Why are feelings so unreliable, fragile, almost as if they are what constitutes our reality of a situation? I mean, for something as extensive as life itself and our perspective of it, which in turn forms an individual's truth, why are they guided by something as variant and susceptible to change as feelings? They change so often that you might look back on and think about it, may not be what you were actually thinking back then at that moment at all. Why is it so easily swayed by external, outside opinions or even environmental factors, which are equally unpredictable in themselves? I can see how this is not a problem for everyone, if they're simply not aware of this happening, but as someone who's gotten really good over time at analyzing my thoughts, it's coming off as rather absurd to me. I mean, why?

Two years ago I was a skeptic. I thought world is rational and that's all.

Then I have read "The Magus" and it awakened my childhood memories of being fascinated by mystery. The passion for mystery reignited in me.

I felt it strange. My skepticism had nothing to do with this passion. The urge of irrationality doesn't make sense in rational world. Still it exists.

I thought of it a lot and here is the summary of these thoughts. If something resonates in you, I would be happy to read your comments (or you are welcome to DM me).

Our world is not a plain, it is a labyrinth. The only possibility of labyrinth is to walk and search for exit. The only possibility of world is to search for God presence.

Mysteries are kind of the hidden rooms of the world. You don't know what is hidden there, but anything unknown may hide the presence of God.

Walking this labyrinth is my spiritual journey. I feel like searching for mysteries, weirdness and unknown makes my life meaningful. I learn to be fascinated of the world. I learn to believe in God.

We live in a world where we can communicate with anyone instantly, yet genuine human connection feels harder to find than ever.

As kids, we had clubs, youth groups, and places where we naturally belonged. Now everyone’s consumed by work, bills, families, and just trying to survive. Even socializing seems to cost money.

Somewhere along the way, we replaced community with consumption and confused digital communication with real connection. We’re more connected than ever but lonely as ever.

Does anyone else miss having an actual community? How do we start creating those spaces again?

Even if the quest to be the exception destroys their life in the process

This is why some people believe in a flat earth regardless of all evidence. It gives their life more meaning than if they accepted the truth like everyone else

It's why people willingly get into relationships with someone with a cheating background. They feel extra special knowing things might be different with them

It's why some people are so religiously devoted because "my religion/God is more true than all others which are false"

It's why rich folks have "rules for thee but not for me"

And it's also the basis of "I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party"

In my last rambling I explored healing as an ongoing architectural project and how a deliberate shift toward a growth mindset can literally rewrite our emotional wiring and prove that our past does not dictate our future. We talked about how scars are proof that we survived, and how we can stop letting old hurts anchor us to yesterday.

But that raises a natural question: what happens to the weight of the suffering itself?

For a long time, we view healing as a process of learning how to carry heavy baggage without dropping it. We imagine ourselves walking down a long road, shoulders permanently hunched under the accumulated weight of grief, betrayal, and heartbreak, simply getting stronger at enduring the strain.

The beauty of true healing, however, is that it completely transforms what "carrying" even means.

If healing simply meant returning to who we were before we were hurt, it would be an exhausting, Sisyphean task. We would spend our lives trying to restore an older, more fragile version of ourselves. But suffering doesn't leave us where it found us; it forces us to expand.

Think about how nature responds to pressure. When a bone breaks and heals properly, the body weaves dense, reinforced tissue at the site of the fracture, making that specific area remarkably strong. When a tree survives a brutal storm or a harsh winter, its trunk thickens and its roots drive deeper into the earth. The ring inside the wood permanently marks the year of the drought, but the tree grows taller and sturdier because of the resilience it was forced to discover.

Human emotional architecture works the exact same way.

When deep suffering occurs, our old container for life often shatters simply because it was too small to hold the weight of what happened. For a while, we feel broken. But as we process, learn, and lean into our capacity to evolve, we don't just glue the pieces back together in the exact same shape. We build a vastly larger soul.

We cultivate deeper empathy, richer gratitude, clearer vision, and an astonishing capacity for joy that we might never have accessed in comfortable, unbroken weather.

We do not merely learn to carry the same old weight with tired shoulders. Instead, the weight becomes a tiny fraction of a much larger, stronger, and more beautiful self. The past stays the same size, but you become vast.

In that expansion, suffering ceases to be a heavy burden you drag behind you like an anchor. It becomes the very soil from which your wisdom, tenderness, and grace bloom. You don't just carry it, you outgrow its power to define you, leaving behind something profoundly whole and infinitely luminous.

Have hope, all you weary and broken. You may be tired today, but you are not finished yet. The best parts of your story are still taking root.

Depression or anxiety? It's a mental illness, not society making you feel lonely or broke

Poor or unemployed? You're not trying jard enough or picked the wrong career instead of society not providing a safety net or the rich refusing to share a meaningful portion of their wealth.

Single or have few friends? Your standards are too high or you're not trying enough, or aren't social enough, rather than society shipping unattainable standards or making us bogged down in our phones instead of talking to another human being.

I'm sure there are plenty more examples. But blaming the weakest person makes perfect economic sense in such a setup, because there's always a potential cost you incur to your own social prospects, whomever you blame. And if you blame a higher-status person, that cost and the risk associated is higher. But if you blame the vulnerable individual, you minimize that, and since individualism is founded on being self-sufficient and neither needing others nor caring for them, since "nobody will save you" anyways (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy), it's the option that is selected by default, and the resulting decisions by a multitude of individuals combine to maintain and reinforce the system.

I'm not talking about being chased by a goose. That's a perfectly reasonable fear. I'm talking about the ordinary fears. Uncertainty. Change. Letting something matter enough that it could go wrong. The chance that trying will rearrange the life we've gotten used to.

I've noticed that the stronger the want, the louder the fear tends to get. We can want something so badly that not getting it feels unbearable. And getting it can be just as frightening. What if it isn't what we pictured? What if it costs us the version of life that feels safe, even if safe has started to feel small?

So we stay where we are. We keep the desire theoretical. That way it can't disappoint us. And it can't ask anything of us either. The fear does its job. It keeps the familiar intact.

Lately I've been asking myself what's underneath that fear. And sometimes, it's the desire itself. The possibility that another way of living might be waiting for us.

The fear isn't wrong about the uncertainty. And sometimes what we already have really is worth protecting. But in trying to hold on to what's familiar, we can also keep ourselves from discovering what else might be possible. Not every fear needs to be pushed through. Some are there for a reason. But others might be worth getting curious about before we let them make our decisions for us. We don't get to know how it turns out before we try. That's the part no one can skip.

Have you ever realized, after the fact, that something you were avoiding was actually something you wanted? What was the fear protecting?"

Recently I’ve been thinking of the cube personality test, I had done it once as a kid and decided to revisit it.

It essentially involves visualizing a cube, ladder, flowers, horse and storm.

The visuals I’m seeing are that of a dessert at night, in the center of my vision or portrayed image is a giant cube made out of gold. In terms of visualization I am looking from the ground up and not seeing an end to the cube. Leaning upon it is a ladder, a ladder made out of wood that seems extremely fragil, but still solid enough that it won’t break, there is some moss patches on the ladder with pieces that seem thinner than others but fully connected nonetheless. Clouds surround the top of the cube and the ladder goes into them, the clouds are blocking the view of the top unable to make up what the top looks like due to their dark and grey appearance almost as if it is about to thunder storm but no rain or lighting is yet visible. At the base of the cube surround it all is grass, a very low amount of grass that fades into the desert the further you go from the cube, but you don’t have to go to far before the grass turns into dust, within the dust are small white flowers, scarce but scattered all through the grass and the bottom of the cube, but not enough to make it past the ladders first step. Next to the cube is a dark horse, the horse is in the distance on the right side of the cube it has a saddle on and is looking at me, for whatever reason I feel scared of the horse, intimidated even. In perspective the horse is about 3 ladder steps in height but not close to the ladder. The cube is just that big. From my perspective I am at the bottom of the ladder but I see the base of the ladder looking up towards the storm, uncertain if I’ll go up on the ladder.

I’m not talking about feeling anger or joy or any emotions that can be easily displayed on one’s face.

I’m not necessarily talking about the basic feelings of anger, joy or sadness (while all of it could probably be dumbed down to those kinds of feelings) but more about the feeling that a certain song gives you the more you listen to it or the smell of something from your childhood that you know your nostalgic about but it feels like more than just nostalgia.

I want so badly to put a label on all of these complex internal feelings but I don’t know what I’m feeling and without being able to name them I feel a sense of discomfort like it’s so close but intangible.

Im aware of the fact that the reason for this may be because I’m simply not educated enough to put my feelings into the correct words but it’s become a serious chunk of my daily brainpower trying to do just that.

Does anyone else feel this way about anything?

Hypocrisy and qualia are a circuit of humanity.

I thought long and hard about hypocrisy, and masks, and well... Lies... And I came to accept it or understand it as an intrinsic part of human nature, because for all we know? A human's own conscious nature might be built upon the deceit of its own self.

But I mean... Why would humans build a world of masks, and games of pretend and lies if it wasn't our intrinsic existential nature? Same way even if you have a dog be vegan, it is intrinsically a carnivore and it'll show eventually. Now? You have, say on the low end, 20-15 thousand years of accumulative small lies that built the reality around us, because our own intrinsic nature influenced the environment rather than the otherwise.

That's why it's beautiful. Genuinely so. Because morals, good, gods, bad and everything in between comes from the most on the nose, behind the eyes and simultaneously smallest and biggest lies of living. Your own self. Qualia.

Because even the connotation of the lie, the concept of its meaning, we built it from the same society we built upon accumulative small lies. So that nobody looks, because lies are ugly. But... Deceit or a lie isn't intrinsically bad, it just is what it is for it serves a purpose. A lie? Never has no purpose. You can do good for the sake of doing good, but you can't lie for the sake of lying because it always serves an underlying purpose. And that's why it's beautiful. Because qualia is a lie. It's our own biggest lie, to forget that we're just... Atoms, on atoms in a vacuum of a void.

See that's the thing. People cannot escape being hypocrites even at a non-malicious level. Because it's our nature. Same way a wolf's nature is to eat meat, a flower's nature is to photosynthesize and so on so forth. As the Lithuanian saying goes: a human does one thing, says a second, and thinks a third (vienaip daro, antraip sako, trečiaip mąsto) - and a person who isn't a hypocrite like that isn't a person at all, they're simply a mirror of their environment. To be a hypocrite without a mask that concedes to the lesser lies than your own existential one? Is to find "meaning of life" because then? You simply get to live and exist. And in a billion billion years or so, you'll do it again but maybe different. Let's hope atoms remember aye?

Because the human mind cannot easily function without masks, after all to have no mask is to be authentic and to be authentic? The big lie needs to be the one acting directly with both the ugly and the beautiful.

But like that's the thing ye? I thought about hypocrisy - what it means, what it is, why it is, and why it is so popular - and I simply came to the conclusion. That hypocrisy isn't a mask. It's someone's true nature peering through the cracks thinking it's unseen.

But here's a unique personal paradox. The more open and non-delusional I was about my own hypocrisy, the smaller and smaller its range of effects had grown. Like how do I explain this? It's like being aware of your bigger hypocrisies ye, still acting them out, but as time passes on those hypocrisies get actually smaller until you stop noticing them. As if, to notice your own hypocrisies is to look at yourself inwards via a filter of some kind?

Yeah, they simply shrink to small, genuinely small things that I entirely miss out on until someone mentions. And I think - that's the perfect state of hypocrisy. You don't have to flagellate your own self, your own lies or truths to find the fact. Think of your own I's mechanisms as a perfect camouflage defense system?

Well, I simply found it hilarious that a lot of philosophies include self-flagellation, yet ultimately serve no other purpose than the purpose being a hypocrisy in of itself - the self-flagellation as the purpose and meaning behind the philosophy, so as to give a person something concrete to blame, to follow, to hate or love so that they don't have to face themselves even if the philosophy says they do.

Anyways. But that's why the defense mechanism is so great. Morals have aesthetics, but beyond that. Concepts have aesthetics. And imagine how ugly, how repulsive one would feel if they heard that their self-flagellation is a hypocrisy in of itself, even if it's not a bad one as long as the lie works as intended.

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Nietzsche once said in Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil that untruth is a condition of life, yet warned against the "last man" who just blinks, shrugs at the lie, and says "we have invented happiness" just to live in lazy comfort instead of suffering to create greatness and meaning. So if he asked whether accepting our own hypocrisy without self-flagellation is just being a "lazy last man" who shrugs because "everything is a lie", this is my answer: (Which is actually brought up from a discord chat because I've never not once in my life read a single philosophy book.)

It's easy to call it 'lazy last man' when what is greatness? Why seek meaning when we know we can't answer the questions. We won't. I don't think it should be answered. We create comfort because self flagellation for ideals or ideas is the same kind of lazy thing you described. Just another set of clothes to justify being. I don't shrug at everything because"i know everything is a lie" because truthfully? I don't know. Maybe not everything is a lie, but can I differentiate? No. And that's the thing. I simply experience. Not exist. Live. Live to experience, and experience to live whilst being a hypocrite - a human because I can't be anything more or less than that. And so I ask you instead. If you know nothing has meaning, then why continue existing? You can't live for nothing, and nothing doesn't live for you. But you are. That's a fact. And you experience - subjectively? Objectively? Do you know? Do I know? Does anyone know the answer to which is it? No. And that's the sad, hard and beautiful truth. A conception of deception that is belief in of itself. So believing that my view is the correct or yours is the right answer to living is a deception of your own consciousness because it's a non. A no answer dilemma that only questions but never answers - instead what answers is the collective lies and interpretations of reality filtered through our own very beings.

And so  what happens when the comfort rips away and you are hit by real tragedy, grief, betrayal, and black bitterness that doesn't shrink? Do you finally curse existence when the lie stops feeling sweet, or try to force yourself to love fate without flinching? My answer to that would be:

I do curse. That's the point, that's the reaction. Pain, tragedy or betrayal... Those are all intrinsic parts of existing and experiencing, yet when you do experience the loss of a loved one, do you not also experience the deepest kind of love and gratitude that they were? When you're betrayed and bitter do you not also learn how to not be deceived by the same kind of treachery? Without bitterness you won't know how truly sweet is sugar. Without sugar you won't truly know the depth of repulsion when that bitterness hits your tongue. That is experiencing. That is the deceit. When a curtain of something is, and when it's drawn down what happens is you find another layer, another curtain that shows you the back end of it. I dislike many things, I get depressed every fall and winter, and I think... How peaceful it would be to end it all, yet simultaneously I'm reminded of the beautiful things. And I think to myself. What more is there that I missed? Just how much more sweetness I can draw after this bitterness subsides. And if it doesn't? What if that bitterness doesn't go away? Then it eventually becomes the new sweet. If life goes only down, then the old worst is the new good. A drowning man looks at the surface until their eyes close and they sink to the bottom. They don't look at the bottom before that, because they already know what's down there - more water. But what's up? Air. Help. Survival and continuation.

So I ask you. Am I delusional to think this way? Or...