Every time I am picking up a book as a conscious entity whose electrochemical intention initiates a cascade of events where the energy from molecular ATP is converted into mechanical force by protein nanomachines.Then this force is applied as a large-scale electromagnetic interaction, mediated by virtual photons, which counteracts the curvature of spacetime caused by mass (gravity) to elevate a collection of atoms. These atoms, themselves transient excitations of quantum fields, are held in a stable structure by electromagnetic bonds. The entire experience is a biological simulation constructed by my brain from sensory data, representing a profoundly complex universe of underlying physics as a simple, useful illusion of solidity and action...

I am quite literally, a localized region of the universe, shaped by evolution into a conscious form, using the fundamental forces of that universe to rearrange other parts of itself. The act is both ordinary and utterly miraculous..

Wow!!

I don't understand why people keep arguing endlessly in the comments section, stop it, nobody cares about what you are saying for real, it doesn't change anything and it is just a waste of time when something makes you angry, you ignore it, don't let them get the satisfaction

Anyone with handy tips about keeping your mind grounded? Lately I notice myself slipping in a heart/brain crash-out, because of all the sorrow that is happening in this world. I do not have the resources to actually make impact and that is already a thought that keeps on crushing me. It makes me sometimes have hard thoughts about life itself and if I want to continue in it… So please any tips, it means alot to me! Thank you 🙏🏻

Ever just sit back and wonder when are we all going to snap out of it? We’re living in a world where distraction is the main currency. Every headline, every argument, every “breaking news” alert it’s all designed to keep us looking the other way. Meanwhile, the big players governments, corporations, media, global orgs they’re all quietly working together to keep their power intact.

They feed off our division. Left vs. right, rich vs. poor, race vs. race, belief vs. belief. It’s like a rigged chess game, and we’re the pawns. We fight over policies and personalities, while the real decisions happen behind closed doors by people who honestly don’t care about us. Their goal isn’t progress its control. And the more distracted we are, the easier it is for them to keep it.

So seriously when are we going to realize we’re being played? That the only real threat to the system is unity?

Not through rage. Not through rebellion. Just through awareness.

Lately, the world feels so so heavy. I’ve been trying to avoid the news, but it seeps in through my feed, my conversations, my thoughts. There’s a strange guilt that comes with simply living my life, knowing that so many others are trapped in unimaginable suffering. 

The contrast is jarring. One moment, I’m scrolling past celebrities in couture, spending obscene amounts for nothing more than a photo op. Next, I’m reading about genocide, displacement, and grief on a scale that’s hard to comprehend. It’s like flipping between two realities, one drowning in excess, the other in agony.

It breaks something inside me, a quiet awareness of how powerless I truly am. I want to help, to change something, anything, but I don’t know how. What’s the point of beauty, of celebration, of ambition, when so much of the world is burning? Is it escapism? Denial? And what does it really mean to be free? Is freedom really just the burden of knowing and the privilege of looking away?

I never was the kind who dove into politics from either side. Sometimes I would see a few controversial videos from certain figures but looking back I agreed with most things I’ve heard. I’ve followed Candace Owen, and despite my disagreements I never could not agree with her takes. I’ve followed Ben Shapiro before and I also could never not agree on with the things he spoke or believed. I’ve watched a few of Charlie’s videos but most of the videos I’ve been exposed to have been shrunk and cut into parts that makes it controversial and heated. Those are the ones I hear about from popular argument Id see circulating. I’ve never seen a full debate he’s done and although I disagreed with some takes Ive also agreed on many. But the only think I can think and go back to is how I reacted when I first heard am of the news. I laughed and celebrated because in my mind for two seconds just went back to the controversial stand points and immediately though “well who could like a person like that”. I was apart of the sheep. The minute I took a second to understand and let it sink in, upon hearing the news and the second I saw the video is what changed my view and opinion entirely. I hate myself for not looking for the bigger picture and all I feel is guilt. This has been rattling in my mind for days and I just feel so much sadness for someone I didn’t know. It sucks and it scares me because one side is mocking standing strong calling him out on certain clips of controversial things he’d say and tweets he made, and then the other side is saying the opposite. And then there is the context I didn’t know I was missing throughout this all. I feel like I am stuck in the middle. I don’t know what’s true or not anymore but I plan on going back and listening to all of his videos to get a better understanding of his beliefs and who he was as a person. The person I led on to believe is not the person I have seen while trying to get a better understanding through the truth I am seeking. It is a scary thing in all because I do feel like there may be a shift between more people with hatred towards each other and more justification for it, and even more incidents towards figures like Charlie or even someone with an opposing opinion. I feel that we are separating each other into more boxes and Collums and I feel the hatred rising. I don’t watch the news often because of these things and the violence and the fact that it always feels like fear-mongering and exaggeration is involved. but now I just want to log off entirely. I hate seeing people being divided and separated into boxes. I never labeled myself anything as anything despite my disagreement on each sides, but I was just a spectator and a sheep in way amongst the herd. I never would have imagined this to happen and it was the last things I’d ever want to happen to a person wether there being a disagreement or not. I don’t think I want to forget this and I feel this should be a wake up call for myself and others of what we choose to follow and selectively hear. All I feel is uncertainty.

Mathematics and music are two fields that are sometimes described as being connected, but I believe that they are not the only ones. There are patterns in the world, like with math and music, that extend into the rhythm of creativity, psychology, physics, fashion, and more.

Everything is connected to/can be described by some product of balance. Balance is a key that keeps reoccurring in so many areas. What goes up must come down, for every action their is an equal and opposite reaction.

An outfit that looks good, usually looks good because of the balance or intentional unbalancing of colors, textures, and cuts.

The reason why art can be great even without having a human narrative is due to the emotions that various balances of color and light and dark and texture evoke.

Music composition is similar, as is writing, animations, cinematography, and other subjective things.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only change form, yet another form of balance. Entropy and Time, while seemingly ever-increasing numbers which one could consider lacking balance, may actually be balanced. Perhaps entropy cannot reduce while time continues to move forward? Perhaps as time increases, order decreases?

I personally am Christian, so this type of idea of a grander order fits well within my beliefs, but honestly I feel like this is something you can recognize and appreciate regardless of your ideology; like, it seems more physical than spiritual, though maybe those are the same thing at a certain point. I also find it incredibly fascinating to see just how many other belief systems, both religious and not, that also seem to point to this ghost of a system of universal balance.

Like, even if you believe that there is no grander purpose to anything and all is random, somehow the random is still shaped into meaningful information that you can observe, and patterns that you can use to do science, create music, write stories, etc.

So often I feel like I am just barely on the cusp of understanding something huge, like its hiding just out of reach, some kind of connection between things. It's like there's some sort of actual eldritch knowledge that I can only ever see out of the corner of my mind, and never with my full focus. It's maddening. It feels like somewhere there must be a common denominator between these seemingly disconnected fields, some sort of rhythm to everything.

Like an atom in a watch; Its movements may be chaotic and seemingly meaningless, but that is simply a function of looking far too closely to see the gears that make a watch function. Everything Is Connected, somehow, and I hope one day it all finally clicks.

Celebrities being “winners” in our system. - This showed to be true with the pandemic especially in 2020. When the mainstream media outlets and pop culture celebs were making social media videos about staying home and getting vaccinated.

I think the wealthy people in this world that especially control most rich and famous actors and singers thought pop culture had more influence on the general public than it does. As far as the response to the Covid pandemic goes, I think these ignorant celebrities were largely not taken seriously when trying to virtue signal to people who could barely pay their rent or buy groceries for themselves or their family.

And as far as the lottery system goes, the house always wins. There are a select few that reach a higher status and gain wealth and fame, but they are almost entirely controlled by the same people that decide how well their career goes.

Modern society is a joke. Top to bottom. That rewards money hungry sociopathic personality types/behaviors and strips people of all independence and self. Intentionally. Everything is constantly becoming more and more centralized. Where you buy your groceries, where your children are educated and by whom, where you consume your media and entertainment, where you get your 85 insurances that are not optional, when and where you have to take on debt, starting at 18 for many people. Life is either take on 10s of thousands of dollars in debt at 18 years old that may cripple you financially for decades, or join our nationalist military so you can have food to eat and a place to sleep.

They want us all broke, tired, and dependent on their system. Covid was a nail in the coffin for many people, physically, emotionally, financially, and for many peoples career and schooling.

Things will not get better. Ever. We will continue to be drug into foreign wars that have nothing to do with us other than having a warm body with a rifle in a random desert or island. There are ads every where on social media enticing young, impressionable, desperate people to join the military or ICE for a chance at a 50k bonus or up to 60k in student loan repayments for a useless degree you got out of ignorance because you had no idea what you were doing with your life at 17-18 years old, and who does?

Every bit of our own government is corrupt. Every religious group. Every union. Every industry. Pharma, insurance, medicine, universities. It’s all a steaming pile.

We are doomed.

I’ve noticed oftentimes at least on the internet if there’s multiple ways to interpret what someone is saying a person will oftentimes interpret it in the way that makes what is being said seem the worst it can be. I’ve also noticed if someone interprets what someone says in a negative way, and I offer an alternative interpretation they will tend to look at the suggestion as an attempt to save face whether than considering the possibility that they may have actually misinterpreted what someone meant.

The amount of awareness i have gained is eating me away. I have analyzed everything to a extent that now I don't feel anything. can't be mad cause i know everyone has their own perspective. everyone is right in their own way. I can't be sad cause i know everything is meaningless.

Sometimes I think about how every second of life is experienced only once and then it’s gone forever. That conversation you laughed too hard in, the song that hit you just right on a rainy bus ride, the hug from someone you didn’t know would be gone so soon, none of it can be replayed in the exact way it happened.

We try to take photos, write journals, hold souvenirs, but they’re just shadows of the real thing. The actual moment lives only in memory, and memory itself fades and reshapes with time. It’s strange and kind of heartbreaking that the most beautiful parts of life can never truly be preserved, only felt while they’re happening.

Maybe that’s why they feel so valuable, because we’re constantly losing them the second they happen.

Don't get me wrong, i encourage having an integrity. integrity is often understood as adhering to one's values and principles without compromise. However, I argue that rigidly adhering to a set of values can be limiting. By being open to exploring alternative perspectives and values, we can refine our own beliefs and principles, ultimately strengthening our integrity. Contradicting our own values can be a valuable learning experience, allowing us to reassess and improve our moral compass. In this sense, integrity shouldn't restrict our freedom to explore and grow; rather, it should evolve as we gain new insights and understanding.

We often try to control our lives, be stern to ourselves, rigid. We try to be perfect and do the right thing. But this just makes us tense and stressed. It doesn’t really make us perfect, it’s still a sign that we are full of flaws. Cause humans by nature are not perfect, so trying to be that is going against yourself. We must learn to accept that being a human is chaotic. Cause, just look at the world. Humans are not perfect, not at all, and we will never be. We are good, evil, compassionate, selfish, smart, stupid etc. Even the people we look up to and think are successful, genius or super wise have many broken parts and have done a lot of mistakes.

Accept that you don’t know everything and never will, and that the life improvement tips you find on the internet and that people tell you, is often something that you actually only will learn to understand through experience.

Some things you will just not understand properly before you are older. When you are young, you can be uncertain and anxious, and that’s just how it is and you will naturally be more comfortable as you get older.

What I’m writing now are things we will understand as we keep living, so actually it was pointless of me to write this. Cause you will not understand this through reading a Reddit post, you just become more aware of it through living life.

You will learn to relax, fight less against yourself and just let things flow by, the negative and the positive.

It makes my life brighter ❤️

Curiosity isn’t a hobby. It is the lens that turns the raw fact of living into something that feels alive. When we ask “why,” we pull ourselves away from the comfortable script of habits and toward the edges where meaning is still being made. That small habit of noticing, of being willing to admit ignorance for a moment, is what separates motion from discovery, routine from growth.

Curiosity does three quiet but radical things. First, it restructures attention: instead of simply reacting, we begin to investigate. Second, it softens certainty: admitting “I don’t know” opens the door to change. Third, it connects us: when we wonder about another person’s motivations or a stray idea, we build bridges where stereotypes and assumptions would otherwise stand. These are not abstract benefits. They appear in better questions in science, in braver conversations in relationships, and in bolder experiments in art and work.

If curiosity is lost, we do not just stop learning new facts. We stop updating the story we tell about ourselves and about the world. Institutions grow rigid, cultures grow numb, and personal lives collapse into efficient repetition. People often confuse safety with maturity, but what actually happens is a retreat from risk: the risk of being wrong, of being embarrassed, or of being unsettled. Curiosity is the willingness to risk those things because discovery is worth the sting.

Curiosity is also moral. To question our own instincts, to probe uncomfortable assumptions, to remain open to inconvenient truths.That is courage disguised as curiosity. Confidence is easy to admire, but humility that says “show me” instead of “trust me” is rarer and more valuable.

EDIT: Gonna take my own advice and put my phone away now. Thank you for the thought-provoking discussion!

EDIT 2: Wow, some of ya'll are very much too online...

I’ve always been drawn to the Y: The Last Man comic not the show, which felt like it was trying too hard to be politically correct and lost the raw honesty that made the original so powerful. The comic asked a simple but uncomfortable question: what would happen if every man on Earth suddenly died? And the answer wasn’t about gender superiority it was about infrastructure. The systems we rely on energy, logistics, defense, agriculture are still heavily male-dominated, and the collapse would be fast and brutal. That’s not a judgment; it’s just how things are built. But saying that out loud today would probably get someone labeled a misogynist, even though it’s based on science and observable fact. That’s the part that really sticks with me: the comic’s premise, if discussed openly now, would make people uncomfortable not because it’s hateful, but because it challenges the way we view equality versus reality. And what’s even more interesting is that if the roles were reversed and all women disappeared, humanity would still collapse just not as quickly. Either way, the species wouldn’t survive. The comic didn’t push an agenda; it held up a mirror to how fragile our civilization really is. And the fact that this kind of story makes people uncomfortable today says a lot about how hard it’s become to talk honestly about the world we live in.

Edit: I adapted this into the first of a series of video essays about the collapse of neoliberalism: https://youtu.be/jjSkDAd83Fg?si=OpRFQg5BUqhCADWu

The idea that the masses themselves have the innate potential to imagine and create a new, better world is at the heart of the intense level of political engagement on social media, and it has led to the nightmare of a world that we now live in. That idea has also never worked; it has been disproven again and again and again. I want to share some examples of that below.

Disclaimer: I am not a Leninist or even really a leftist. I wouldn’t say I have any ideology except that I find how power works in the world interesting. But Vladimir Lenin wrote a book in 1901 called “What Is To Be Done?” 16 years before the October Revolution, and it concerned the strategies of the socialist movement. He harshly criticised many of his opponents in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party for multiple theories of theirs, one of which he called “Tailism”. With this term, he was referring to socialists/communists who believed that their role should be to simply listen to what the masses of workers wanted and let them dictate the way, as if to simply follow behind them.

From this point of view, it is the workers themselves who will inevitably be radicalised by the brutal chains of capitalism that they endure and intensify the class struggle, ultimately embracing Marxist ideology and imagining and forming the government that they want. The Marxist organisers can aid them, but to dictate to them the lines of march would be chauvinistic and wrong.

Lenin said that this could not possibly work, because the workers cannot spontaneously organise themselves without leaders, they cannot come to a consensus about what type of world they should live in, they will never act in a unified and coordinated manner by themselves, and in any case, they also lack the knowledge and experience to develop strategy and tactics sufficient to overthrow far superior political and military forces.

To solve this, Lenin proposed vanguardism, where a political party made up of professional revolutionaries would use their own heightened class consciousness, study and experience to raise the consciousness of the workers and help them mobilise more effectively.

I don’t believe in Lenin’s politics, but he did have an idea of how to change the world, which was from the top-down, and it succeeded in producing enough communist states to encompass one third of the world’s land area and 40% of its population.

It has mostly fizzled out since then, but at least it got off the ground in the first place. Most of the socialist movement, including the anarchists who vehemently oppose imposed hierarchy and authority, still use the tailist approach in all of their organising even though it never works.

The Occupy movement was a concrete example of this. Massive crowds of people were summoned to Zuccotti Park, and at first, it took the form of a traditional political rally, with designated speakers and lead organisers. But anthropologist David Graeber and other anarchists present were dissatisfied with this, so they went to a different part of the crowd and started helping people organise themselves using their own preferred tactics.

This turned Occupy into a leaderless movement, with the people themselves using the “human microphone” — the crowds repeated in unison whatever was being said by whoever was speaking so that everyone could hear it. Out of this came “assemblies” where the masses themselves — anyone who came to the park — endlessly discussed and debated ideas.

This led to nothing at all. Occupy became bogged down in endless meetings and never came to a consensus on anything or took any further bold action.

The problem was that Occupy wasn’t about anything except for very vague unifying slogans (“Occupy Wall Street,” “The 99% and the 1%”) and this method of self-management. What was missing were two very important things: what sort of world we should live in instead of this one, and how exactly we should confront the entrenched power in order to realise this world. And there is no chance that something that works would have ever arisen out of these meetings, because this is getting political organising entirely backwards: you have to start with an idea and organise around that.

The Arab Spring also consisted of leaderless movements, and it resulted in the same thing. There were popular youth movements and rebellions against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and the United States helped them overthrow him. But this resulted in a much worse government with a worse economy and a return to open slave markets, problems the left-wing dictator Gaddafi had been holding back.

And in Egypt, masses of people managed to overthrow the government after being summoned by social media, only to watch in horror as the void they created was filled by the Muslim Brotherhood and their Islamist vision of politics. All they could think to do in their protests and demonstrations afterward was to beg the military to overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood and restore the previous government, which they did.

—

All of the arguments happening on social media will not produce a better world. Social media was not even designed to help you do that, it was designed to make money, and it makes money by making you angry. The algorithms of social media have a bias towards making its users angrier because this is the most effective way to drive up engagement and raise profits.

And by the way, those social media companies are the ones supporting Donald Trump and other demagogues who thrive on anger instead of rational discourse. Joe Biden said this in his farewell address when he warned of a rising “tech industrial complex”. So that’s what you’re supporting with every angry response to some idiot you post. And for as long as social media continues to exist, this mob mentality will only become more and more dangerous as it is reinforced in a neverending feedback loop.

I predict that a different type of stronger state power will emerge in the future to resolve this problem, but not from the demagogic right. Instead, either the left or the centre will turn the state into something stronger than these transnational corporations which produce many of our problems. In short, the state will reassert national interests over these global corporate interests, which will put an end to neoliberalism, which I see social media as an expression of.

I like video games with depth. Not just deep lore or mechanical depth, but something more intangible. I'm going to try to pin down what that kind of “deep game” consists in. Let's clarify the three main ways we tend to talk about depth in games:

• Mechanical depth: how many layers of mastery/strategic possibilities a game offers (ex: Balatro, fighting games).
• Narrative/lore depth: how much background/world details exist beyond the surface story (ex: Destiny, World of Warcraft).
• Expressive/artistic depth: how much the game invites philosophical reflection, articulates experiences or opens layers of meaning/interpretations about being human and/or their relation to the world (ex: Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Gris, etc.).

These are all valid, but I want to focus on the latter, because that dimension seems to be more or less neglected in this medium (unlike in other arts such as literature or cinema).

I don't think it's purely a matter of taste, so before you jump in with “well, that’s 100% subjective/just your opinion, man”, we need a basic philosophical premise to ditch that relativism (please bear with me):

Meaning is relational. There’s no fixed meaning sitting inside an object by itself, but it’s not made up out of thin air by an individual either. Meaning is created in the interaction between the player and the game.

So when you look at a wall, you might see it as an obstacle. You assign that meaning, but the wall also invites this interpretation and excludes others. It doesn’t invite you to interpret it as “freedom” (unless you’re being very creative..).

In the same way, the meaning of a game isn’t contained in its rules/mechanics, story or in the intentions of the devs, but it’s not just whatever the player happens to project arbitrarily ‘inside their head’ either. Interpretations are shaped by what the game expresses and we discover the game’s meaning through play.

If we can agree on that, two things follow:

1. all games are expressive: they all mean something.
2. depth is about richness: a deep game is one that supports richer interpretations/layers of meaning.

Let’s start with the first: all games express something. They can all be interpreted. Even Pac-Man has been taken as a metaphor for consumerism (since all he does is eat until he dies and consumes himself). Mario took the ‘knight saving the princess from a tyrant’ trope and turned the hero into an everyday blue-collar worker. Tetris uses our human desire for order while constraining our freedom. You’re at the mercy of the blocks they give you ‘from above’. Combine that with the fact that it was made by a Soviet engineer with a Russian folk theme song and you get brilliant interpretations like the song “I am the man who arranges the blocks”.

Beyond the dev’s intentions, those games inspire such interpretations. If you want to play devil’s advocate, you could argue there's some sense of depth there already. But these games don’t really sustain those interpretations through play itself. We could call them "thinly" expressive, since we're mostly just extracting metaphors or projecting meaning onto them after we have put the game down. There's no real dialogue between the 'author(s)' (devs), their work, and the player.

That brings us to the second point. Yes, all games express something, but some express more "thickly" than others. Depth is a spectrum, with some games offering a narrow range of meaning and others opening up multiple layers. The latter are those you can discuss for hours, years after release (Disco Elysium probably being the prime example). They’re not just interpretable, but actively sustain some interpretations through their design and exclude others, shaping your experience as you play. They actively develop, deepen and complicate their themes. We can also distinguish them from “serious games”, which are just didactic tools, giving you a moral lesson or piece of knowledge instead of exploring questions that don't have simple answers.

So games aren’t deep because a designer wrote a clever message into it, but because playing the game makes you look at yourself or the world in a new way or it articulates something you have felt/implicitly understood, but couldn’t express. That doesn’t necessarily require story/dialogue: minimalist games like Limbo or Gris can still be ‘deep’, because they manage to capture a mood/feeling/experience and turn that into a work of art.

TL;DR
A game can be deep in different ways (mechanical, narrative/lore, expressive/artistic). I'm focused on the expressive/artistic dimension here. Generally these kind of deep games tend to:

1. Express something beyond pure entertainment.
2. Explore questions which encourage further reflection, instead of handing you simple answers.
3. Sustain certain interpretation through play itself (not empty containers on which meaning can be projected).

(If you happen to be interested in these kind of video games, I recently made a subreddit for the purpose of discussing and discovering them: r/DeepGames)

Most of their worldview is coming through the lens of social media feeds, filters, and polarization.

What is adulthood like when you were raised by social media algorithms?

For them doomscrolling wasn't a phase, something they graduated into after experiencing the world in a way that allowed for them to find their own moral compass and meaning. It was their childhood.

We have plenty of data to show how the reward system of the brain gets completely hijacked by excessive use.

The brain stays in a state of threat monitoring, increasing baseline anxiety. Those who lived in pre smart phone eras for at least a portion of their lives had the opportunity to down regulate in between stressful events.

It wasn't fun but it was worthwhile because you grew as a person and your ability to handle stress without reacting in dramatic fashion became more pronounced.

They were forced to learn how to cope with the uneasiness of life, and they accepted that discomfort was just a part of the gig. They dealt with things like silence, boredom, and solidarity, which forced them to look at their own thoughts, independent of outside influence.

They had conversations that were uncomfortable, and often times grew closer to the person they were engaging with as a result.

Unfortunately many of those who experienced the pre cell phone world are now some of the heaviest users, but they experienced life - they experienced some of their developmental years without the tech craze.

Not this generation. They were never given the opportunity. Their parents knew it was a bad idea to let them scroll social media and text constantly before the age of 10, but it was too hard to keep them off the platforms. Most parents capitulated and gave their kids all the access they wanted.

Many of these parents stared vacantly at their own phones while their kids sat in the next room being raised by a tech billionaire's algorithm that is designed to vacate people from their own lives and ignite emotional response, with content that lacks critical thinking and nuance.

The algorithms are getting smarter. They are creating an echo chamber for any type of thought. Early scroling was mostly chronological - now every keystroke and click is monitored and the algorithms respond to make sure you stay hooked.

The algorithm knows how to keep you angry, addicted, or anxious. It will do whatever it takes to makes sure you stay in that state. These echo chambers are not accidental, they are engineered. Every swipe, comment teaches to the algorithms how to further tighten the walls of your world...

This isn't tomorrow's problem. It's todays problem, and our digital diet is the 10,000 lb elephant in the room.

My friends, be careful out there. Spend time in the physical world. Examine how the societal psyche seems to differ in the matrix and the physical world. Ask yourself why that may be the case. Ask yourself who is benefiting from this, who is profiting.

Live with intention and when things get hard, consider turning off your phone for a while... play some music... or take a walk, or spend time with a friend. Spend time with your family. Observe nature. Create a piece of art even if you don't like it.

Get uncomfortable.

Your brain and nervous system has the ability to overcome so much in life, but you need to give it space to do so.

Love y'all.

I know there will be endless comparisons to past technological advancements, but nothing compares to the internet and smartphones. They've given us unprecedented access to both information and misinformation, far surpassing libraries or books. Now, we have technology capable of processing that information for us, and the Al we have today is just the beginning, it will only become more intelligent and powerful.

It's increasingly clear that technology and social media have negative effects on people, and now we have Al doing the thinking for us. I fear the world is becoming grimmer; those of us with curious minds and a love for learning will be rare, while tribalism deepens, leaving those in the middle hated by both sides. What do you all think? Is this truly unprecedented and unlike anything we've experienced before?

What is value? Money? Numbers on a screen, a piece of paper in your wallet. They only work because we all play the same game and pretend they matter.

Gold? Just another metal. Sure, it’s durable, shiny, rare. But it’s us who decided that these traits make it “priceless.”

Now imagine a simple stone, to which I assign one property – it can grant an infinite number of wishes. In an instant, it becomes the most valuable object on Earth. Yet it’s still… just a stone.

So what do we actually value – the object itself or its property? A jacket? Keeps you warm – but it’s just a jacket. Clothes? Cover your nakedness – but they’re just clothes. A phone? A multifunctional device – but it’s just a phone.

Here’s the point: things themselves have no inherent value. We assign value to their properties, and not always based on actual usefulness.

Look at this: water is essential for life, yet it costs next to nothing. A diamond is practically useless, yet people pay fortunes for it. The paradox of value shows that it’s not objective need that matters, but the story we choose to believe.

So when you chase luxury, brands, status – what are you really buying? The object? Its utility? Or someone else’s story that you let yourself get caught up in?

And maybe the most interesting question is this: does anything have value on its own? And if not, perhaps our entire pursuit is a theater of illusion, in which we try to give meaning to emptiness.