Love & Loch Ness

True love is like the Loch Ness Monster. People desperately want it to exist, despite all odds, simply because it makes life less boring. Pretending that there’s some higher level of human connection to be achieved helps them cope with the fact that romantic love is a mere human construct. By telling themselves love is more than a simple combination of two elements: infatuation and companionate bond, ordinary people can convince themselves it’s worth extraordinary pursuit. That it’s something they can invest their identities in. An ethereal romantic high that makes life worth living for. And so they expend inordinate amounts of time and energy looking for it in the most bizarre of places, building their entire lives around this mindless pursuit of nothing. They get jobs for it, educations for it, buy books about it… There’s no point in telling them the truth, even if you could convince them of it, it would be horribly cruel of you to tear them away from the bliss of their delusions. You’d rid them of any reason to live. They’re too simple and often too stupid to realize that it is possible to lead a life of meaning without said meaning deriving only from the whimsical and inconsequential emotions of another person. So they’ll trod mindlessly on day by day through their rote existence searching for another human that will make their lives worth something. They will all fail. Some will die trying, and the rest will convince themselves they haven’t failed, shrouding the true nature of their self-induced relational bondage with foolish idealism. With every last bit of their mental resolve, they’ll ignore the nagging dysfunction that penetrates every corridor of their partnerships, lest they look up and find themselves quivering at the feet of raw existential terror.

Does he feel?

Feelings don’t take up nearly as much mental space as actual plotted-out ideas and knowledge. They take up next to no space at all. This is because feelings, in and of themselves, don’t need to be remembered. They are like mathematical equations in that, when presented with the right external input, they produce a certain result the same way every time. And when a result is different than the previous, it is because the input has changed. This is why time needn’t be consumed remembering one’s own emotions, because they surface naturally when prompted by specific situational variables, like a solution emerges from a calculator when prompted with numerical variables. For the average individual that is. So what then can be deduced about him who must remember how he feels about something? He who stops, when presented with a stimulus, to ponder how he ought to feel. Is he cold? What if he should decide not to feel anything? Is he heartless? What if he should *decide* to feel something? Is it fake? Can one really *choose* to feel something and it be legitimate? Suppose this man is presented with a death. And suppose upon pondering the possible responses to this emotional stimulus, he *chooses* to be sad. Is he really sad? Or is he simply feigning sadness because that’s what social convention tells him he ought to feel. Or even still, is he simply feigning sadness because that’s what he tells himself he ought to feel. Does he really feel anything?

The Love Addict

Love is like a drug. It feels good on occasion, but it’s draining. Draining and expensive. It draws you in at the start. It keeps you coming back. And eventually it swallows you up so much that it becomes what defines you. And it is life sucking. You become a slave to feeding the emotional stimuli that make you feel good inside, but each time you have to up the dose to reach the same level of euphoria. You play a painful game of diminishing returns until you find yourself so far into it and so heavily dependent on it, that you don’t even know who you are anymore. Slowly your relationships, your passions, your own personhood starts to crumble before your incessant and insatiable cravings. When they can no longer be satisfied, you break. And you’re left disappointed and lost. Full withdrawal. At this point there’s no one left for you. All of your friends and loved ones have been shoved away in your mad scramble for ‘what you need’. You’re left with your life in ruins and nowhere to go. All because you were consumed by your feelings and abandoned rationality in favor of appetitive frivolity.

The Curse of the Artist

The general population has the remarkable and unfortunate tendency to get irritated when they see exceptionals actually pursuing the things they are passionate about, because they themselves lack the confidence to shake up the status quo and pursue their own passions. They're afraid to leave the boundaries of their "normal pursuits" and so they bring degradation upon everyone who doesn't share their fear in order to give themselves a little ego boost. I suppose that's just the curse of the artist. Or really the curse of anyone who challenges societal norms in favor of their own seemingly unrealistic or unfruitful ambitions and passions. Of course this boldness is what defines the artist. Not everyone has the courage to be one.