Isn't the money we see in our online banking accounts essentially just numbers stored in a computer system? What actually prevents a bank from artificially increasing those numbers and creating money out of thin air?

Cash feels easier to keep track of because it's tangible and you can physically see and count it, whereas digital money exists as numbers on a screen, making it harder to understand where it comes from and how it's tracked.

Also, doesn't currency only have value because people collectively believe it does? If everyone suddenly stopped trusting banks or believing that the money in their accounts was real, wouldn't the entire system fall apart?

I'm curious about how the system works behind the scenes and what ultimately gives those digital numbers their value and legitimacy.

I really think the world's going to stay the same, no matter what. People will die, societies can fall apart, and generations will pass, but the world will keep going, and the same old problems will stick around. There will always be suffering, people being mean, fighting, and hurting each other.

Even when things do change, it seems like we just swap one problem for another. Humans have been around for thousands of years, and even with all we've learned and achieved, we're still facing the same basic issues.

I don't see a time coming when the world will be fundamentally different. The surface stuff might change, but the overall situation will always be the same.

The only universal constant in this world is the persistence of life—fungi, animals, plants. Everything is interconnected within a cycle where organisms nourish one another; each is essential for the continued existence of the others. How life is lived varies entirely depending on one’s culture or species. Every being employs different strategies for survival, yet the ultimate goal has always been the same: to preserve one’s own life, as well as the lives of loved ones—or those we feel compelled to protect.

Have you ever considered how strange it is that parents feel an urge to protect their offspring, even when doing so is incredibly exhausting? I’m speaking in general terms: lionesses constantly hunting for their cubs, birds foraging to bring food to their chicks every few hours, or human mothers nursing their infants. Biologically speaking, this is driven by a cocktail of hormones that fosters a bond between parent and child, compelling the parent to provide care. But why does this happen? The purpose is to ensure continued existence—but why? Why do things strive to keep existing?

It may seem like a silly question, but I suspect it could stem from a human bias. We are so accustomed to seeing things fight to stay alive that we perceive this as mere common sense.

But why has life—or existence itself—taken a form that inherently tends toward its own perpetuation?

"After all, what would be the point of not existing?"

But then again, what is the point of existing then?

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.

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"

Having experienced bullying, group dynamics among peers, and family structures, I have spent time reflecting on how people behave when their beliefs, loyalties, and self-perceptions are challenged.

One observation that stands out to me is how difficult genuine accountability seems to be for many people. They may acknowledge wrongdoing when doing so carries little personal cost, yet change their position when standing by the truth threatens their social standing, relationships, or sense of belonging.

It makes me wonder whether we value truth and fairness as much as we claim to, or whether we value preserving the unspoken rules of the groups we belong to and protecting our collective self-image even more.

In the search for meaning, many people seem reluctant to ask the difficult questions about life, existence, and their own motivations. Instead, they follow a familiar script: acquire material possessions, project an image of success, and cultivate the appearance of being intelligent, wise, or high-status. Yet beneath that polished exterior, genuine self-examination can be surprisingly absent.

We also tend to defer to people who are perceived as successful. Those around them may hesitate to question their behaviour, either because they benefit from the relationship or because challenging them threatens the social hierarchy. Over time, this can reinforce a person's self-image without necessarily making it more accurate. When surrounded by people whose interests align with pleasing us, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish honest feedback from validation.

I have also noticed how people who question established norms are not always rewarded for doing so. Their willingness to challenge the group may be interpreted as arrogance, disloyalty, or unnecessary friction. However, if their position is eventually proven correct and they gain recognition or status, the same people who once dismissed them may suddenly seek their approval.

To me, this reflects a deeper contradiction in human behaviour. We often claim to value honesty, fairness, and independent thinking, but our actions can suggest that we value convenience, acceptance, and social positioning more. We are willing to praise the truth when it benefits us, yet resist it when it forces us to confront uncomfortable realities about ourselves.

Perhaps one of the hardest things to acknowledge is that the identity we defend so fiercely may not be entirely our own. Much of it may have been shaped by the expectations of our families, peer groups, and society, along with our desire to belong and be accepted. What we perceive as our authentic identity can sometimes be a role we have learned to perform.

Genuine self-awareness, then, requires more than believing we are good, fair, or independent thinkers. It requires being willing to question ourselves when doing so threatens the very image we have built of who we are.

These are simply my observations and reflections. I am curious whether others have noticed similar patterns in their own experiences.

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.

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?

~ What is Normal? ~

If we observe the world today, we would consider innocents dying needlessly in war, from random violence, drugs, hunger, normal. Treating others with prejudice, indifference, due to their contrasts, normal. Homelessness, poverty, inequity, normal.

In a more compassionate world, no one would be ignored. Rather than continuing to live in a self-centered world of greed, everything would be equally shared so all may survive. Those without food would be fed, without shelter would be housed, in need of help, would be aided.

To change the world, we must challenge humanity’s definition of normal, realizing anything harming another in any way is not normal, and only together, selflessly helping each other, may our world not only survive, but thrive as well.

​

To begin with, let me remind you that mathematics is not a science fortunately and that it is perhaps one of the largest organized, consistent symbolic formal systems for developing something: maybe intellect, maybe a certain form of thinking, maybe someone understands more clearly what exactly mathematics develops and can tell us about it.

And whatever it develops in us, there may immediately be a temptation to say functionally: well, then mathematics is needed precisely for developing this, Robert Wide.

The difficulty is that although there are interesting things in it, such as topology, or interesting theorems and models, and especially what seems important is the economic, technological, and research contribution of mathematics,

And yet it seems that this formal system stalls a person and makes it harder for him to think outside this formal system. Of course, one can say this about logic too, and about their similarity, and in general about any old systems of thought or let us call them closed or “controlling” ones. To some, dialectics may also seem like this, though to a lesser degree, and it is precisely dialectics that sets the task of sublating contradiction and arriving at generalization and understanding, that is, in an ethical sense it is a more encompassing system of cognition in the sense of its capacity — though often in verbal form to include something else and incomprehensible in its understanding. And if we abstract from formal dialectics, if you have ever heard these expositions, then the ethical idea and, as it were, real dialectics in full non-contradictoriness and some communication, for example as metamodernism, is the same dialectics or synthesis between sincerity and so-called postmodernity or irony.

Dialectics is still an example, not a proposed answer. Although it could perhaps be one of those considered.

Returning to mathematics. Despite its outstanding economic, technological, research possibilities and achievements, and as a result also social and political ones… it still remains rather abstract. One can say that it is the most complex, or one of the most complex, games of the mind, or games within the mind, or separate games within the mind. But for the mind itself this seems like something akin to sophistry or magic, though a very useful one. Or one can say that it is a magical system, or one of the magical systems of this world. But it is almost always something very abstract: it seems to me that this is often said about philosophers too, by those who do not delve deeply into philosophy; but those who do delve in, on the other hand, can understand that we often reflect on the most important questions or phenomena that we can feel or think. As far as I understand and it is not known how much the answers may still differ mathematics is a system of ultimate formal complexity, or of ultimate complexity for thought in general, since in one way or another what we formulate as philosophers often, though perhaps difficult, has a clearer representation of reality, even if it is Lacan’s Borromean rings. In the sense that philosophy, apart from again sophistry, usually does not strive to become complicated simply for the sake of complication because why? It seems that a person, after this stage of formal logic, can also learn other possibilities of thinking. But in mathematics, complexity and possibly even not necessarily, but possibly the degree of abstraction seems literally the quintessence of content. On the other hand, of course, this may also be good. In the sense of ultimate complexity, ultimate constructiveness, ultimate abstraction, in the sense that we as a culture have some content, some achievements that we may still have to comprehend, if some of them can be so complex that there are literally 400 pages of formulas of explanation.

But, like, why?

And returning to what we were talking about, this seems like ultimate sophistry or thinking in idle, in the sense for thought itself and for man, although culturally it brings enormous social results: both economics and technology and research and efficiency.

And even if we assume that mathematics is integral thinking rather than specific thinking, then although it is clear why mathematics should be developed: so that there can be a further possibility of development…

What for, and what from mathematics, and should it and it or they even be present in education?

Because even if we may have grounds to think so but even if mathematics is connected with integral, that is, general thinking, that is, as it were, some generalized function of it, the mathematicality of education then creates a situation in which a person tries to wipe the sofa with a processor without imagining what a sofa is.

And if not, and mathematics is more specific thinking, that is, in the sense that it also remains there and in a constant submetacognitive state: in the sense that it fundamentally cannot leave the box and its language and its formality or formalization… then such thinking is good for producing human-computers useful for working with ordinary computers, for example in a bank or somewhere else. As a result, man has, as it were, given his brain to mathematics, and how is he supposed to live further? Well, that is, then perhaps also the market, where this mathematized brain may be valued higher than the self-esteem or self-understanding of such a person, and so the puzzle comes together: successful recruiting into a successful company.

I will say right away that simply “progressive studies,” which may even be not thinking but to some extent dogmatic propaganda or propaganda at the expense of education hours, trying to lean on Marxism or performatism according to Butler, are, as it were… Well, people can learn something valuable, but on the whole it seems that this is simply the disintegration of education, or rather almost its absence, or its replacement by propaganda so that in an economic-political sense these people could be ever more perfect agents of this very propaganda, possibly even without fully understanding it. And how lucky we are that we can look at this from the outside, unlike the people and economies that this “progressive” propaganda may further repress. And the main complaint against it is probably economic, because a society simply without technical specialties loses economic opportunities; only oligarchs remain, and they would most quickly move to a new place. And in a universal human sense, this is potentially the next target and problem for the next intellectual stratum that will try to do something about this repressiveness. If, in general, there will be anyone left to do anything there.

In general, why was this clarification about “progressive” or agenda-driven education? So that this question is not in support of that very agenda, and, as it were, we understand in advance some of the existing difficulties there and have described them.

And still, the question: is mathematics needed? And such mathematized, formalized thinking — and then we are surprised by further formalizations and the resulting difficulties, such as bureaucracy and media simplification and corruption in many senses.

Additionally:

Maybe the form of my question is a bit of Soviet thinking or a way of thinking about something, and if you understand another or other better ways of asking or thinking about this, you can say so.