Contemplating Life
I don’t know why I’m writing this, but fuck it. I’m gonna write this anyway. Growing up is not easy, it is fucked up. All of us born in this tormented universe amongst funny beings trying to find the singularity of life, universe and all the cosmic crap but still be normal/sane.
Then at some point reality strikes your head and you realize that you are all alone. I don’t mean lonely, you are alone. You wear a mask trying to fit into the “all dancing all singing crap of the world”. You realize you’ll have to fight for a living, impregnate a woman and then get your kids to the same fucking life you had. All those twitter followers, facebook friends who spammed your profile on birthday as if they remembered are not going to fix your life. You just feel helpless, very less you can do about the existence of this pseudo-cycle for the pursuit of happiness. You feel like punching that guy who said “See son life is like a sine wave, you have highs and lows”. It is not that simple, you realise that life is a spectrum of emotions, relationships, heartbreaks, fight and love.
Some say fuck this shit, look out for Altered states of consciousness digging the deepest corners in the realm of existing reality. For some it is god, some it is drugs, and some music and etc. But my point is not matter what, you realise there IS no reality, there are many realities and you keep trying to fit into one at a time.
And after you have been through all this, you can’t help but let insanity into you. Bit by bit, little by little. It turns to obsession, reality distortions and statelessness. Now that is what lets you think crazy. A crazy fucking autoscopy. You no longer go with the flow, you feel fucked by the very things that define your existence. It is not a fucking id, not a bitch ass car, not that job for which you would suck dick, it has to be something more. Something more fundamental, something that you can tie your existence to. You realize that this very fundamental element is nothing but “interdependence”. You might not agree with me, might not have even known this but it is undeniable.
Languages around the world use pain language to express social pain (“she broke my heart”, “he hurt my feelings”), but social pain is real pain. The things that cause us to feel pain are things that are evolutionary recognized as threats to our survival and the existence of social pain is a sign that evolution has treated social connection like a necessity, not a luxury.
The funny thing is that thinking about others’ thoughts doesn’t feel particularly different from most kinds of analytical thinking we do. Yet, fMRI research shows that there are two distinct networks that support social and non-social thinking and that as one network increases its activity the other tends to quiet down — kind of like a neural seesaw. Here’s the really fascinating thing. Whenever we finish doing some kind of non-social thinking, the network for social thinking comes back on like a reflex — almost instantly.
Why would the brain be set up to do this? We have recently found that this reflex prepares us to walk into the next moment of our lives focused on the minds behind the actions that we see from others. Evolution has placed a bet that the best thing for our brain to do in any spare moment is to get ready to see the world socially. I think that makes a major statement about the extent to which we are built to be social creatures.
Reference: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-are-wired-to-connect/
