People are complicated. Life is hard. One minute there is a reason to smile to the most insignificant of things, the next moment you feel a new vibe that invalidates your feeling of peace and contentment.
But the real kicker is in the twisted belief that people actually think they are unique.
“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
David Foster Wallace
I couldn’t agree more.
Life is shit; you’re not special. Nothing that happens to you is because of who you are, it is because life is what it is.
But the presence of some factors influence and distort our view of reality: attention, belief and advantage.
Attention is the spotlight. It dims everything else and puts you in the foreground. It builds up ideas, inaccurate ones at that, till they take hold. And when ideas take hold, they blossom into beliefs.
And while beliefs are meant to enable in the right direction, to help create hope that “it is possible“, when it focuses on the less important thing, it becomes crippling. You enter a loop.
And when you’re in a loop that reaffirms the mundane, it creates an advantage. It tells you that you are special and deserves to be treated as such.
And when you can convince enough people that you are special, you actually start to believe it. And it starts the cycle all over again.
The implication is wasted years. Because when you finally realise everything is a lie, it suggests that to correct it, you have to start from scratch to build a solid identity.
By then, you are faced with a tough choice: toss your false identity aside and embrace the truth or damn the truth and live the lie for the rest of your days.
Your choice.
Prompt: Down the drain.
