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Cake day: May 10th, 2024

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  • The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.

    One of my most frightening and profound realizations as an adult, was that our language is our most powerful tool and nobody seems to know or care. It’s how we can abstract the universe, rearrange ideas and concepts and come up with new ways to approach problems and explain feelings.

    Because if you’re not consciously explaining your feelings, you’re unconsciously doing it, and make no mistake, your brain is ONLY a tool for telling a story to explain your feelings. It’s not some vast computer or calculator, it’s a hyper-charged neural network designed to write stories to tie up loose ends and provide cause and effect for the world around you. It doesn’t seek logic or reason, it just wants continuity.

    The sooner you realize this in life, the sooner you can start getting a handle on things like your own mental health, identifying rumination and where it comes from, figuring out what choices give you the best outcomes and how to overcome momentary discomfort for great rewards later. Things that our disconnected world is increasingly having a harder and harder time doing.

    Because we’re abandoning language. And no, listening to social media and reading posts doesn’t boost your language, it doesn’t train your brain how to take YOUR experiences and feelings and abstractify them into ideas you can move around and view from different perspectives… something we should be able to do with ease if we have a large enough toolset to make accurate pictures of our lives. Social media and reading posts doesn’t boost you abilities to accurately abstractify the world and your life, it just gives you other people’s stories. Which are usually equally inaccurate or limited in scope.

    If we don’t have language tools to help your brain write a more accurate story, you will believe terrible things about yourself, about others, about the entire world, and you will live in that state always.



  • Our species is more alone than we’ve ever been even though our numbers are greater than they’ve ever been and our means for reaching each other is nearly limitless.

    Because everyone is so, so deeply scared of social rejection, an instinct bred into us through ice ages and apocalypses where we needed each other to survive, that the fear of rejections has become one of our primary social motivators. People now have a choice of trying to find social circles and groups that they can adapt to or compromise with like we’ve struggled through for thousands of years, or withdraw into spaces that prevent us from ever having to experience even a chance of rejection. Feel awkward when a stranger says hello? You can choose to practice getting better at responding to others, experience failures as well as successes, or you can retreat to a place where “hello” means oppression and you don’t ever need to ever risk pain by responding.

    This is just a tiny, micro-slice of the issue but EVERYONE does this, and if you think you don’t, you are also stuck in the film-strip post-hoc rationalizing your every feeling.