Against illusion

The Floating Man While I was reading Ibn Sina as philosophy, I found something I did not expect first. It wasn't really the floating man or "the soul" in his principals. It was how much of him came before those questions ever surfaced. He was writing on logic before he turned twenty. By his own account he read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times and had it nearly memorized without understanding what it was for, until a small commentary by al-Farabi, bought cheap from a bookseller, finally showed him the point of it. By the time he wrote the Canon of Medicine, the text that trained European physicians for six hundred years after his death, he had already been a court physician, a vizier, a prisoner, a man who kept moving between cities as the ground shifted under whichever ruler he served. Most of us inherit him as the philosopher of the flying man or just a medicine polymath. Almost none of us inherit the fact that the argument was built on top of a mind that had already diagnosed the body before it went looking for the soul. The argument itself is easy to state and hard to sit inside. “ Imagine a man created whole in a single instant, suspended in open air, blindfolded, his limbs kept from touching each other or anything else, no sound reaching him, nothing beneath his feet. Take away every sense he has of the world and of his own body”. Ibn Sina says this man would still affirm one thing without hesitation. that he exists. It's not the matter that he has hands or there is blood moving somewhere beneath a skin he cannot feel. Only that he is. He used this to argue that the soul is not something we arrive at through the senses. We do not deduce our own existence by feeling our weight or hearing our breath. Self-awareness comes first, immediate, needing no inference, and the body comes after, known only through sensation, which can in principle always be doubted or stripped away. Six centuries before Descartes sat by his fire doubting the world down to a single certainty, Ibn Sina had already suspended a man in the dark and found the same thing waiting there. It really stays with me that his proof required subtraction, not accumulation. He does not build toward the soul by adding evidence. Ratherz, he gets there by removing everything else until one thing refuses to go. It is something almost merciless, if you think about it, in a proof shaped that way. You do not arrive at yourself by discovering more of the world. You arrive at yourself by losing all of it first. What follows, in the rest of his psychology, is that the soul is simple, without parts, and this is exactly why it does not decay the way the body does. A body is a composite, and composites come apart at their seams. A soul with no seams has nothing in it to separate. I find this less comforting than it is meant to be. A body that fails at least fails somewhere specific, an organ, a vessel, something a hand could point to. A soul that cannot fail also cannot be reached. It sits behind everything, certain of itself, answering to no one. I keep thinking of the floating man more as a description of a specific sort of aloneness. In that sort you know you exist without needing anyone to confirm it, and where that knowledge does nothing at all to warm the room around you.

A Compass, Not a Map Part 2: What to point the wanting at Some philosophies, like Buddhism and Stoicism, offer a similar conclusion: stop reading it. The Buddhists (in my limited understanding) went after the needle. Craving is the root of suffering, so still it, let the wanting go. The Stoics went after the reader. The needle points at things outside your control and settles nowhere anyway, so why organize your life around it? Be content with where you stand. If an instrument can't bring you anywhere, they ask, what exactly is the point of staring at it? The needle alone really does bring you nowhere. It can't even tell you where you are: your goal can sit on the same parallel as you, and the compass will read exactly the same at your destination as it does a thousand kilometres short of it. But sailors! Sailors knew all this for centuries and didn't throw their compasses overboard. They used it for the things it does well: holding a heading and showing the drift, and they let the charts and stars do the rest. A limited instrument is not a useless one. And bringing you somewhere was never its job. The point is in the pursuit; the needle's job is to keep you honest about direction while you move. I believe our brains were built for a very different environment, but they were built for the right reasons. In that world the signals were few and impossible to misread: there is nothing confusing about RUN or the lion will eat you. Find food or you will starve. Build or you will freeze to death. And with signals that clear, the future belonged to the restless: the people who felt satisfied with one good meal and one safe cave left fewer descendants than the ones who kept wanting more. So the wanting is not a defect and the instrument is not broken. It is simply calibrated for a world that no longer exists. Today, most of us no longer face existential threats to our individual survival. Instead, there are plenty of signals, many of them weak, and a weak signal is easily confused with noise. The needle still trembles; we just can't tell what it's pointing at. And when people can't read their own needle, someone will offer to read it for them. Fascism, racism, nationalism (and other isms) sell exactly what the modern brain is starving for: one loud, clean signal. Everything wrong in your life has a single cause that group, that ideology and getting rid of it becomes your ONE clean point in life. A compass that always knows where to point. The catch is that these ideologies can never deliver, because the bad doesn't live inside a group you can remove. It lives in people, all of us, which is why the followers end up fighting forever. But the isms are not the only loud signals on offer. Find the pursuits where you already know the destination is good, and jump. Having kids is one of the clearest ones. You might not know what you're doing, why, or how, but you know there is at least one goal that needs no interpretation: this human you are responsible for must be fed, safe, and happy. The signal is loud again. Some experiences do the amplifying all on their own: falling in love, doing something difficult, being new at something. Suddenly the needle is easy to read. And that is the whole deal: you supply the destination, the needle supplies the pull. Treat it like a tool, give it ambitious missions, big or small (like being slightly better at something everyday), and it will always have somewhere to point, instead of wandering the way it does at the pole.

A Compass, Not a Map Part 1: Why we can't stop wanting Our brains are the tool for finding where to go next. But strictly speaking, they work like a compass, not a map. While a map shows you the destination, a compass only gives you a direction. You can follow the needle your whole life and never arrive anywhere, because "north" is not a place. If you walk all the way to the magnetic north pole, the one spot on Earth that every needle on the planet points to, your compass will not congratulate you. At the pole, the field lines dive straight down into the ground, so a needle built to swing horizontally loses its grip and just wanders, settling nowhere. (A needle free to tilt would point at your feet.) The needle doesn't disappear at the destination. The pull doesn't switch off. And to make it worse, the pole itself drifts tens of kilometres a year, so even the destination won't stay put for you. There is no place you can stand where the instrument finally says done. I noticed that the brain is the same: it generates pull, not destinations. It tells you that way. It never tells you you have arrived. And we are not holding this compass in an empty field. Life is full of magnets. Work pulls one way, family another, then ambition, envy, comfort, and the needle swings between all of them. Even the summits don't quiet it: we expect the peak to be the end, and we arrive only to see other peaks ahead of us.

Personally I believe personality is treated as the least important part of a person's development when it should be treated as the most important, because it is the one thing that determines whether every other quality you have, your looks, your intelligence, your achievements, actually lands with anyone or just sits there unused. You can be gorgeous and no one wants to be around you. You can be brilliant and no one wants to ask your opinion. Personality is the delivery system for everything else you are, and yet it is the one thing we never consciously build. What makes this worse is how little attention we pay to what is actually shaping us while it is happening. Nobody sits there thinking "this brainrot audio I've watched forty times is currently installing itself into how I talk," but that is exactly what is happening. You will meet people whose entire personality is just quoting the same three tiktok sounds, responding to real conversations with "it's giving" or "no because," treating every interaction like a comment section instead of an actual exchange between two people. This is not them being shallow on purpose. It is just that this was the only material they were ever fed, so this is the only material they have to build a self out of. And the scary part is this happens completely below the radar. Someone doesn't wake up one day and decide "I will now think and joke exactly like a group chat." It happens one scroll at a time, one reel at a time, one recycled meme format at a time, until years later their sense of humor, their opinions, even their emotional reactions are basically a highlight reel of whatever the algorithm was feeding them that year. Ask them why they find something funny and they cannot actually explain it, because the joke was never really theirs, it was just absorbed. That is the part nobody talks about. We assume our personality is something we own, when for a lot of people it is closer to something that was rented out to them by whatever app they used the most. This is why the gap between people who consume with awareness and people who consume on autopilot has become so visible. You can spot it almost immediately. Someone who reads, has real conversations, sits with boredom instead of numbing it, tends to have opinions that are actually theirs, humor that is actually theirs, a way of speaking that does not sound like it was copy pasted from a trending audio. Someone who has spent years on nothing but short form content and recycled internet culture tends to sound, ironically, like everyone else who has spent years on the same thing. The algorithm was built to make you feel unique while making you extremely predictable, and most people never clock that irony because they are too deep inside it to see the pattern from outside. None of this is said to dunk on anyone, because honestly almost everyone is somewhere on this spectrum, myself included. The point is just that personality is not decoration, it is infrastructure. It decides whether your looks matter, whether your intelligence lands, whether people actually want to sit across from you or just look at you. And infrastructure this important should not be left to whatever content happened to be trending the week it was quietly built.

What's even understanding? Let it be said plainly, for it must be said. There are those who speak the word understanding as though it were a spell, and once uttered, their duty is finished. They say, "I understand you," and then walk back into the very same behavior that wounded you the day before. This is not understanding. This is a word wearing the mask of understanding while nothing beneath it moves. True understanding was never meant to end at speech. Among the old thinkers, to understand a thing was to be changed by it. A physician who understood a wound did not merely name it. He altered his hands to treat it differently. A farmer who understood the drought did not speak of thirst and then water the field exactly as before. Understanding, in its truest form, always produced action. Where there is no action, there was no understanding. There was only agreement with the sound of your pain, not with its meaning. This is the narrowness so many carry without knowing it. They believe understanding is a single act, spoken once, filed away, complete. They believe if they nodded when you cried, they have done the work. But they never ask the deeper question, the one that separates true seeing from performance. Why does this keep happening. Why does this person keep arriving at the same wound. What in me continues to cause it. That question is where understanding actually lives, and it is the question almost no one is willing to ask, because the answer might require them to change, and it is easier to repeat comfort than to repeat effort. So you are left with people who say the sacred words and offer none of the sacred labor. They understand your sadness enough to comment on it, but not enough to stop causing it. They understand your anger enough to flinch from it, but not enough to ask what fed it. This is not understanding. This is familiarity they confuse with depth. Know this, and let it settle in you like truth should. When someone truly understands you, you will not need their words to prove it. You will see it in what they stop doing. You will see it in what they finally begin to do differently. Understanding that does not move the hands is only a story someone tells about caring, not caring itself. You are not wrong for feeling alone inside their claims. You are simply seeing clearly what they refuse to look at. And that clarity, however lonely, is closer to truth than their easy comfort will ever be.

amor fati is often translated as "love of fate," but that translation softens what the idea actually demands. there is nothing gentle in it. most people spend their lives arguing with what has already happened. they revisit old mistakes, resent their circumstances…

amor fati is often translated as "love of fate," but that translation softens what the idea actually demands. there is nothing gentle in it. most people spend their lives arguing with what has already happened. they revisit old mistakes, resent their circumstances, and imagine better versions of themselves who chose differently. amor fati rejects that entirely. it does not ask for acceptance because there is no alternative. it is indeed more severe: stop treating the past as a courtroom. stop expecting reality to explain itself. what happened is now fixed in the structure of the world. no regret, no bitterness, no nostalgia can change a single piece of it. amor fati means neglecting to become an enemy of one's own history. every humiliation, every failure, every loss, every moment of confusion and suffering has participated in making the person who exists now. to reject those events would be to reject part of oneself.

Most people don't fail their dreams. They abandon them long before that. There are million good reasons why it doesn't make sense for you to start working on the life you dream about. You accept your circumstances thinking that one day you will have the time, resources and perfect opportunity to finally get started. I don't think that time will ever come. You will grow bitter and resentful that the world is not working the way "it should." The thing about dreams is that they're meant to keep moving further away from you: like the horizon as you walk toward it, or the next, higher peak that appears as you climb. So you never fail if you truly chase your dream; it might take you longer than you expected and when you think you reached it, you just climb higher with it. The only real failure is not taking the first step because your goal looks too far right now. And it will be further than you think. If it weren't, many would reach it with ease, and it wouldn't be your dream.

do you measure life by the shadows it casts, or by the light that keeps breaking through ?

I keep thinking about how weird it is that the things I admire the most are rarely the things I naturally move toward. Like I can genuinely romanticize discipline, depth, becoming someone better, more fulfilled, more meaningful, but then my actual instincts…

I keep thinking about how weird it is that the things I admire the most are rarely the things I naturally move toward. Like I can genuinely romanticize discipline, depth, becoming someone better, more fulfilled, more meaningful, but then my actual instincts lean toward comfort almost every single time. Sleep feels more natural than ambition. Scrolling feels easier than confronting yourself. Immediate pleasure makes more sense to the brain than some distant abstract version of fulfillment that may or may not ever arrive. And that makes me question whether humans truly desire meaning as deeply as we claim to, or whether we mostly desire comfort while intellectually admiring meaning from a distance.

If we can accept ourselves, we can accept the world. Which is not to say you'll agree with everything; Rather, to say that you won't be moved by your own disagreement. What is outside will be more of itself because you will be more of yourself. If we don't…

If we can accept ourselves, we can accept the world. Which is not to say you'll agree with everything; Rather, to say that you won't be moved by your own disagreement. What is outside will be more of itself because you will be more of yourself. If we don't see things for what they are, we will see them for what we are. If what we are is not filled with value, positivity, and whatever love we have for ourselves, then it will not be in the world we experience. So in a way to see any value in the world is to in part see it in yourself, because it's your perspective. So if you see anything beautiful in the world around you, you too must contain that beauty. If we are unable to give ourselves fully to the moment, then there is no moment to experience in the first place. If we wait for the world to tell us we are valuable after it experiences us; then who we are is more focused on being experienced, than actually experiencing.

Okay, so here's the thing. People talk about awareness like it's this enlightened state you want to reach, like climbing a mountain where the air is cleaner and everything makes sense. But nobody mentions that the higher you go, the more you see the cracks…