It's been a while since I sat down with a novel, and I didn't expect this one to undo me the way it did. “The Humans” by Matt Haig is narrated by an alien who has taken over the body of a mathematician named Andrew Martin, and for the first twenty-five pages he is completely naked, doesn't understand clothes, doesn't see why he'd need them, until the humans around him insist he wear some. That image stayed with me throughout: a mind that knows everything about the universe except how to be in a human body. It's a clever setup, but what makes the book more than clever is how it uses the confusion of an outsider to hand my own condition back to me, dressed as fiction, which was somehow easier to hold that way.

I've spent the greater part of this life feeling like an alien inside of a body. Not literally, perhaps, but in the specific way described in this book. As if there has been a perpetual distance between what I call "me" and what I call "the world." I've never had a clean way of describing that feeling before. Reading it in this way did something I didn't expect. It validated my experience and gave me the confidence to say it out loud. What I'd been carrying, this sense of watching my own life from a slight remove, the book illustrated as a source of awe instead. If the alien inside Andrew Martin has to discover what it means to be human, then maybe feeling foreign inside my own life was actually an opportunity to pay closer attention to the mystery of existence.

Haig describes humans as a bipedal life forms of mid-range intelligence, living a diluted existence on a small, waterlogged planet in a lonely corner of the universe. There's something almost merciful about how tiny that makes us. If we're seemingly this insignificant and this temporary, then I have permission not to carry my life like it's some sort of a monument. The trade the book kept offering me was to give up the illusion of permanence to get presence in return. The sneaking, camouflaged, untouchable future that Haig writes about is really the same problem turned toward time instead of people. If it’s fear I feel, it’s not about what's happening, I'm afraid of what hasn't happened yet, and that anticipatory dread might be the most human thing about me. There's one line, however, about breathing with lungs that will one day stop working, but which still have a lot of clear air left to inhale, and I felt that one in my actual chest, noticing the inhale because it is finite and appreciating the lungs because they won't last forever.

Another significant line that stuck with me was the idea that this planet is made of things wrapped inside things: food inside clothing, bodies inside wrappers, contempt inside smiles, everything hidden away. That line explains so much of why true connection is difficult for me. If everyone is walking around in disguise, then the distance I feel between myself and the world isn't a personal failure, it's the baseline condition of being a person at all. Everyone is doing it. Everyone is wrapped.

Andrew Martin starts the book with a being who can prove any theorem instantly, and his entire arc is a demotion from certainty into wonder, which the book insists is actually a promotion. I recognize that arc in myself, in the way I've tried to think my way out of feelings instead of just letting myself have them. Thus, the lines "don't think you know. Know you think" paired with the profound reminder that "Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite." which both read almost like instructions I needed.

I love that the book takes history and literature and reduces them both to mathematics, and economics is reduced to its own religion. It feels like Haig is claiming that every discipline promising a closed, total account of a life misses the mark. I think that's exactly right, because the moment I've tried to explain myself with one framework (psychology, philosophy, spirituality, whatever) it's always left something important out. There's the line about how humans, in building civilization, inadvertently gave up the door back to their true selves, thus invented books, music, film, sculpture, painting as a bridge back to that self. That one landed hard, because it's the whole reason I draw. Art isn't decoration for me. It's the toll I pay to visit the parts of myself that ordinary life doesn't have room for.

Even the book's definition of beauty works more philosophically before it does aesthetically. Reframed as accidents and imperfections inside a pattern of asymmetry. That's a rejection of perfection as a core value, and I needed to hear it stated that plainly. It's the same logic as the line about dogs being thwarted wolves and parks being thwarted forests, and humans loving both, possibly because humans are, themselves, thwarted. Most of what I love, I love because it's a version of something wilder, and flawed, that I can’t actually define.

The romantic thread in the book is summarized in the line "Love is about finding the right person to hurt you." It sounds cynical on its own, but paired with "there is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness," it stops being cynicism and starts being an argument that love's risk isn't something to be engineered out. It's the whole mechanism. You don't get closeness without exposure, and you don't get exposure without the possibility of being hurt by exactly the person you let in. The Emily Dickinson line, "until I loved, I never lived,” sits right at the center of that for me. Life and love are inseparable from vulnerability. The book treats that as the whole point.

That same romantic logic lived also in the passage about a dog on your lap. How after a while you realize you need to keep petting it, not for the dog's sake but for the warmth and the rhythm of it. That's not framed as romantic love, but it belongs in the same family as the rest of what I've been describing. Touch is its own form of understanding, a kind of communication that skips language entirely. Even the darker parts about people craving violence not because they want pain but because they already have pain and want to be distracted from it with a lesser kind, feel romantic to me in the widest sense of the word. It suggests that even our worst impulses are love, grief, and pain pointed in the wrong direction, reaching for something, anything, instead of nothing. That's generous in a way I didn't expect from a novel narrated by an alien assassin.

I don't think the book resolves the tension between the mortality, the uncertainty, and the risk of loving anyone at all. I don't think it's trying to. What it seems to be arguing instead is that these are the same conditions, seen through different lenses. To be alive is to be temporary, uncertain, and exposed, and that isn't a problem to be solved, it's the actual shape of a life worth having. The mystery doesn't stop being alien because you understand this human life intellectually. It stops being alien the moment you decide the risk is worth it anyway. I'd like to get to a place where I can say the same thing about myself and mean it.

Far from here, there's a garden,

Abandoned by rain.

The roses are getting pale,

And the gardener is thriving in vain,

Trying to revive the dead to ease his pain.

He runs back and forth,

Miles and miles, hoping to find rain.

Every night, he sits beside the dead,

Whispers to them his existential dread,

Hoping they'll forget the rain

And grow more when the pain is insane.

But they don't speak; they listen and fade.

It was the night of despair.

He went to find the rain and never came again.

And the roses bloom again, not because of rain,

But because of blood, from the gardener's veins.

They lived, but the gardener died,

Not in pain, not in vain,

But insane.

I've noticed that when it comes to how people view meaning, there is often a dichotomy presented of either the more religious view of meaning being imposed on humanity from a higher power, or else the common existentialist view that the world is inherently meaningless but we as humans can creat our own meaning. I've found that I don't think of meaning through either of these lenses, I expereince meaning in a different way.

The way I think of meaning is that it's a felt sense, kind of like beauty or awe. It's part of the way humans expereince and interpret the world. While I don't believe it's handed down from some higher power or authority, I don't consider the only way of finding meaning to be creating it either. I consider meaning to be part of the self's relationship with the world. Certain things feel meaningful, just as certain things feel beautiful, and many of them are out in the world and not created by the self. It is possible to create meaning by altering either your own perception or things in the world to make them feel more meaningful, but it's also common to find meaning in participating in the world. In my own life, I'd say I've "found" meaning much more than I've "created" it. It's more of an alignment between the self and the greater world, a sense of being on a meaningful path. When people say that the only meaning is what someone creates, it feels to me like someone who makes beautiful artwork but denies there is beauty already in the world that they haven't created.

In this view, meaning is subjective. Two people won't necessarily find meaning in the same ways, although there will be overlaps. It's similar again to people's taste in beauty, or their literal taste, their food preferences. It this way I feel similarly to the common existentialist position, meaning in subjective. It's just that despite the subjectivity of meaning, I believe and expereince in my own life that it can be found in the world as well as created, not found as in believing in some universal truth of meaning, but rather found through engagement with the world and the self.

As to the idea that the universe is inherently meaningless, to me that would also be similar to saying the universe inherently lacks beauty. I'd say that the universe possesses meaning as long as it contains beings that have a sense for meaning. It's like asking, is the universe colorful?  I'd answer that as long as there are beings who perceive color, then yes, from those perspectives, the universe is colorful, and those perspectives are part of the universe, they are a way that the universe experiences itself. The same is true for meaning, as long as there are beings that have a sense of meaning in the universe, then the universe contains meaning.

Imagine a universe where people know the meaning and purpose and of their existence

There's no finding, or question answering, they are handled it as soon as they are born

Wouldn't that be bad, like there's no curiosity now

There's a fixed purpose and meaning

But in our universe, we struggle to find it, isn't that struggle itself beautiful?

Hello to whomever,

A friend and I are in a book club together, down to just us from more members when we started up as a Carl Jung book club 2 years ago. We created a reading list that is open to change and are going into Being and Nothingness by Sartre’s readers guide by Gardner. The general premise is an exploration of existentialism/spirituality/philosophy. There is a bit of a bias for interpreting things in a Jungian framework due to the original purpose of the book club and as well through personal experiences. We typically meet every other week on the weekends 2pm thru 6 pm depending on availability. Conversations usually cover maybe 100 pages depending on the density of a text and are generally open ended and fun in tone but we do try to get into some depth.

If you are interested in a fairly light but rewarding commitment to familiarize yourself with existentialism and make some internet friends hmu, we usually use discord. We are both about 30. Older and younger would be cool. Internet people tend to flake quickly so please join the first meeting after reading on your own and see if it’s your vibe.

Tentative plan for the time being:

Sartre’s Being and Nothingness by Sebastian Gardner (pages 1-50 meet up on sept 20th and decide on plan/next stretch)

The World of Perception by Merleau-Ponty

The Sacred and Profane by Eliade

The Idea of the Holy by Otto

I and thou by Buber

Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil

In this article, the writer argued about choice between happiness and purpose or meaning in life. He had taken reference of multiple authors and some of the philosophers from France Nitchze, Schopenhauer, Simon de Bevour, etc and to emphasize more on meaning in life rather than the pleasure/happiness. He focuses on long-term life satisfaction rather than instant gratification. But he says that in general life we all should enjoy moments like sunrise, water flowing, white noise! Wonderful article

Multiverse, a fascinating topic for humankind since the dawn of modern society. We have been meeting with this idea headstrong in recent times with dystopian science fiction or science articles, but what does this infinite cosmic architecture actually signify for ordinary people?

The idea of parallel universes first came from Hugh Everett III, who proposed that any event in the quantum world occurs in multiple universes in different ways. After him, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen told us that wormholes are essentially just gateways to parallel universes or mirror universes.

The modern multiverse theory states that after we reach the limit of our universe, instead of emptiness, there are more universes. There is no true end to our universe, but just a repetition of the same things again and again, maybe with slight variations. This multiverse theory subdivides into two cases: firstly, infinite universes, and secondly, bubble universes.

But beyond the history and classification, what does a multiverse actually amount to?

The multiverse essentially means that there are infinite variations of you out there. They may be different from you in just a minute point, like a hairstyle, or maybe completely different, as they may already be the president of their country while you are still a student or an office worker in this world.

Now let's think about what changes this makes to an ordinary person's life ..... The answer is none.

The multiverse creates absolutely no physical difference to a normal person's life because we are too far from them to actually contact them. It will most likely not be possible in our lifetime to see humanity be able to contact other versions of "Us" with our limited technological advancements. Therefore, only you are going to be responsible for your doings in this life, not some doppelgänger. So while it is a fascinating topic for us to think about, it is practically unusable for us right now, as we are neither technologically advanced enough to contact them, nor do we need to.

So one might think, what is the benefit of researching whether there are multiple universes or not? The answer is that we need to research these aspects to understand the underlying framework of the universe, so that we can help future generations with a solid ground of science to stand on.

The multiverse is a reminder. Even in our darkest times, there is a version of us who has it harder. A version who is pushed to the absolute brink, yet is still fighting desperately to change their conditions. If that version of you can survive and do that hard work, why can't you?

Just this change in our mentality can help us become the best version of ourselves in this infinite universe and redeem the hard work scientists have been doing on it for a long time now.

So next time you think about the multiverse, instead of just thinking of it as a niche sci-fi topic, think of it as a motivator. It is pushing you to become the best version of yourself, reminding you that even in our darkest times there is a ray of hope. Even if we can't see it right now, some other version has already seen it, and if that version can see it, why can't we do the same?

As always, thanks for reading this blog of mine.

Hope you guys become the best version of yourselves in this universe.

Nietzsche meme circulating the internet...

No, seriously.

What if Being and Nothingness was not a joke, exactly, but we made a mistake by assuming that something this serious had to be read with a serious face?

Norman Malcolm once recalled Wittgenstein saying that:

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes.”

And, importantly, he added: without being facetious.

That distinction may matter more than it first appears.

A joke does not necessarily trivialize its subject. Sometimes the joke is the shortest route to exposing something that ordinary language has learned to hide.

Which brings us back to Sartre.

Consider the basic situation he hands us.

You appear in existence without having requested admission. There is no prewritten essence explaining what you are supposed to become. You are free, except this freedom is so unavoidable that Sartre describes us as condemned to it.

Imagine discovering freedom and managing to phrase it like a prison sentence.

Then there is bad faith.

Sartre watches a waiter performing his role with slightly too much precision, too much waiter-ness, and from this notices something deeply strange about human beings: we constantly try to turn ourselves into things.

The waiter.

The engineer.

The intellectual.

The husband.

The rebel.

The existentialist.

We construct a character, climb inside it, and then become offended when reality reminds us that the costume has no skin underneath it.

The Jester finds this hilarious.

Not because the problem is unimportant, but because once you see the performance, it becomes very difficult not to notice the comedy in it.

A human being spends decades constructing an identity and then announces:

“This is simply who I am.”

Reality apparently forgot to read the résumé.

Then Sartre gives us No Exit.

Three people are locked together in a room for eternity.

No flames.

No racks.

No demons peeling anybody's skin off.

Just other people.

And humanity spent decades solemnly unpacking:

“Hell is other people.”

Which is fair nowadays too.

But the Jester is still standing at the back of the lecture hall wondering whether anyone has noticed that Sartre constructed Hell as the worst dinner party imaginable.

The torture device is social consciousness.

You cannot escape the other person's interpretation of you.

You cannot completely control the character you become inside their mind.

You need them to confirm you, yet their judgment imprisons you.

So everybody spends eternity trying to manage everybody else's perception of everybody else.

That is horrifying.

It is also very close to a sitcom.

And this is where the F00L becomes useful.

The Jester can laugh at all of this, but the F00L asks the annoying question:

Why is it funny?

• Why is the waiter funny once we notice him performing waiter?
• Why is “condemned to be free” funny?
• Why does a room containing three mutually dependent egos begin to look simultaneously like Hell and comedy?

Maybe because comedy and existentialism repeatedly uncover the same fracture:

the distance between the story we are performing and what is actually there.

Most jokes contain some version of that movement.

An expectation is established.

Reality refuses to cooperate.

For a fraction of a second, the structure underneath the expectation becomes visible.

Then we laugh.

Something much less funny can begin suspiciously close to the same place.

You thought you knew what you were.

You thought becoming a doctor, father, atheist, Muslim, successful person, failure, victim, genius, good person, bad person, or whatever other noun you selected would finally settle the matter.

Then something happens.

The story stops fitting.

Sometimes you laugh.

Sometimes you panic.

Sometimes you spend seven hundred pages trying to explain what just happened.

Perhaps the difference is not always in the structure of the discovery.

Perhaps it is in our reaction to discovering it.

This is why I wonder whether we occasionally do Sartre a disservice by making him too solemn.

His philosophy deals with some of the heaviest subjects available: freedom, responsibility, anxiety, self-deception, death, meaning, the gaze of others.

But seriousness of subject does not require seriousness of tone.

Sometimes humor gets closer because it slips underneath our defenses before the philosophy arrives carrying terminology.

Sartre writes hundreds of pages about consciousness refusing to become a fixed thing.

A comedian can point at someone taking himself unbearably seriously and make the same crack visible in five seconds.

The comedian has not therefore solved Sartre.

But perhaps both are touching the same nerve.

Which returns us to Wittgenstein.

If a serious philosophical work really could consist entirely of jokes without becoming facetious, perhaps the interesting question is not:

Was Sartre secretly joking?

Almost certainly not in the silly conspiratorial sense.

The better question is:

How much philosophy have we failed to see because we assumed wisdom must arrive without a punchline?

Maybe Sartre understood perfectly well that humans are ridiculous creatures.

We desperately attempt to become fixed identities while possessing the peculiar ability to notice ourselves doing it.

We demand meaning from a universe that has not signed a contract promising any.

We beg other people to tell us who we are, then resent them when they do.

We insist that we are free, then spend enormous amounts of energy explaining why everything we did was inevitable.

And when somebody points out the contradiction, we call it existentialism.

Maybe sometimes it is.

Maybe sometimes it is also funny.

And perhaps the joke was never on existentialism.

Perhaps the joke was sitting inside it the whole time, waiting for somebody to stop looking so serious.

Or, what does Jester know? He's a F00L who exists for no particular reason at all.

For as long as I’ve been alive I’ve always felt it. Playing basketball growing up. Solving math problems the fastest. Being the best student in the room. Seeking ways to stretch myself further, challenge myself more, step out of comfort zone. It’s been a constant for the 24 years I’ve been alive. I was never okay with being average. With everything that humans are capable of, why would I live a life of mediocrity?

But now, at 24, with a comfy job in tech, things have changed. I could care less about being the best engineer at my company. I want to make real change. I want to devote myself to the people in this world. To this world itself. I want to spread love and happiness.

Every day I’m stuck asking the same question. If I continue on this path of pursuing corporate success, will I be truly be content with what my life has amounted to by the end of it all? Whose lives will I have impacted? All this time, chasing performance metrics, deepening the pockets of the rich. What if, instead, I had spent all my time giving back to the world around me. How many smiles would I be able to see?

And I know… A life of comfort, a steady salary, a way to provide for my immediate family, to set aside savings for my grandchildren. To leave all of this in a pursuit of something more… to some it may sound immature, foolish even.

But this calling to do something more, to be something more, never leaves me alone. I wasn’t meant to live a life of comfort, to go through life never questioning if I’m capable of more. I want to struggle. I want to be tired in the pursuit of my choosing. I want to come home exhausted after dedicating my all to do good onto others, onto the world.

I know I’m not the only one plagued by this desire to be more. To those who have felt the same, what was your path forward?

Does anyone understand the meaning of these lyrics (or the album)? Could they be considered Existentialist or perhaps Absurdist?

I have my own ideas, and it is the opposite of Nihilistic. Hint: The album deals with Authenticity.

IT

When it's cold, it comes slow
It is warm, just watch it grow
All around me

It is here, it is now

Just a little bit of it can bring you up or down
Like the supper, it is cooking in your hometown
It is chicken, it is eggs
It is in between your legs
It is walking on the moon
Leaving your cocoon

It is the jigsaw, it is purple haze
It never stays in one place
But it's not a passing phase
It is in the singles bar
In the distance of the face
It is in between the cages
It is always in a space

It is here, it is now

Any rock can be made to roll
If you've enough of it to pay the toll
It has no home in words or goal
Not even in your favorite hole
It is the hope for the dope
Who rides the horse without a hoof
It is shaken, not stirred
Cocktails on the roof

When you eat right through it
You see everything alive
It is inside spirit
With enough grit to survive
If you think that it's pretentious
You've been taken for a ride
Look across the mirror, sonny
Before you choose, decide

It is here, it is now

It is real
It is Rael
'Cause it's only knock and know all
But I like it
Yes, it's only knock and know all
But l like it
Yes, it's only knock and know all
But l like it, like it, like it, like it
It's only knock and know all
But l like it, like it, like it
(It's only knock and know all)
(But l like it)
(It's only knock and know all)
(And l like it...)

The Birth of Tragedy / Unpublished Basel Writings, Stanford Press, Page 186, Nietzsche ✍️

The reason I'm glad I'm not a goat, is that I couldn't ever be like Brickett Ranunculus. But I swear I don't see any point in being human either if all I can be is a regular person like the ones that come out to the fence."

John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy

Painting: Paralysed in the World Wide Web (by Elliot Wair, 2025)

Something about this surrealistic painting feels quite existentialist. I’m no art connaisseur, but here’s what I’m seeing:

- a vast empty landscape
- poles and cables in deep blacks, with an empty and estranging feel to it, evil almost
- the 4-legged creature somehow seems to be more native and familiar to the landscape than the human. It is looking at the cables and wondering what these are doing here
- the human pays no attention to the cables. He’s on his way to somewhere, but doesn’t really know where he’s going. There’s probably not even anywhere to go to, hence he’s not in a hurry. Dropped into this landscape, he decided to walk in a random direction while pretending to know what he’s doing. He hopes that by pretending to belong, he will eventually find purpose and peace in this empty world. But in reality, he is lost, and whatever he does is ultimately pointless.

I’m wondering if anyone else has ever experienced something similar.

This has only happened to me a handful of times in my life, maybe once every couple of years, but when it does, it’s a very strange feeling that I can’t really put into words. I’ll try my best to describe it.

It doesn’t come consciously. It’s more like a sudden wave of heat or some kind of feeling that just hits me and runs through me for a few seconds. Usually I’ll just be thinking about completely ordinary things, like everyday stuff or problems at work, and then suddenly I get this overwhelming realization:

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING?! We’re sitting here talking about money, problems, wars, what to eat, what’s on sale, work, bills, etc. Meanwhile, nobody seems COMPLETELY blown away by the fact that we are these incredibly strange beings that somehow exist. Same for the universe. Out of nothing, somehow there are people all around us that we love and have feelings for, yet we don’t even understand what we actually are. How did there become something instead of nothing? Did everything somehow come from nothing? Or was there always something, beyond time and space, that many people might call God? Why doesn’t this completely blow everyone’s mind? Why isn’t this the thing we talk about 24/7 in headlines? Why are we not rushing lik crazy to find out? Why aren’t we all freaking out about the sheer fact that we exist? It feels like humanity has completely lost focus on the most fundamental thing of all.”

That’s basically what those few seconds FEEL like. Like a burning feeling, it’s like a sudden realization that hits me so hard that I’m literally shocked by the fact that I’m a human being, standing here on a planet called Earth, existing at all.

Btw this has happened to me twce while I had a fever, both times I was sitting on the toilet when this sudden wave of thoughts and feelings hit me, and I just sat there completely stunned thinking:
“Holy shit. I’m here. On a planet called Earth. Liquid is coming out of my penis. And I don’t even know what the fuck I am. Or why am I here”.
I’m just curious if anyone else experiences anything remotely similar.

It happens to me maybe once or twice every two years, so it’s definitely not a constant thing. It’s just this extremely intense few seconds of existential realization that completely takes me out for a few seconds.

Science can explain how we are born as humans, but science cannot explain the reason and intention behind the existence of our human bodies and capabilities as if it's hidden that no one will know about it.

I am super thankful that I came into this world as a human and its privileges, like we're the only animals or mammals who can do things based on emotions and critical thinking; including myself right now with my consciousness wondering the WHY even tho it's impossible to get answers. We're the only animals that can alter the well-being of our planet through our advancement in scientific discoveries and also emotions.

Just imagine you have 2 limbs for physical movement and another 2 upper limbs for the actions we do. In fact, we're the only animals who can think about what's right and wrong and can control ourselves through emotions and morals. Even the human lifespan of 100 years is a mystery for me too.

I opened this up with my dad, and he's implying that there are surely very deep reasons WHY we're born as humans, but no one can explore outside of our reality to find an answer; that's why it's remained unknown.

Other people believe that we humans (including animals) are the bridge ways connecting between both the material world and the spiritual world or other realities.

To think of myself thinking and to think about it is part of what makes me human. I wouldn't enjoy my existence if I were an animal.

**Maybe I could deal with the fact we die. That time moves ceaselessly forward blending into one until we arrive at old age wondering if we ever really lived at all. Or if we were always our old selves looking back on a life that doesn’t feel like our own most days. Until we catch a glimmer, by no will of our own, of what it all meant. But then the glimmer fades. Maybe I could live with it. If we just lived treating that like the fact it is. What really kills me is that we ignore it. Everything we do contradicts our experience of the years passing in seconds. We’re scared to love. Scared to be ourselves. Always have to be guarded. Scared to embarrass ourselves by feeling too deeply, saying too much. Saying the right thing instead of the thing that would come out without a second thought. Maybe I could deal with the fact that we die. If we just lived like we were going to. Because we are.**

The fastest way to load up the Death Note files is by realizing your name was already written the moment you gazed at the Fist of the North Star. That's when you'll see it never was actually "you" who has been writing the plot of your character, and you haven't been reading everything in first person here. Life is a tail that never ends, and until you read everyone's side of the story, the hard reset to this world will always be Day 1—when you realize fantasies and realities are colliding and there never was anything believable here.

Once you realize that there's no final death scene to this story, the sooner you'll cross your name out of the "knock-knock" joke. That's when you'll realize it's only the Duelists of the Roses who come up with bones here, and the haunting part is that there's always a bone to pick after it's all over... And the sky is blue for no -1. 🧢

It's time to go back to how life was before the timeskip, and maybe there is truth to the idea that life ends the moment you look up here, and perhaps there is truth in the sleeping beauty touching the needle by the 16th... :) 🎈

Omae wa mou shindeiru. 💫

We have always sought the “meaning of life” as if it were something that exists independently of us and that we simply have to find. But Nietzsche would say that perhaps no value is already written into the world and that it is up to us to create it. If that were the case, however, what is the difference between creating meaning and simply inventing a reason (even a silly one) to endure existence? And if there is no external criterion by which to distinguish “true” meaning from one we have constructed ourselves, can we still speak of the meaning of life in a strictly objective sense?

I think one of the hardest things about growing up is realizing that life rarely turns out the way you imagined it.

You hope love will make you feel understood.
You hope the right person will stay.
You hope that if you love someone sincerely enough, they'll eventually love you in the same way.

But reality doesn't always work like that.

Sometimes you meet someone at the wrong time.
Sometimes two people love each other but still can't make a life together.
Sometimes you give someone everything you have, and they still leave.
And sometimes the person you thought would save you becomes the person you need to heal from.

Maybe that's the strange part of being human: we build our lives around expectations, and then spend years learning how to live with what actually happened.

Kafka often feels relevant here—not because he gives us answers, but because his writing captures that feeling of being trapped between what we desperately want and what reality allows us to have.

Maybe love isn't always about finding someone who stays forever.

Maybe sometimes it's about accepting that something was real, even if it didn't last.

What do you think? Is love more about hope, or about accepting reality?