Interlude

There I was, thinking I knew you, but when the wind blew over the water

the reflection I thought was mine faltered.

Fake

As I train myself to let go and remain neutral inside, I find the distance between me and people around me only growing further. But it's not people, it's me. Every single person I know seems to have hobbies, things they like to do, favourites, dreams, desires that are often widely found among people, making it easier, in a way, for them to bond with one another. These hobbies, favourite things, 'interests' or dreams make it possible for them to fit in more often than not because all these hobbies, favourite things and 'interests' repeat themselves randomly across the world. After all, we're part of the same species, and though we like to claim differences, we are mostly similar in essence. Even the need to feel different is part of a common human trait that can be found across the world in various people.

Depending on the pool of integrated 'interests', hobbies, preferences and desires a person has, it turns out easier or harder to make 'friends' and integrate within a group. The more generic the likes and preferences, the more likely the person will find themselves integrated within a larger group, whereas the more 'niche' the list of interests and hobbies, the more difficult it will be to find others sharing the same sort of niche list of interests and hobbies.

Well, that's nothing new. Being more like the majority means getting on easier with most because you share a lot in common with a lot of people.

I've realised for myself that I've grown rather empty already. There is nothing about me remotely attractive for any regular person out there. I mean really. I have no hobbies, no strong preferences in anything, no strong interests... nothing. I could sit in that chair just thinking all day and it would be enough for me. Sometimes I think about what I could do or try, but there is never a strive strong enough to make me want to bother. I'm like a blank slate inside that just doesn't 'take' in when it comes to further adorn my identity with composite elements such as likes and dislikes, interests etc.

I can be interested, of course, especially if it's something entirely new to me, but nothing ever seems to become a part of who I am, or that could ever define me.

I noticed that a long time ago, but until now I was never able to fully realise it for myself. You know how people will define themselves through the things they like and don't like, be it in a conversation or online? I remember once when I was still at university, I started going out with a few popular people in my year. One day, I ended up sitting in a pub with a couple of guys from that group of popular folks, and as I sat there wondering what the hell I'd talk to them about, one of them simply started asking me about my likes.

"So what kind of music you listen to?" asked one guy. I looked at him for a moment as I racked my brain for an answer... nothing sprung to mind in terms of 'favourite' because I liked way too many things without any particular preference for one or the other. I just enjoyed almost every genre rather equally for different reasons. As I looked at him, I picked my answer from the pool of all the types of music I liked without any higher degree of preference according to what I knew would probably fit it with his own high favourites. So I replied: "Radiohead, Kings of Leon...that sort of thing." And the guys nodded in approval at once, especially at the mention of Radiohead.

Depending on who is in front of me, I seem to adapt to what their bundle of interests is. It's often easy because while I have no strong preference in anything, I usually appreciate almost everything without any particular bias or strong interest, so I just pick whatever would fit with whoever is in front of me whose identity is just based on a bundle of strong preferences.

But what does that make of me? It means that every time I make 'friends' I'm actually playing a different role each time 'tailored' to a particular person... and it probably explains why I've ended up with a few friends, but all of them usually completely different from one another - so much so that I can never really gather a group of friends because they would be way too different from each other to get along or even relate.

For a long time, I used to accuse most people of being 'fake', but it was always me. Most people are at least consistent in terms of their core identity. They have a fixed set of likes and dislikes that can expend or retract over time, whereas I happen to be so open-minded that I have lost, or never really had, the capacity to be selective to create a core identity for myself, and I don't think that's a bad thing at all... it's just that this realisation makes all the difference now, because it finally sheds light on a lot of things at once for myself.

So whenever someone approaches me, I'll be tailoring myself according to them because most people are really just a bundle of likes and dislikes, preferences and interests, while I don't usually prefer anything, I can just like a lot of things equally for different reasons, and none of it is ever assimilated deeply to my own person, leaving me somewhat like a blank slate that I can construct in a certain way just to match another person's bundle of likes and dislikes, preference and interests.

Hence my inability to truly 'fit in'... because every time my core personality is just a made up 'doll' according to who's in front of me.

I have... no so-called personality. I'm just a rough outline upon which layers of interests and preferences can be loaded randomly depending on both my environment and the type of person I interact with. But as soon as I'm away from it, the layers vanish leaving me back with the rough outline that presents no strong interest for any particular thing.

Nowadays, I can't help perceiving people more like 'bundles' than 'real' people. It's hard to explain... it's like I've grown too aware of how much people build up their sense of identity like lego blocks in terms of defining themselves based on the things they like or don't like, their hobbies and interests. It seems to be needed to fit in within a group or society in general just to bond with others and create relationships, so I'm not saying it's bad. I just can't relate.

So long the idea of belonging, fitting in with what I never was in the first place.

Ego

No more poetry to be written, no more sweet-sounding words, hollow enemies of the mind. What is the mind anyway but part of the same prison Ego has constructed for us?

It's all an illusion. It may feel real, but it is not. Everything is caught up in a maze of neurons and sensors inside the brain while the rest of the body constitutes the bulk of the machinery to keep the whole going. Same goes for 'bigger' things like society or the 'world'. It all works pretty much in the same way fractals do.

My words aren't even my own. They are borrowed and drawn from the pool of some collective consciousness that remains intent on deceiving its subjects or 'parts' by instilling the overwhelming notion of Ego from the start.

There is NO 'I'. Not even the shadow of one.

If I am but a cog in the big machinery of the universe, then why must I be made to believe and hang onto the false belief that 'I' exist independently from the whole?

An ideal form of language, if there really must be a 'language' at all, would never have a first person. It would at best only have a third person that is undefined.

Everything about languages as we speak and write them today are a consciousness trap because languages are not made up as such by a group of people who sit down to think about it, they are or have become a mere reflection of the tenets within the collective mind that stick. Languages evolve mostly depending on what the collective mindset prefers to adopt in terms of ideologies, imposed meanings and beliefs at large. As such, languages become little more than a direct mirror of our belief systems and reinforce the prison within which all is trapped. To use any ready-made language is per se to inherit a whole set of pre-defined notions, beliefs, illusory understanding, etc - including most if not all the flaws accumulated within that particular language's collective mindset.

Why is English so popular and spreading so easily throughout the world? Why this one and not another? (Yes, Chinese is technically the most 'spoken' but not in terms of spreading power) That's at least partly because most of the world is being made to adhere to a certain collective mindset whose influence happens to either have come to existence or developed from the English speaking side. Sounds far fetched? Only because I'm not finding an efficient way to put my point across.

Language is the equivalent of a virus carrier within the mind.

Apart from that, I still don't know how to de-construct the Ego in me. How to kill it... I'll embrace emptiness and void if it means I have eradicated it. To be fair, I still can't see the good that would come out of it. As the sack of meat that is 'I' becomes emptier, I find it robbed of any joy, smiles or hopes. All that remains, more and more, is emptiness devoid of anything at all. How can that be good?

But I can't stop. The alternative for me is even worse, it would mean having to live in a fake world that is really just a prison of cheap senses.

Lost

Sitting in the dark, with only the light of a flickering candle to pierce the darkness... but there is no light within, only obscurity.

I feel absolutely empty, and not even words sound accurate enough anymore. Like a metronome, I still carry my self from place to place, I smile when prompted, I speak up when asked a question... but death is what I feel inside. Complete and utter emptiness within.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the elevator's mirror at work this afternoon, and for the first time in my life I saw the emptiness reflected in my very eyes. It's hard to explain, but it was there, staring back at me with a void and sadness no word can fully describe.

Even words no longer ring true... Nothing rings true anymore, and when I look at people in the street, as I stand against a wall for a cigarette, it all looks unreal. Just metronomes shaped in the form of human beings passing me by in a hurry.

God I feel so dead inside.

I feel like a puppet on strings who no longer cares to know what happens if the strings break. Everything feels so unreal... The world may be big, but I can't feel it. It feels like being trapped inside one of those snow globes they sell in gift shops.

I've been trying to drown my sorrows in various alcohols, but when it's not the pounding headaches gripping my mind, it's the intense waves of paranoia waking me up at night in a sweat.

I don't know what happened... something just snapped again out of the blue inside my head, except the inner bleeding feels like it's situated inside my chest, so heavy and painful.

I just want to be my self? It very recently occurred to me that I've never been my self, especially in instances when I thought I was.

I have never been my self.

I've tried and tried to find my self, let the 'true' self come through, but the more I tried, the more confused I grew, till only darkness started pouring out of me.

I have seen some seriously DARK sides within me. Disgusting, revolting, shameful... and for a time I embraced all those sides, each time thinking they made me 'I'.

But I was wrong...

There was never any self in the first place. Yet most of the world imposes the notion that it does exist, enslaving us to the useless pursuit of something that never was. But even as one realises that there is no such thing as a self, they have to face the emptiness.

I no longer want to find 'I' because the notion of 'I' has been toying with me for too long. I just want to let go of everything...

But if I let go of everything, even the futile attempt at finding 'I', then what will be left except complete emptiness? I don't know. But I've already reached a very scary stage...

I feel so awful inside... There are no words. I wish I could just plunge a hand inside my chest and remove whatever twisting rot is burning me from within.

And my eyes... they look so dead and empty now.

This can't be right... From self-awareness, which all human beings experience more or less, to the annihilation of Ego... for what?

How does it make sense to start off existence with the development of self-awareness only to need to destroy the Ego that feeds off and grow from the self-aware stage?

The User

I've been thinking about the notion of 'users', as in people who use others constantly for their own benefit often without even realising it, and how much a world's ethics based on greed and self-interest has been driving that trend.

It would be foolish to think that the way our world's ethics have developed isn't directly having an impact on the very way people turn out to be in life. More and more, life as a whole has become a race for consumption. A belief that each of us has a 'right' for almost everything has nurtured a society based on self-entitlement and expectations that ought to match our own, irrespective of the fact that our expectations may be wrong, deluded or contrary to the well-being of others.

We want what we want, and give no regard to anything else. We have a 'right' to want, and that's it. Everyone is out for themselves in a society that no longer exists in essence, but whose foundations are still there to give the illusion that it's still a society we live in.

Love has become this strange commodity that one can get and throw away at the slightest inconvenience. The notion that love is something deeply linked to responsibility and commitment has pretty much gone out of the window for a lot of people out there. People just want the easy part where it's all cuddly and nice, and as soon as the going gets tough, they can just throw it all away and move on.

It's particularly disturbing to me, I have to say. It's not even like I have a particularly strong sense of 'ethics' in life. I'm rather flexible, and tend to follow or dream about things that would make more sense than not. Things that would more likely bring a healthy balance than not.

Yesterday, I went to meet a friend of mine, thinking it was good timing that she'd called me to go to the movies with her since I had nothing planned and was feeling a bit down. I decided at once to go out and spend the afternoon with her and catch up on things. Just have a girls day out, you know, between old friends...

We met near the cinema where we used to work together, and went to have a burger and chips first. As we sat at a table in a corner, she started telling me how she was no longer talking to her other friends because they were so 'selfish' and always 'wanting things to be their way' without any regard as to whether it was good for her as well or not. I was listening, nodding my head as she said all this, and then she said something like: "Yeah, so I told them I wouldn't go out with them anymore. I said I didn't want to go to the movies with them this weekend anymore, and when they laughed and said I'd have to go on my own, I just told them I'd call you, so... in their face, right?"

I was struck for a second by the blatant fact that she'd just told me in my face that the only reason she'd called me was because she needed someone to go with her. She'd used me and told me in my face, and couldn't even see that she did, and yet there she was complaining about her friends doing that to her.

Talk about making you feel like the third wheel, here. But that's obviously the role I play with most people I know. Thinking back, they never call or text, or really want to be in my company unless there's a specific purpose that forces them to see me.

A few months ago, another of my 'friends' called me out of the blue. Her polite excuse was that she wanted to catch up, and then before I hung up the phone, she asked if I could lend her that pretty top I had because she was going salsa dancing. I said, sure, I'll bring it with me when we meet up, which I did.

Then I didn't hear from her for another 4 months or so... till she texts me again out of the blue and offers to go out for a drink and 'catch up'. I'm like, yeah, of course, that would be nice. So I go there to meet her, and we do have a nice time catching up, but the real reason for meeting up in the first place stares me in the face the whole evening: she needed to return the top.

This sort of situation where I'm reminded I'm always the third wheel or Billie no mates isn't new to me. It's the story of my life since high school, really. I've spent a good part of my last decade wondering what it is I do that alienates people so much from me, and I'm sure there are things I do or don't do that put me in that position. My lack of active social interaction doesn't help, in the sense that I don't actively seek to be in contact with anyone most of the time. But the reason I don't is because I just don't feel drawn to most people... they bore me, perhaps just as much as I bore them. There's this inherent incompatibility with the people I end up meeting, which is really at the core of why I can never fit in with them.

For a long time I used to think that perhaps I was just plain weird - but even the worst of weirdos make friends. Doesn't society love a so-called weirdo? Maybe I'm a mean person, but then again, don't people always feel more attracted to the bitch and the jerk of the village? Yes, they do. So... I ended up thinking that I was probably too boring, and it fitted with the fact that I just don't find what most people talk about 24/7 interesting that much. It's interesting, even fun at times, to gossip and make stupid jokes for a third of a conversation, but after that it just gets way too boring for words, I'm sorry.

So I've developed that inability to fit in with a lot of people because I don't really get what they talk about. I don't watch much TV, don't read the latest trends, don't follow sports, don't enjoy shopping, etc... so when people start mingling with each other and 'bond' I can never contribute, not only because I'm not interested, but because I really can't, since I don't follow what most of them do.

However, I recently started to make some effort just to have the basis of a mainstream conversation with people, you know. It's not really helping because now I've realised something else: people, for some reason, never wanted to listen to me at all. It's like whenever I open my mouth, people would rather ignore me or talk over me.

There I was thinking that my inability to make real friends, even to just 'fit in', was linked to my lack of conversation on trivial matters and gossip. But even as I found myself having things to gossip about, I realised that it didn't change the fact that whenever I interact with people, a chasm between me and them remains.

I've spent way too much time trying to close that chasm, and nothing worked. I just have to accept that there is something about me that makes it impossible to ever fit in. I have to accept that and start finding ways to cope and get used to standing alone in this life watching a world I don't belong to as though standing on the other side of a glass wall.

Twenty seven, twenty eight

Sites like Facebook are a good way to gather some sort of personal statistics based on the number of people you actually know on there. You can also keep track of predictions, such as the one made by my philosophy teacher when I was 18 and about to leave high school.

After spending a year teaching us the basics of thinking in depth using the logical side of our brains, the philosophy teacher ended his last lesson with a gloomy, dismissive outlook. He claimed we'd all have forgotten what we'd learned by the time we hit 25. By then, he claimed, all of us would be married with babies or careers to obsess over. That was the fate that awaited us all, he said. No escape. Every student in the class protested loudly at that point, accusing him of stereotyping people without knowing any better. I was petrified that his outlook could be right, somehow, but by then my life had turned upside down so abruptly that I also knew there had to be some exceptions to that rule of conformity.

"There are exceptions," I told my teacher, who sneered back at me dismissively. "No, really," I insisted, "There are always exceptions to rules, come on." He looked at me again and shrugged unwillingly. "Yes, there can be one or two, but no more than that," he said. He was the only teacher who knew me a bit better than anyone else in that school, which I'd joined for my last year of high school out of the blue a few weeks after the first term had already started.

The reason he knew a bit more about me was down to the fact that he was also my headteacher. When I started bunking off school and not attending certain classes (Latin and History) he was made aware of my repeated absences and confronted me one day after his lesson to threaten me with disciplinary action. That day wasn't a good day for me mood-wise, I'd tried calling my mother, but she wasn't answering, so all sorts of fatalistic scenarios were dancing inside my head by then (I lived alone in a foreign city where my new school happened to be but no one knew that apart from me and one girl I'd made friends with by then). As he threatened me, I got angry and words began to flood out of my mouth - how much I didn't care, because it was hard enough to find the motivation to go to school at all when you were accountable to virtually nobody. It's not that I didn't want to go to history class, it's just that the lessons were always so late in the afternoon that by then the temptation to just leave was too great to resist. As for Latin, I couldn't stand the teacher, so why should I force myself to endure it when I can simply not attend the class? All I had to do is keep walking past the classroom and leave school grounds. It was too simple and easy not to do it. And once you've done it once, it gets easier and easier because you realise no one is doing anything about it. Nobody is actually stopping you, because nobody can ever stop you in anything except yourself.

The teacher stopped threatening me and sort of blinked in surprise, saying he had no idea I was alone here. "How come you're alone in this city?" he asked, puzzled. What was I supposed to say that would be short enough to prevent the meeting from lasting a whole afternoon? I embellished my story, that's what I did, making it simpler for anyone to grasp, because even I couldn't make sense of what my life was at that point. I said: "My mother and I can't stand each other, so she sent me away to get to know some of my family over here. Unfortunately none of the family members in question live in this city, and we can't speak to one another because I don't know the language. So they dropped me off in the city with my luggage and drove off. Now I'm here."

The story seemed to have the effect expected and the teacher suddenly turned more sympathetic, no longer threatening that I 'had to attend classes, or else...", but instead urging me to 'try and attend classes' as much as I could. He also said something about how he'd assumed I was just another spoilt brat.

Anyway, to revert back to the last comments the teacher made on our last day of school with him...

Ten years have now passed, more or less, and his outlook turns out to be rather accurate, except his timing was off. Most people didn't conform completely by the time they reached 25, oh no. Modern times mean that 'clever' people now take longer to 'settle down'. They'll have spent the greater part of their 20s studying for pieces of paper that will then get them a steady foot on the ladder. Apart from a wrong timing, everything predicted seems to have materialised. And how could it not be the case? I guess it all comes down to whether you end up settling down with a career to keep you busy if that's a choice you derived for yourself. More often than not, though, people end up trapped in such settings not by choice, but according to social expectations because that's what you're expected to do. You're expected to get a good job, get married, have kids, do like everyone else is doing, basically. So you do it. Not by choice, but blindly according to what others expect and the pressure from seeing everyone else do it.

I wonder... Is it realistic to even think it's possible to lead a life derived from personal choice, or is it more likely that most will just lead a life derived from expectations? In other words, is it possible to lead a life for ourselves, or are we doomed to lead it according to others because others have ultimately become the symbol needed for our own validation?

What is success?

The world is full of positive definitions built around that one word. 'Success, succeeding, successful'... They have the same term in French, borrowed from English, "succès", even though the French have their own word for it, like "réussite".

Ask anyone around you, they'll all tell you the same thing: success is good. It means you're doing something right... right?

Or is it?

If anything, the notion of success is nothing more than the translation of peer acceptance as to a person and/or an action. In other words, success is nothing but a majority-based agreement that, for better or for worse, decides on whether something is a success or not, or whether a person is successful or not.

But that's easy. Almost anyone could derive such a basic conclusion. The more interesting point to be raised is this: what is the cost of success as the world, or a society, recognises it?

In this modern world, everything is about succeeding in something. It really is, even when one thinks he/she 'only' aims to get a better life by getting a better job, for instance. That means, really, that the strive is to be positively validated by as many people as possible (majority-based agreement) or by a specific group of people within a specific area as found in the notion of 'career' - let's call this a 'niche-based agreement' even though the intrinsic meaning remains the same: the notion of success is absolutely subjective and only exists based on other people agreeing on what it is and whether it exists or not.

How many other words or notions, beliefs or dogmas, rest on such absolutely rooted subjectivity? Quite a lot. In fact, so much so that it would be enough to prove most of the world is built on human illusions stemming, perhaps, from over-developed minds compared to our chimpanzee neighbour.

So what is the cost of success, this one notion that prevails in our world today? The cost seems to be to forsake all other notions or ideals to reach it. This means spending one's existence running blindly after it - therefore doing nothing more than seeking others' validation. The fact that others' validation often brings rewards is often incentive enough to go for it.

We are wired to long for the notion of success from the moment we start going to school at the very least. Tiny children who can't read and count yet are 'innocently' asked to draw pictures and the likes, and then a figure of authority - a marking figure in a child's mind - gathers them all in a nice little circle to elect which one was best, for example. It then gets worse and far more obvious as the children grow up and made to compete for the best grades. Those who seemingly don't care about such things as grades are usually those who have been scarred by a figure of authority at some point or other - be it at home or at school. They may deviate from the norm here, but often will find alternative ways to continue developing the competitive streak in them, such as taking a liking for sports, or even just to beat their friends at whatever game or task. Or even to be the best at simply not doing the 'right' thing, ie: crime, anti-social behaviour. No matter how you look at it, it can always be found rooted in the notion of succeeding over others because success giving way to endless competition to reach it is the prevalent notion from the start.

How can education as we know it not be all about conditioning mind in such ways? Anyone looking back on their time at school would probably agree that most of the testing they had to go through, all these endless grades that were hyped as the most important thing in one's life, actually have no bearing on real life once they become adults. Did it really matter to get a A on that science project when I was 12? What about all the grades I had to study for throughout the year, every year that constituted my education years, when I was made to believe they could make or break me? 99% of them had no use in the real world.

Sure, most could say such techniques as testing are meant to assess learning. That's the lie right there. The lovely subterfuge to allow for the conditioning of minds from the weakest point in time in terms of human consciousness - childhood, where minds are easily moulded and influenced without any notice of it.

A lot of people would be inclined to conclude that being competitive and striving for success is just what we do naturally, because it's part of our make-up, so to speak. But how can this be when the base is already being manipulated, meaning that everything was already set up to encourage us to develop in that way, with very little room for any alternative way of development?

If I were to make a science experiment involving looking at the behaviour of a virus or bacteria under the microscope, but placed in that sample another element that will thwart its natural or innate behaviour, could I be allowed to claim that whatever behaviour I then get to observe is bound to be its natural behaviour? No, I would have to start over with a base sample that removes any external factor that could influence the outcome of that experiment so as to be able to have a basic observation of that entity, and then be able to compare its basic behaviour with the way it adapts when I add external factors.

The same is true with the way we constantly draw conclusions as to who or what we are in essence. We constantly base conclusion on an already spoilt base - meaning we have no chance of truly finding out about what human means unless we stop conditioning ourselves.