okay, it's 3am. You just woke up, need to piss, have a piss, try to sleep again, don't feel like going back to sleep, feel hungry, go downstairs, trip on the way down, make way too much noise doing so, somehow arrive at the kitchen. Now what to cook? The 3am menu has an interesting atmosphere. It is simultaneously incredibly peaceful but also a stealth mission minefield of getting out pots, pans, and bowls without it sounding like a nuke going off. You look around to see the first food option: cookies. We know it tastes good, reliable, easily replaced, and almost no effort. But do you really want to be that guy that eats cookies at 3am after not sleeping? Nobody wants to be that guy that eats cookies at 3am after not sleeping. Food option 2: spaghetti. That 1/8 of Italian that runs through the blood could finally be paying off because it's so early in the morning. You could really go all out on this thing. I'm talking search enough recipes, trying

ingredients you haven't even tried before. Listening to French music and making complicated fry pan maneuvers that seemed a way better idea in your head but it would make a lot of noise and a spaghetti feels too fancy for 3am. You're not Gordon Ramsay, you're in your pjs. Ah, the cereal, the classic easy to make, not too healthy, not too unhealthy. Is it shameful to eat at such a late hour? Yes, but everyone's done it. You know it'll taste good, you know what to expect, you know the routine. You've done it a million times. You could and even would call yourself the 3am cereal expert, but you're too modest and frankly, the fame that comes with it would add way too much to your already busy life right now. Grab that milk, grab the spoon, and get the best bowl that hasn't been cleaned in the dishwasher and prepare for the most mediocre feast you've done a million times before. Pour that milk into your second best bowl like a madman and go get that cereal. It's time for the

main event, and you pour the cereal. It's time for the main event, and you pour the cereal. It's time for the main event, and you [ __ ] empty the cookie box lies next to you, as empty as the cereal bowl that preceded it. You just ate the entire thing. Nobody helped you. The crime was committed by one sole perpetrator, and you can't even look in the mirror, as in physically, there is not a mirror in this part of the house. But if you could, you would be riddled with shame. You are now the guy that ate cookies at 3 AM, and yes, nobody wants to be you. Humanity has been plagued with many different maladies, mental, physical, and spiritual, over the course of our existence. It seems like the very essence of humanity is about suffering and then finding solutions and band-aids for the suffering till the suffering finally ceases. Since it's such a core part of our lives, it makes sense we come up with reasons for its leech-like titer.

identity and its relevance in our lives in the first place. This is what I'd like to focus on: less on the medications, procedures, surgeries, therapies, and mindsets, and more on humanity's supposed theoretical purpose of pain. Before we get to the hard stuff, it's important to acknowledge that pain is not always useless or meaningless; it's actually usually the driving force of humanity. Humanity's history and physical form itself is littered with adversity and discomfort; it's in the core of living itself. No matter who you are, what state of life you're in, you will have a longing for food, water, and safety. We have these longings and these uneasy feelings because the body has to ensure survival. Pain, physically, is the mechanism of the sensory nervous system known as noise deception. It covers a sequence of actions and procedures necessary for an organism to take in painful stimulus, translated into a molecular signal, and then identifies and characterizes the signal to set off the proper defense reaction for the situation. Everything to do with pain in

the physical sense is about defense, and this translates well to outside of the body. Our worries and anxieties are primarily about ensuring our survival and calculating different things that can go wrong in the future. In relation to the modern world, this would be financial worries, relationship status, and what to eat at 3 am. Pain is a guiding force for how to succeed by showing failure either in the senses or subconsciously. Since toddlers, we learn what failure is—the first time we try standing up and then fall on our asses. In order to grasp what successes we need to first understand what failure is, what is to be avoided. Pain has purpose most of the time. The funny thing about struggle and about adversity is that despite being the bane of humanity, humanity has an almost flirtatious relationship with it. As much as we moan and complain about the challenges we face, we also clap and share and find a deeply rooted appreciation for the struggle and the overcoming of pain. It's not the pain we enjoy; we're not sadists.

it's the overcoming, the strength, the will, and the perseverance. It is not the fact that a man reached the top of a mountain that makes Everest the achievement; it's the climb. You see this in almost every story, in almost every culture: a hero or character who overcomes a challenge and sees their potential despite varying degrees of difficulty. It's why in movies like Whiplash, as much as it is a painful, affronting, and downright traumatic showing, it is also admirable how much Andrew is willing to go to perfect his craft of the drums and how much he is willing to take by Professor Fletcher's abrasive teaching. If we were to just watch the final scene of the movie, having not known what he went through, his sacrifice in romance, time, and comfort is an abusive and unapologetic view of pushing himself to perfection. If that struggle was lost, the final scene of the movie would be a well-choreographed, well-shot, exciting piece of music with lots of movement, sure, but witnessing what he went through, those

struggles make this moment foreign. [Music] Aging and impactful, even in stories that deal with things like romance and comedy, they almost always have a problem or an issue to overcome, no matter how trivial they may be. How do you make people care about something as naturally evolving and complicated as relationships? You throw them roadblocks and then see how the characters react. The most unrealistic and unrelatable story you could ever write is one where nothing bad happens. Having something bad happen is how you make people care, by seeing or experiencing struggle. The art we create mirrors the experiences we go through, and everyone, regardless of what they may appear on the outside, has their own Everest, their own Whiplash, and their own 3am cooking crisis. But there is a problem about generalizing the topic of pain into just a struggle that we go through or a stepping stone on the way to an elaborate goal. Reality doesn't work like that. In fact, reality is a lot scarier, and unlike everything humanity seems to make of it, reality itself is in

great contrast to how we've usually built religions, stories, and most structures of understanding and morality. In most books that tie into religion and a person's guiding philosophy, things happen for a reason. In religions, it uses stories as a tool to get the viewer or reader to recontextualize their perception under the religion's rules and structure. In stories that humans create, characters interact with their reality with intent and purpose, and it does have an effect on the grand narrative of this slice of life we see in the story. Reality does not work like this. We have duped ourselves through our stories into having an idealistic view of pain and that the suffering we have endured always has a purpose. We romanticize the pain we had dealt with because the unpleasantly likely reality of trauma happening to us for no reason is too painful to think about. It's almost like having Stockholm syndrome with reality itself, where you're constantly making justifications for abuse because deep down you love the idea and idealism of this person or in

this case, this version of pain in your head, but it just isn't like that. My point is we build things up by our own invention to make justifications for why they are happening to us. Some pain just isn't character growth; it's just abuse. Some trauma isn't a lesson; it's just dramatic sick, and I'm sick of the romanticization of this kind of pain. I'm not the first one to notice a little hole in our psychology that bugs us. It's been around for a while in many different quotes and observations. I'm going to be using what I think is the most famous example said by one of the most notable philosophers of the 20th century. God is dead. God remains dead, and we've killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? It is said by Nietzsche in The Gay Science and really was a hyperbolic reflection of Nietzsche's prediction that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable, and everything that was built upon this faith propped up by it.

grown into it, including the whole of our European morality, is destined for collapse. Really, I feel like that quote needs a precursor for context, explaining the need for such an extreme statement, and Niche provides it. He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how. In this quote, he is saying an untouched, interesting part of why we struggle. We struggle for the why, for the idea of things, for the beliefs, and for what we care for. It's an obvious thing to recognize, but is understated in its importance in the way we interact. For most of history, it was God, gods, who provided us comfort when we went through pain, and the beliefs we held made it seem like it was leading somewhere. I'm not going to say that God is not real or that those who think of him as real are foolish, because my intention is not in any way to be bigoted or to win some sort of theoretical argument. I'm more interested in how Niche was right in some aspects of modern society and most

people are becoming disillusioned to believing in such an entity, and even more so, most people aren't finding comfort as we once did in God. Let's look at the larger, more extended ending half of this quote: God is dead. God remains dead, and we've killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world is yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement? What sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? Nietzsche seemed incredibly worried that God would become something unbelievable, and we would try to fill that void with things that could never truly comfort us as much as him. Take notice of the phrase yet his shadow still looms. We feel the absence of the actual entity, but we still know of its

outline and feel like something is missing. So then if to us in modern society he doesn't exist and he was the one that provided us comfort for the pain we felt, had no purpose, then that pain reveals itself as something that truly is meaningless. Meaningless pain that doesn't build character, it doesn't help you, it doesn't provide you with insight, it is just pain. And as you can see around you after killing God, it seems like humans have been blindly stumbling around lost in the dark, looking in our reflection and realizing that we have deep-seated daddy issues. What's truly fascinating about this Niche quote is that he predicts what will happen and is worried for the rest of his working life about what he views as inevitable. We've tried to fill the gap of God with things that could never truly fill that void. I've tried writing out so many different variations of this, but David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech where he illustrates it perfectly. Here's something else that's weird but true in the day-to-day.

trenches of adult life. There is actually no such thing as atheism; there is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. In modern culture, we have not stopped worshiping; we have just changed what we worship. One of these being pleasure. One thing is certain in every observable living thing: death. You will at one point breathe the last breath, think your last thought, and sing your last song. This is why the hedonistic lifestyle is so alluring. Hedonism is the worship of pleasure. Now, most people like to party, drink, and do things they might regret the next day every once in a while, but there is a massive difference between just unwinding during the weekend to having every night be trying to forget whatever happened during the day. It is definitely a balancing act because everyone wants to feel good, and everyone wants to unwind from their daily commitments, but if you are living just to unwind and forget about your real life, are you really living? There is a unique

trap that gets people, especially young people, into things like addiction. They start out trying different drugs, mainly out of curiosity, and then curiosity becomes a habit, and then that habit becomes an addiction. While that may sound like an oversimplification, it really is usually a slow and subtle buildup in stages. And the tragic thing about our brains is once we get something we perceive as readily accessible that makes us relax, we want more of it. It's not a sudden switch; one day you just realize you're dependent on something you otherwise shouldn't be. At its core, it is not a good solution to the pain we feel, to mask it with nights of strangers and beds, shady substances, and days you can't even remember. Pleasure is always seen by us as this endless resource which can never truly run out, but there actually is an end to pleasure. You can shoot our heroin into your arm and feel the greatest pleasure you could ever feel: euphoria, weightlessness, a sense of nirvana, tranquility. But you will come down from

that high and no high will ever replicate that ever again. To a person who seeks the highest pleasure after shooting heroin, they thereon will be met with disappointment from every other substance, as nothing could ever compare to the bliss feeling that accompanies it. It shoots the user in the foot because they have now had the most pleasurable experience in their life, and if that really is what the person values—just feeling good—the normal life, which you should be focusing on and enjoying, will seem completely dull and dreary, and things which would once excite you won't because they could never hope to compare to your artificial comfort. You only get a certain amount of time to be here, and to have most of it be a blur or have most of it paling compared person to those brief moments of indulgence because of your own choices is quite tragic. But the true tragedy of seeking pleasure as a solution to pain is that it doesn't even work. You cannot escape reality, as it will always catch up to you, as much as we may want to. Your

problems that you will try and escape from will still be there, and all you're really doing is wasting time. Many people's lives have been spent like this, wasting time. If every emotion and everything we care about ends, all the highs, all the lows, the accomplishments, the relationships, the memory of life itself, then life is suffering. In theory, it sounds like a decent philosophy and conclusion. We build things up only to be let down by their unfortunate, seemingly inevitable end. It's not hard to view life as pain when pleasure and comfort are such an abstract, fleeting feeling. It's almost like we spend all of our lives chasing this dreamlike thing that seems so simple to us when we were younger. The moment you get it is the moment you get it, and then you realize you're not in the moment anymore. Then you have to chase that moment again, an endless cycle, the treadmill, the rat race, the pointlessness. However, having uncontrollable laughter with a friend is not suffering. Working on a project that means a lot to you and feeling proud of what you've achieved.

isn't suffering if you're making love to someone you love. Unless it's been a particularly bad night in bed, you're probably not thinking life is suffering. You're probably just happy to be with them and enjoying each other. When we're in pain or pleasure, we give biased views based on a remote of experience that life is this or that. Really, life is this, that, and everything. Every piece of art in history has been made to share The Human Experience and doesn't even scratch the surface of the depths of what we go through or who we are. Every piece of philosophy ever made has been trying to rationalize reality into a formula or a book or a smart assassination one-liner, and that's how you end up with silly little phrases like life is suffering. It doesn't allow for the varying circumstances people have or complexities of the subject of life or the complexities of humanity itself. It subtracts everyone and everything down to a basic principle: we grow attached, we lose attachment, ignoring the things they are subtracting themselves. It is hard to say that a dog

running around, chasing his tail or chasing squirrels, is suffering, and I've always viewed it as an incredibly narcissistic and self-centered statement to say that they are just because they will one day die and lose their mobility. Their happiness right now is suddenly invalid because of their inability to live forever. Arguments like these are endless. For every example you could give of nature being this holy and tranquil thing, you could show an example of nature ripping itself apart for survival or even sport. For every time you could say that life is simple—just eat healthy, maintain relationships, and anything is possible—you can see those whose very life is a fight for survival due to circumstances outside of their control. You can always generalize a broad topic down to your own personal experience; however, just because you have experienced that does not mean everyone has or will. I'm sure that there are a set of circumstances to an individual that are so horrifying and painful that it would be completely justified in saying that their life is suffering, and while they have my complete sympathy and

They should not at all be discarded in sharing that pain. That is most certainly not everyone's experience; that is a very rare occurrence for a lot of us. The Human Condition is not just suffering; it's not just happiness; it's not just laughing. It is everything we experience and everything we don't. It is much, much more complicated than anyone seems to make of it. I have found that the 21st century has this almost contradictory nature of value, where everything that we in mass desire and value about ourselves—mobility, health, attractiveness, intellect, life, relationships, and money—can be taken away from us and almost always do as we approach death. Yet we still seem to cling on to them and judge each other based on these traits, knowing this. It could be propaganda, survival, or just wanting to fit in, but I find this never really works out in the end because all of these things are temporary. This, along with the supposed death of God, has led people to follow existentialism. Existentialism is a sibling of nihilism and one of the most individualistic

philosophies to undertake. You create your own meaning. This is empowering in a lot of ways, mainly because it solves a lot of the problems of other philosophies. Your meaning could always change as your situation changes. So many other philosophies have the problem of assuming someone's circumstance, assuming that they have a certain type of autonomy that they may not have. In existentialism, meaning could be something as arbitrary as getting tuna at the grocery store or as large in scope as becoming an astronaut. It's up to the individual. This also means a person can reevaluate what truly matters to them in a way that fits their own life and not just the lives of others. Now, there are limitations to this. I believe it is impossible to be a fully formed existentialist. The very languages we use and the ways the mind constructs things in our heads have preconceived connotations that we're not nearly intelligent enough to dissect or dismiss. In childhood, just as we learn about pain and success, we also socially learn what to value through school, society, and

relationships. It's not very beneficial to try and deprogram this from our minds when almost everything contingent to jobs, relationships, and housing comes from at least a little bit of valuing money and status. Not everyone can become or have the opportunity to become a Buddhist monk in the mountains. Searching for your own meaning is often isolating and solitary, and you also have to put up with so many compromises and roadblocks for getting where you want to go. The unpredictable nature of life can completely upend a person's meaning, and things which we hold so dear to us can completely change in a day. For example, say you had been training all year for a marathon and then sprained your ankle a few days before it happens. Not only does the goal become suddenly unattainable, but all the prep and hard work you've done loses its purpose because you'll need to rest in order to heal, losing the progress you've made. This is the advantage and problem of an individual's purpose. It's fickle and

constantly changing to suit your circumstance, depending on factors largely outside of your control. This can lead to a person jumping from meaning to meaning, North Star to North Star, kind of haphazard, depending on what they're going through, filling the existential hole, yes, but only temporarily. On the flip side of the perspective, there is pride. It is considered in most religions and in most ancient literature to be the most egregious of all vices. It is, as C.S. Lewis put it, the one Vice of which no one in the world is free, which everyone in the world loathes when they see it in someone else, and over which hardly any people ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. Pride is an interesting concept because it is one of the most muddy yet simultaneously clear characteristics and attributes. It is so easy to recognize because it usually boasts about itself or makes itself apparent through the way one acts or talks. Traits like confidence and self-assurance could be mistaken as pride because they're very similar, but pride carries with it a certain sense of

superiority and focused intellectual stubbornness about oneself and beliefs. Legacy, popularity, and relationships are all tied in with pride. It's enjoying the perception of yourself and how others view you based on your own set of values. Pride in this David Foster Wallace worshiping analogy could be seen as the worship of perception, but really, I would say it is the worship of judgment. For some reason, likely because we are social animals, one of the things we always worship is judgment. First, it was the judgment of gods and religion, then it was fame, the observation and judgment of others, and currently, it is algorithms and numerical success of artificial means that is the barometer of our judgment. I truly wonder what the next thing to worship will be. Anyways, as we have seen in the 21st century, there is an abundance of people advertising the way they live in accordance to things that are completely made up: clout, likes, engagement, and a never-ending legacy of pictures and vapid thoughts of our lives that show a tiny glimpse of who we are.

is what we offer up to others for judgment. It could be the dopamine hit of people liking you or the feeling of growing more influential or popular or the obvious that everyone deep down wants to feel loved and accepted. But regardless, almost everyone is sharing their lives to judge and be judged in this completely artificial, strange reflection of ourselves. Even though I believe a majority of people posting their lives are doing it with no real motive in their minds, I think that subconsciously, some people post images and thoughts out to the void of public platforms not even for engagement, but rather for a record of having lived out their pictures and thought out their thoughts. There is a large element here of seeking and promoting a version of ourselves we want to see, and then we want others to see us as. It's not enough just to live a moment anymore; you need to capture it. It's not enough just to have a thought; you need to share it. It's not enough just to live a life; you need to present it. People are posting things

now to then look back on themselves in the future to make themselves feel comfortable for how they have lived their life. The perception element is very interesting because you can examine the way someone acts in front of others to determine what they value, but you can also learn what they want to appear to be. For example, it's important to ask whether a person is doing something good to be viewed as good or because they want to do something good. Take people who constantly advertise that they are donating or doing charity. Most people donate to charity; they do not advertise themselves doing so because benefiting off of helping others most of the time comes off as trying to gain good PR rather than helping a cause. I'm not saying that anyone who publicizes themselves doing good acts as Machiavellian nature or in any way dubious, more so that if someone enjoys being viewed as a good person, it says something about them. It's kind of like when celebrities go to events that are designed for charity but really just use

it to network with other celebrities in the press and make it about themselves, their outfits, and their lives rather than the cause. Everyday people are becoming almost PR managers for themselves in their own lives, despite no real gain from doing this except positive attention and judgment from ever-changing social norms. We love judging each other based on value systems, and this does not mean material things like attractiveness or wealth; it can be intelligence, attitude, and character archetypes or stereotypes. Things like masculinity, femininity, spirituality, good social bonds—everything seems to have a certain stereotype that we put people under and judge each other by to set the social norm in an almost competing way. Just as we get to determine our own meaning, we get to decide which value systems we determine the worth of a person on and the worth of ourselves. The problem is that most of this is subconscious, and it takes real effort not to view someone as a list of set characteristics but as a complex, ever-changing whole being. It takes even more effort to do so in an age of blatant vanity and narcissism.

Repackaging itself is self-expression, and platforms that are designed for people to judge each other based on limited information. The internet has made it so we are constantly aware of each other, and because we notice the pattern of certain behaviors, mindsets, and ideologies, we then begin seeing others as almost caricatures of themselves, constantly presenting and sharing and commenting on other people's presenting and sharing and commenting. It is a Melting Pot stew of millions of people in quick succession making judgments on the presentation that others have made. The problem is that giving into this and constantly reevaluating yourself on the evaluations others have of you will mean that you have no actual identity because you are living for other people's perception of you rather than living for your own. And similarly, looking at people through your own perception and never questioning it has this effect of dismissing the actual person and just focusing on your version of them. I am in no way saying that it is bad to make judgments of others or that it is bad for others to make judgments.

of you more so that we should judge our own judgments and critically think about what it is we judge others on just as we do broad strokes over things like pain and the purpose of life. We do that with other people and their identities. We don't think of others as them; we think of our perceptions of them because that is all we have to go off of, and it's very hard to question that perception or to be charitable. That view of them is short-sighted. It is a conscious, mature effort of understanding someone else and trying to truly consider something that is different from oneself, and it defeats ego and pride because there's a certain act that is charitable not for the perception of another but for another. This is not a worship thing, but I think this is one of the biggest reasons that people are so nihilistic in an almost grim fashion these days. An interestingly hellish part of the modern experience is watching events that have a massive impact on society at large play out, being aware and tuned in on

every detail and yet be completely unable to affect any outcome in microscopic ways. You could help out by raising awareness, donating, or speaking up with your presumed Free Speech or speaking up with your lack thereof. But in so many modern cases, you cannot actually realistically change or impact the problem that you see happening in any meaningful way, and yet you are still constantly aware of the event's existence, forced to watch it play out, fade away, or get worse. I don't think humans were built to know about problems we can't fix, and this has led us to infinitely introspect on our introspections and argue, comment, and debate in Endless democracy and live commentary on everything with no real ruling Vote or jury except algorithms and engagement and clapbacks and one-liners. Personally, I have found growing up in this time a propaganda and a mindsled of derivative talking points done by different interest groups in order to exploit our unnatural fear, alienation, and disconnect that many are feeling in one's Society. The way in which, for example, social media and the

internet interact and talk about issues, controversies, and problems is antithetical to free thought and individuality. It groups people together, labeling and categorizing them for the sole purpose of making arguments and problems that are complex into simplified images and easy-to-read scapegoats for what is wrong with the world or how to fix it. Combining this with the churning 24/7 news feed of new issues every day makes commentary in this age feel completely pointless, as before anyone can even possibly truly digest or speak at length more than the surface level about an issue, the public will have already moved on to the next thing. It's all just anecdotes or again endless commentary, media inside media, and references to other references and reactions to other reactions. There's not really an end to this, and it won't end because so many people are profiting off of this misery cycle. It is the ultimate comfort to feel like you're contributing to something more, especially in this day and age where most aimless and problems you can't fix are weighing down on you.

many people who are looking for a sense of belonging, identity, and purpose, typically the youth, get used and exploited by those that know of this feeling and exploit their struggle for profit or their own motives by giving them a sense of community and then shoving their ideologies into the comfort of their communities. These communities then become Echo Chambers and hug boxes of varying people constantly regurgitating the same talking points every time a new issue happens. Despite endless debates, barely anything ever gets solved besides maybe a slight change in the Overton window, and these people just make a lot of money and get a lot of Engagement off of whatever is being talked about or whatever horrific event is currently happening, which will be moved on from in two weeks. Despite living in an age of supposed democracy, I have never felt like our voice has mattered less. Man's Search for Meaning is a book detailing the horrifying circumstances of the Nazi concentration camps, written by Survivor Victor Frankl, published in 1946. The book chronicles Frankl's experiences as a prisoner during World

War II and explores the darkest depths of depersonalization, apathy, torture, abuse, and details things which should emotionally break people even just thinking about them. The book is not just a recount but more so clinical observations he had as a psychiatrist over the prisoner's psychological condition and his own. The concentration camps tested the prisoners' faith, will to live, and spirit. There was constant death and no sign of a way out, and yet despite this, he noted life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of Good and Evil? We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the Huts, comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose One's Own Way. You could argue that it's

just impulse or social bonds that they were kind to the other prisoners, but they didn't gain anything from doing this when all of them were starving and in a constant state of near death. Humans are, as far as we know, the only animals that will forfeit their own survival for the survival of others, even in the case of knowing their own demise. It is a tragic but interesting point that Victor Frankl notes and an interesting trait I have found about humanity in times of great crisis, where you see the most cruel acts and the most soulless abandon and have every reason to give up or to give in to apathy. We also see a unique showcase of selflessness, heroism, and the human spirit. This is why events like the Battle of Thermopylae are one of the most talked-about and referenced stories in human history. The Spartans fought off an incoming army of Persians, vastly outnumbered. There was absolutely no reason for them to continue to fight, let alone win, and yet they did for the sole reason that they refused to lose the

natural disasters that constantly afflict us in different parts of the world have shown that even in response to nature ripping apart our communities, we still show a sense of community. From helping and saving those afflicted, not for any sort of gain, but so that they are safe and okay. When the terrorist attacks on September 11th happened, firefighters charged in, saving countless lives, not stopping to save their own. Every passenger flight across North America had been canceled, and the town in Gander, Newfoundland, was tasked with taking in 6,700 people after 38 planes had been forced to land. And immediately, the citizens offered shelter for those stranded, left with no place to go. The town and its population almost doubled in the days after, and the townspeople didn't complain at all. They opened up their homes, organized walks and parties. They offered soup, sandwiches, hot showers. Many made friendships that lasted for years, and some even found love. In World War One, on Christmas, in a place that could only be described by any synonym for hell, depravity, and horror for a

brief moment in that [ __ ] place a truce was held, and a game of soccer was played. The reason I'm listing such extreme examples is because I believe we are living in extreme times, not extreme necessarily in scarcity and war, but more so in ever-constant awareness of how cruel all those can be and how unexplainable it seems in all of our value systems. But just as unexplainable as the cruelty is our unique ability to push through it. Nietzsche, as intelligent and philosophical and brilliant as he was, had a fatal flaw in his argument. He didn't count on how stubborn humanity is about caring for one another despite every reason not to. It doesn't seem to matter what religion we follow or method of torture, existential, physiological, or emotionally we face. Even in the most extreme, depraved, nightmarish, hellspawn circumstance, humanity always seems to be littered with a certain type of defiance against apathy or uncaring nature. It would be so comforting not to care and

to truly believe that all of this is meaningless, but I find that only works in the broad brush of her own conceptions about life and not the part of actually living it. The body is practically screaming at you every waking moment to care about living and to find something to make you feel good or to fulfill some sort of purpose. I felt like I had this idea that nothing mattered, sort of, baked into my head through the things I saw and talked about from the intellectuals of my time, but as I grew up, everything from my body to gravity to love to hate to just being alive and experiencing things points otherwise. Despite how much the opposite has been spread around lately, humanity is a uniquely emotionally intelligent species that is capable of adapting to almost any circumstance. I say almost, but really, if we're looking once again at history, all we are is solutions to circumstance. We've adjusted to land, to sea, to depth, and slowly adjusting to space. The existential weight of proper self-awareness and awareness of everyone else, I believe, is just another that

We're adjusting to most propaganda, wartime or not, throughout history is really about manipulating or caring nature against each other for patriotism, fear of losing what we love, or something that we care about being tarnished or abused. From this comes hatred, typically not even from the people you hate but from the idea of them propagated by different interests and apathy. Like hatred is bred; it is not unbuilt. Apathy in such a large apparatus as we see today could only really exist in an age of over-socialization, where everyone constantly is in a rat race against each other, fighting over things that inevitably will evade us. These are subconscious things you won't even notice yourself slipping into them or that they are influencing your perception. The trick and balancing act is to keep in the daily consciousness that although the advertising is abundant, we have the choice and get to choose what we spend our brief time doing and have the will to work towards it. If you worship things that are meaningless, your life will feel

meaningless, but you always have the choice to find your North Star, your solution to the pain you feel, and your purpose until you can't anymore. Nihilism is at best an egregiously simplified look at climbing Mount Everest and concluding it was only the top of the mountain that mattered, not the climb. Nihilism at its worst is the self-centered statement of viewing Sisyphus as pointless as he repeats the same action over and over again for eternity. Humanity's history, if I had to define it, would be about beating the odds despite almost certain failure, looking the abyss in the eyes, and still living, still caring. foreign [Music]

Overcoming Meaningless Pain

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