Standardized people

The sincerity of of intellectual affirmation has nothing to do with the naturalness of spontaneous emotion. Strangely or not, it seems the soul may be given such surprises merely so that it won't lack pain, so that it will still know disgrace, so that it will have its fair share of grief in life. We are all equal in our capacity for error and suffering. Only those who don't feel don't experience pain; and the highest, most noble and most prudent men are those who experience and suffer precisely what they foresaw and what they disdained. This is what is known as Life – Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Processing pain from the lens of other peoples' experiences and rules always gives rise to the same set of conclusions. Whether one is grieving, heartbroken, fighting against institutionalized discrimination or the State, war or even simple pettiness, answers can be found distilled from the memories of faceless humans who have contributed to the knowledge bank. Follow this and you shall be done, follow that and you will become a better person. This will help you create a revolution and this is what will help you heal.

The irrationality of being human – thoughts and actions that do not put one in a box of approved puritanical behavior or expected “norms” are the bastion masts of moral and psychological depravity. At least that's what the newspapers and the internet tells us, be normal in the way everyone reading this is normal. All the people I meet have this polished normalness as their veneer, I don't know what they think in their fantasies, I do not who they are when they daydream.

Complete loss – the loss of an ideal, the loss of an altered state of mind, the loss of a crutch one uses to cope with the complexities of the world. Like how alcoholics seek the rock bottom before they find the path to recovery. Though despair takes countless forms, the experience behind the filter is the same. Dependent on a society that has an invisible decorum programmed at its heart, our intelligence fools us into believing we're all different. We are different like the forms of despair, but united in sorrow.

On this conveyor belt of pings and pangs, who we are takes a backseat. Being irrational becomes a subdued power, normalized through instruction and taming. Mass produced humans, in a mass produced world. Our feelings erased many generations ago and now left with only ghost shadows. Chattering people, where fractured false selves transact in closed loops of thought and action. To think that we live for anything other than the cheapness of being alive, is foolish.

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