobody has to struggle to feed or house themselves would completely forget the value of food and housing and would collapse on itself when supply runs low, as everyone would oppose spending resources on food and housing (it being a given) and would instead start a campaign to find who is to blame.

Calling the west the most corrupt system might sound ungrateful at first, but if you look deeper into it you’ll see that our so-called “freedom” is really nothing more than just a smokescreen. In most dictatorships you usually know what to expect.

Depressed about the past. Pessimistic about the future. Too old to feel like anything can really get better. Hopeless.

This is such a common experience now. I think if we look around at this moment and are objective about it, we see clearly that this is the single most confusing time to be a young person, maybe ever.

Teenagers receive a terrible education and are left to waste all of their free time on porn and video games. Then very often their parents kick them out at 18 or they’re sent off to college where it’s really just more of the same and the college sees them more as an income scheme than as a customer let alone a student. Did you know colleges now consider 6 years to a bachelor’s degree a “success”? And then you become an adult and you’re handed this tray of utterly meaningless make-work jobs or else you can join the military and fight a pointless war in an Arab country.

All the while the culture is hostile to religion, to art, to poetry, to basically everything and you’re encouraged to waste your time on social media. Nobody really cares what you do, not even your parents and you’re not encouraged to investigate things like reading, let alone writing poetry or songs.

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. William Gibson, Neuromancer

If you really want to know the answer to this question, look around. Increasingly we live in a world controlled and manipulated via the net, the wired, the metaverse. Where content and creators, programmers and artists coalesce into vast seas of content. Evermore our youth are lost in the infancy of the virtual worlds that our tablets, screens, and now headsets provide. You need not look at the specific technological forms or functions from these stories to see how well they predicted the future. If you look at the broader picture, the broader result of the technological singularity our civilization is undergoing you can see they were dead on.

As of late, it seems that a horrible disease has taken root inside me, it feels that something is gnawing at me, choking my very will to live. These days, everything I do, watch, see and listen seems so utterly meaningless, futile and devoid of substance. All around me I see people going from point A to B or B to A, doing something or the other, trying to make ends meet, making money, building houses, being face-buried in their phones etc.

We are living just for the sake of living, and with a deep frustration I want to scream at the Universe and ask what’s the point of it all? Life has been going on for generations upon generations, people are born, they grow up, reproduce, grow old and die, rinse and repeat. Why? Where is it all leading to? It all feels like a chore, life feels like a meaningless chore full of suffering.

“At the very beginning [of the pandemic] people just didn’t know how to be polite,” says Zech. It was hard to communicate a smile, and it became necessary to avoid rather than embrace people. But after a certain point, the unintentional rudeness became intentional and deliberate. “It’s meant to call attention to what they see as this kind of unjust policy, some discrimination, or some infringement on some other right,” says Zech. In the minds of some of the individuals, snapping at the flight attendant is not rude, it’s civil disobedience. source

We trully are living through an unprecedented global trauma and there are a number of people who seem to think that the best solution is to get everything back to “normal” as fast as possible, rather than dealing with the effect this trauma is having on most people. Perhaps the realisation of the futility of this desire causes considerable mental anguish and cognitive dissonance which manifests itself in anti-social behaviour.

Yes, I am worried about us not being able to let down our guards and listen to each other even when everyone is doing everything in good faith because we are listening carefully for hidden enemies, the same enemies who have actually popped out in the past where and when we least expected. Overriding this is hard work because it involves re-learning how to interact in the world and also what the world is like in terms of the potential for threat it contains. Threatened and reactive people make mistakes and sometimes those mistakes add more inflammation and actively make things worse.

• You are what you consume - people, music, movies, books, news, etc. If you mostly consume the positive side of life, your mindset will follow.
• You can only rely on yourself. Friends are just stage-of-life companions.
• Your phone will not make you happier, sometimes you should risk a glance to the left and right.
• The connective tissue of human relationships is at least of equal importance as the technical merits of a solution.
• When things are going your way, try not to get arrogant. And when things aren’t, don’t get despondent.
• It’s a misprint to select your paths based on the sins you bear.
• Don’t take yourself too seriously.
• Hollywood has no foundation for offering opinions about morals, family, love or anything else.
• While we undervalue ourselves most of the time, we overestimate our fears most of the time.
• Awful people I’ll never meet, in countries far away from mine, can have a negative impact on my mental health.
• Time doesn’t really exist.
• You are fundamentally alone.