Lately, I've been reflecting on how human interaction is shaped by individuals, each carrying their own histories and personal wounds. While collective experiences do influence us, society ultimately consists of individuals—each a building block of the larger whole.

If we accept that many people have experienced trauma or emotional wounds, whether in childhood or adolescence, these unresolved pains shape who they become. When these individuals come together, they create systems that not only reflect but often perpetuate these wounds, embedding the effects of trauma into societal structures.

An important point to consider is that attempts to change systems from the outside often ignore the inner struggles of individuals. Talking about a "sick society" misses the fact that this society is made up of individuals who are themselves unwell. A society’s health is fundamentally determined by the health of its people.

If we also consider that our societal systems were shaped in the past—often reflecting outdated values and unresolved collective trauma—then much of the discord we experience today stems from reproducing these old wounds. These systems persist because individuals carry their past pains into the present, creating cycles of harm that ripple outward.

So, could healing individuals—helping them break free from restlessness, survival-driven behavior, and unprocessed trauma—transform not just their lives but the systems they build? Could addressing the wounds of the individual lead to a healthier society as a whole?

What are your thoughts?

The people who are the nicest, sweetest, least diplomatic, can’t hide their true feelings, sometimes express their true self ( good or bad ) end up suffering the most. They end up getting used, ghosted, cornered and bullied. Whatever we have been taught as kids to be moral and ethical is a lie, because being nice is actually looked down upon by the society as dumb and naive, people who can be used and discarded easily.

More accurately, the socially accepted definition of abuse is flawed, not the one that comes up when you search up the meaning of it.

Anyway, here's why, i've heard this way too many times but usually when abuse is brought up, people say something along the lines of "an action done to use someone for their own selfish good" implying that all violation, behaviour and treatment can only be there on the condition the person abusing is gaining something from it they otherwise wouldnt

Now this is completely wrong, abuse can happen simply out of being too shallow minded or being bad at understanding the diverse human mindsets, the person abusing is also most likely also being harmed by it, but in a larger prespective they can't grasp in the moment

The socially accepted definition is also a bit abusive in itself? because if you cant prove its abuse by mentioning how the abuser is benefitting, can you even say its abuse? making this very point one of the easiest weaknesses to be gaslighted, not just by the abuser but also by one's own self to themselves (out of experience)

Anyway in hindsight, All interaction is using someone for another's selfish good, and it's this selfishness that's actually sort of mutual as being useful is also a blessing, it's also actually selfless in some very specific contextual situations

We now know for sure that intelligence, or at least the type of intelligence that we “try” to measure with IQ, is inherited. We also know that there are many ways by which you can lower your intelligence, and none that can help you raise your IQ points more than a standard deviation from the mean.

So how is society going to manage the fact that there are people who will not have the ability to survive in an ever more abstract world.

I mean, there are still a lot of people who do not believe in quantum mechanics, which in many ways is extremely abstract.

This obviously wasn’t a huge problem because society built a system by which you can match your level of competence with the job market.

But what if low IQ jobs are automated and now a large part of society becomes meaningless.

Even if training programs are put in placed, due to what i mentioned in the first paragraph, it will not be effective. There is no cure to lack of intelligence unfortunately.

However, we have now learned to use quantum technology to built an excessively amount of logic gates at a size of 1-20 nm to create almost anything our mind can come up to, and our mind came up with the idea of creating intelligence.

All of these technologies consist of statistical equations that act in unpredicted ways many times, but are very effective at achieving human level intelligence in different metrics.

Research is expanding, and what seems more interesting to me is how it is capable at identifying patterns within data that would have otherwise been impossible for humans, or would’ve taken a lifetime.

This is scaling the scientific knowledge in unprecedented ways, creating a gap even larger between the different levels of intelligence that exist in society.

This is the exact reason why open ai was built, the initial mission in which open ai was founded before becoming a for profit company.

So with all this rant i ask you, what do you think should be done to protect those in the lower spectrum of intelligence?

Because it misses everyone's mark.

I have been seeing recently extremely wealthy(billionaires and 9 figure plus individuals) people be super against being taxed more or anything that would cause them to make less money. They also seem to constantly want to acquire more wealth, have more of the market etc etc.

I find this behavior to be genuinely absurd. They all have more money than can be spent in many lifetimes yet they seem to never have enough. Elon musks current behavior of just pushing for more power and money to the point of infiltrating the government to protect himself is genuinely insane. Blackrock, vanguard and the likes constantly acquiring and gutting companies for profit is so insane to me.

These people have enough wealth to change governments , end hunger for thousands, change societies and yet they do nothing but contribute enough for tax breaks and try to get more wealth.

Im all for wealth and all for the game but at a certain point you just are mentally ill, something is wrong with these people and its honestly terrifying to even imagine what goes on in their heads. Imagining how they probably see other humans is scary.

In our society the only reason we give a fuck about anyone is because everyone gives a fuck about themselves. All these "morals" like you shouldn't kill anyone or you should be nice is all so we can together live as a society. Morals is what allows us to live together without us all killing ourselves.

Take the question of a train: A train moves along a track and you are given full control of which direction it turns(you have to choose)

On the right side is one person On the left side are 5 people

Which direction do you divert the train to?

let's add some twists to the question once you give an answer.

If you chose to divert the train towards the right You get told that the one person is your son/daughter

If you chose to divert the train towards the left you get told that they are your mother,father and some other relatives.

Now after you're done being told that you get another chance to rechoose weather you want to redivert to another track.

If you're answer was yes you're proving my point If no then you're just built different or lying out of you ass.

Like the first two, you use it to manipulate and get what you want.

Let’s imagine you happen to find an offer for a collection of 20 philosophy books online. You do not know which books are included, just that you receive a box with 20 books. Since you like surprises and especially philosophy the decision is easy: You contact the vendor and buy the box, which arrives three days later. Full of anticipation you set up your cozy reading space, ready to open the box and have a look of what you have retrieved. And so you sit there in your quite and thoughtfriendly room and open it just to realize… All the books are written in chinese (and you don’t know the language). So what is meaning then? These books certainly contain information. You are just not able to retrieve it. In fact it would probably take years building up the needed mental capacity to read a philosophical book in another language fluently. But others could read it and understand it, so it is just that you don’t possess the skills while others do. This particular meaning space of chinese language is locked to you like it is to the majority of people living on earth. If all chinese people and all records of the logic and teaching of their culture happened to disappear somehow - these books would contain no meaning anymore. But objectively the content has not changed at all, just the circumstances that there is no more subject to retrieve the information contained inside the content. So meaning is bound to a subject being able to retrieve it and also to build it. Meaning can feel deeper when one knows more due to more associations and understanding of contexts and so on. It is extendable. It is in fact: learnable.

But what is meaning ?

This is a very difficult question. We retrieve meaning in language spoken or in text through the order of words in a particular order. The words themselves are build up by smaller elements: letters. Letters contain nothing. They need to be in a specific order to make up a word. Letters arranged in an order that don’t make up a word that we know has no meaning, like: ksleofm. <– no meaning (at least not in any language invented yet). The words themselves also need to be in order to convey information, words for themselves indicate nothing or not much without context and embedding in larger language structures. So only in context and through combination of words we form a sentence that conveys information. Words stand for objects, places, concepts, ideas etc. They subsumate a lot of additional information associated with it.

Ofcourse I am simplifying a lot here and also miss a lot of important topics like the subconscious, projection and other psychological factors going along with it like the subjectivity of meaning, relativity etc.

But my main point is this: We are all embedded in social structures from birth on in a specific cultural area in a specific historical epoch where certain norms and values are normal and taught from our earliest years on. Our parents, the institutions for socialization, the world as we see it through media and when going out build up this picture of what is normal. What something means. What has to be done in what way and why that is important. Those first encounters with the world form the foundation for how we perceive information for the rest of our lives. Society works because we all pertain in it like what we know has any objective reality beyond our interindividual perception. Everything today was build up over thousands of years. What we are able to think today is the sum of thoughts over the course of humanity condensed into a giant mindsystem where the world can be made sense of in a complex way, but just in a particular kind of way. Also history is not the same depending on where you come from. Perspectives differ. Cultures differ. Meaning is not real in any way, it is a manmade construct that needs so much to built up. It is soooooo relative.

For when one day society collapses and many records get lost, languages get forgotten: with them goes all the meaning in books and art, ethics and so forth. Art, when no one knows of history or symbols or how to interpret: what is it? What is a painting of Cesar to somebody who does not know Roman history? How famous is Christiano Ronaldo to people that have no internet or TV connection and never seen him? What is any record really that humanity leaves once the last human closes his eyes?

Nietzsche proposed that the fundamental driving force in humans is not survival or reproduction but a “will to power”—the intrinsic drive to assert and enhance one’s strength and creativity. This idea applies not only to individuals but also to cultural, social, and intellectual development.

If you become a Jeff Bezos, or seek to become one, you have, in effect, permanently achieved security and prosperity, at least, in a psychological sense. You have overcome the struggle for survival altogether, and have achieved permanent security. Or, at least, this is where that desire for power comes from.

The desire to assert one's own strength and creativity remains an expression of our survival and reproductive instincts, not a desire that is opposed to them. It's like winning the war instead of just winning battles.

Whether the brain can ever feel permanently secure is another debate. But the initial desire to assert one's power, as Nietzsche describes, is a desire to eliminate the battle for survival altogether.

Our society is not natural. It is not based on "human nature". It is structured in a very specific and deliberate way, largely based on 17th century or so thinking.

Some of the main fallacies our society (especially American) is based on is:

Selfishness being "natural":

It is erroneously assumed that "human nature" is "selfish". This is not true. Human nature is based on self-preservation, which leads people to act in their self-interest, but this is not necessarily the same thing as "selfishness" and "unlimited greed". If society discourages people from being selfish, and rewards them for being altruistic, then in order to boost your own self-interest, you would act altruistic. Yet what has happened is that in our society selfishness is encouraged and valued and justified based on the erroneous assumption that selfishness and unlimited greed is human nature and this is the only way.

Unlimited greed is not natural, it is rather a byproduct of certain specific systems such as capitalism, which require unlimited production and consumption in order to not implode. Those who step on others for more yachts and cannot stop themselves from unlimited spending have issues that need to be dealt with, they are not happy people. They never achieve happiness, they just go through their whole life wanting more and never being happy with what they want. This is not human nature. Human nature is self-preservation, not unlimited and unnecessary consumption to the point it causes detrimental to your physical and mental health. That makes zero sense from an evolutionary perspective. I guess you could argue that the more you have the more prepared you are in case something happens and you lose something or something requires a lot of money to deal with, however, this makes sense to a point, unlimited pooling of resources is still unnatural and if you have so much fear that you can't stop doing this, especially when it is causing you to step on others and people people are starving, that means you have an unhealthy amount of fear and you need help/it is not natural.

Free will:

This is why it is called the "justice" system instead of the legal system. There is a focus on punishment. According to recent consensus by neuroscientists, humans actually don't have free will, rather, the universe operates based on the natural laws of the universe, and we operate within those rules and are not immune to them. We are a product of our physical body we are born with plus environmental stimuli. That is why there are correlations between things like IQ and success, or body build and athletic ability, childhood upbringing and success, etc...

You may argue these are correlations and there exceptions: this is correct, however, the exceptions or non-perfect correlations can be explained by other variables that typically go under the radar. For example, a kid from a low socioeconomic background may have had a caring teacher, and they succeeded in school then attained career success. But often people don't notice these variables, so they mistake this for free will. That is why you have a lot of people who say things like "I grew up poor and made it, that means anybody can pull themselves up by the bootstraps and if anybody does not succeed that is them being lazy". This kind of binary thinking is fueled by emotion and is the result of not focusing on certain harder to detect variables.

Instead of creating the conditions that create crime then punishing people, we should focus on fixing the conditions that create crime in the first place. I will expand on this later.

Freedom:

"Freedom" is highly valued. However, most people are not taught about the 2 types of freedom. There is positive freedom and negative freedom. Negative freedom is freedom "from", e.g., freedom from someone taking your property or belongings. There is indeed lots of negative freedom in our society. But we are largely lacking positive freedom, which is the freedom "to" do things. That is, the practical freedom. So if a society is high in positive freedom, it would provide practical opportunities to people to succeed, anything from education to healthcare to social services can count. But our society is missing a lot of positive freedom, and much of our positive freedom is theoretical. We theoretically have the right to do many things, but we don't have the practical opportunity to do so, due to massive inequality from birth. Corporations and the rich hold a monopoly over this power, and government protects this birth advantage of them, so it is practically very difficult for people who don't have birth advantage to get ahead in this regard.

There is also an unhealthy or paranoid amount of fear over government in the US, and obsession over property rights. This largely stems from the thoughts of 17th century or so thinkers such as John Locke. Read Ted Cruz' undergraduate thesis for a perfect representation of this kind of paranoid thinking. There is so much fear of the government, that power of government is stripped to the point it is weakened. Once it is weakened, in theory that gives "people" more power. But practically speaking, the problem is that "people" are not united or the same. So what happens in practice is that corporations/billionaire get to hijack the weak government and practically run it themselves. And that is how you get the oligarchy that we have.

Practical implications:

So the practical implications of basing society on centuries-old outdated and often incorrect theories in areas such as political philosophy and human nature is that you get an oligarchy in which corporations/billionaires are in control. There is massive inequality and this is justified using circular reasoning. There is a low level of knowledge and critical thinking among the masses, and they primarily operate based on emotional reasoning and there is a lot of division and conflict.

If you try to step back a bit and observe society you will see how sick it is. Most crime is due to economic inequality, lack of proper education, social systems, and health care (how many people with untreated mental health issues, which themselves were caused or exacerbated by society end up in the "justice" system?). It is "normal" for shows such as those reality TV judge shows and Dr. Phil, where people with poor upbringing and education and mental health issues inevitably and obviously end up causing trouble for themselves and others, yet instead of focusing the root societal issues that caused this, the capitalist system doubles down and parades them for entertainment and profit, then people justify it by saying "they chose to be like that, they deserve it". So why are there massively different rates of these issues in different countries? E.g., in Scandinavian countries, who have less wild west capitalism, these issues are significantly less than US, which is the most wild west in terms of unrestrained capitalism. Is this significant correlation just random? Or does it indicate that the variables outlined above may have something to do with it?

People without astigmatism will never truly understand how pretty Xmas time can be

We emit a very small amount bioluminescence glow. 1000 weaker than our eyes can detect. It’s basically produced by our metabolism

If people will understand how to make AI like human intelligence, they may use that to depfake

Let people learn from their mistakes (as long as they don't get injured).

Watching old TV shows like Three's Company, Reba, or anything before 2010 ish, a fashion was established as part of culture. Bellbottoms to skinny jeans and fun sweaters.

Is there a fun fashion look for young folks these days?

Now before I even start, we all have a brain. Obviously I don’t mean “do whatever, do bad things if you want”. I mean if you wanna pursue something, or you wanna take a chance at something, do it. Ever since I was a kid, my dreams have been CONSTANTLY crushed, even by adults. Later on in life I felt like I didn’t have motivation to do anything because I didn’t have a dream to chase. How could I? Everything I wanted to do was shut down by people around me and made me doubt myself. I let them win and I’ve been stuck for years. Then about a month ago, I was watching a video on a person and their story of their transition. I’ve wanted to do it since I was a junior in highschool but I felt like I could never do it, but after watching her video I realized “holy shit wait could I do this?” And now I’m successfully 3 weeks into the transition process. I’m taking things step by step to keep myself going and I’ve never felt happier. I wanna leave an impact on the world and I’m excited to see what I can do in the future. Chase your dreams. Seriously, pursue them. We may only get one life so you should accomplish what you want to do before it’s too late. Time’s a bitch, don’t let it make you theirs. Stay safe and keep pushing. I believe in you and you should believe in you too. Don’t give up :)

"Hey look! This karen is getting mad at my doormat! ha ha ha", "Hey! Look at how dumb this politician is! How can someone in a position of power be so dumb?", "Look at those guys from [Insert ideology from politics, science, etc]. How can someone on 21 century still think this???"

Lets be real, you are NOT a superior, higher being than those people. In fact, you are not even superior to the criminal scum in prison. Yes, i could create some sort of pseudo logic to argue how much valuable you are compared to some sort of people, but dont hold on to that shit because we both know its just arbitrary.

Yes, this also goes for you guys that are mad for elections on USA. Trump supporters are NOT superior to Hillary supporters and vice-versa. "But look how stupid x person is" shut up, because if you were truly smart, you would realize EVERYONE is stupid.

The more you learn about the world, the more you realize how little you know, and how deep is the abyss of knowledge. We can try to study, but even if we spend 60 years doing so we understand very little about how the world works and would be surprised with the new discoveries.

Treating someone like a dumb, a villain or a waste of oxigen wont help anyone. Because even a genocidal president is doing something he think its logical. Am i saying criminals shouldnt be punished and be treated with chocolate cakes? nop, im saying even the most cruel man in history have fully functional brain like yours. You and some monster like Stalin, Hitler, Pinochet or Che guevara have the same fully functional brain capable of knowing right or wrong, what is logical or illogical what is real and what is not.

And even if they didnt, lets say they suffered some brain damage. If you had that same "hipotetical brain damage" you would do exactly the same thing. And this makes me wonder, what if YOU are "brain damaged", but are too stupid to realize your own stupidity? What if you could see yourself "using a normal brain" and realized how stupid you are? Would you kill yourself or suddenly accept people like you while feeling disgust for those worse than you?

Naturally, all cultures can have their deprivations and triumphs. But the reason we have semantics and culture is to give continuity between our communities and their pasts and indeed futures. That's why we value them, even as we may reject them because we know they will be there preceding us and extending beyond us like a river onto Infinium. That's why we must read upon our cultures to learn about yourselves and as a tool to help the future of our communities. History and posterity are bound together in our cultures.

A future free from wars, greed, borders, and inequality is inevitable in the distant future. However, achieving this will likely require a global extinction-level threat, which is also unavoidable. Such a crisis would make it clear that humanity's survival depends on cooperation and unity, rather than division and competition. The focus will shift from individual gain and territorial power to collective well-being. Old systems of division and exploitation—whether through nationalism, corporate monopolies, or social hierarchies—will crumble, replaced by new, more inclusive models of governance and economy, where shared resources, mutual respect, and common purpose drive progress.

The next milestone in humanity's evolution is likely to be social progress, rather than technological advancement alone. This shift will require a reevaluation of our fundamental values and systems. The pursuit of profit, individualism, and the accumulation of wealth will give way to a focus on sustainability, equality, and the well-being of all people. Traditional power structures that have long perpetuated division will be dismantled, replaced by more collaborative and transparent systems that prioritize the common good.

After this milestone, people might reflect on the past with disbelief, saying things like

"They were so divided, it’s hard to believe they made it through."

"How could they have let greed drive their decisions for so long?"

"They truly believed in borders and national identities over shared humanity."

"They were trapped in the idea that power came from wealth and control."

"Their obsession with competition nearly led to their destruction."

"They thought technology alone could fix their problems, but it was their hearts that needed changing."

"It took an extinction-level threat for them to understand what really mattered."

"They feared change when it was the only way forward."

"They let corruption and power-hungry leaders control their destinies."

"They were so caught up in survival, they forgot to live with purpose."

"They couldn’t imagine a world without exploitation, but now we live in one."

I know thats probably nothing new. But I think this is an intresting way to look at things.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we define ourselves. We all have moments where we say, "This is who I am," but life keeps changing us, new experiences, new perspectives, new challenges. It makes me wonder: is there ever a point where we fully know ourselves, or are we just endlessly adapting?

Does it even matter to have a fixed identity, or is the journey of constantly discovering ourselves what truly makes life meaningful?

Yesterday I read an interesting contribution about the "vicious circles" maintained by the prevailing political-economic consensus, about the dangers of economical crises and wars that may result from them. The question arose, what we could do to evade those vicious circles. Because the contribution was already 20 h old and there were already 300 comments given (mostly life-stories of a very private character!), I did not undertake any effort to add another comment that probably noone would read. I would like to give my answer now in the form of a contribution.

Qualified critics in fact speak of an over-accumulation of money in this world. We do not know, how big the risk of a world wide economical crisis is at the moment: Today the industrial companies are occupied with "market research", and probably get some correct business orientation from it. But as the financial crisis of 2008 has shown, the over-accumulation and the decrease of investment possibilities connected to it may cause risky investments - bubbles that burst in the end. The danger of war is -as it was the case in 1914- caused by the competition and the ambitions of national "elites". As the Ukrainian war shows to us, this is not a fairy tale. Apart from these "classical" dangers, we are forced to notice a considerable shrinkage of the influence of the national parlaments, i.e. a decline of democracy, for decades, and a quasi-abolilition of the righteous order ("Wild West capitalism").

To overcome this situation, three political measures are necessary:

1. The majority of the population has to vote for a political party which is more concerned about the common wealth than about private profits. One will find parties of this kind in the leftist segment of the political spectrum. (In right-wing parties the collaboration with the capitalists is evident: They receive a considerable amount of their money from them.)

2. A governing party of the political left will come into contact with the lobby of the industrial capitalists. Its members may be influenced strongly by those knowers of the economical scenery and their ways of interpreting it. To correct for a possible deviation of a leftist government street actions of the people are required: demonstrations and, if necessary, political strikes. (The presently lingering down-break of social organization to "family values" means that the degree of political organization is zero at the moment!)

3. Reliable leftist governments of this world should cooperate to frame the international capital to some degree, so that at least a democracy of mutual checks and balances may be restored and a rule of law may be reinstalled. No more "black-mailing" then, and hopefully a better, safer future and an improved motivation to work for a system that is more strongly directed to public welfare than the governments before it.

If you live long enough, eventually you forget who you were.

You hear so much in the world about how the world is getting worse, And I remember there was a point where I just had heard it so often, that I just learned to accept it as a fact of life. That society was tumbling down, humans were getting dumber and caring less about things, and we were all going to be doomed in a few generations, if not this one.

But then I saw a video that sparked new hope and life. It said that yes, progress comes in waves, and there are long periods of time where it seems like no progress is being made at all, or even that we're going backwards. But still, if you compare today's world to how it was even just a few decades back, there is significant amount of progress to be noticed.

Yes, there are still lots of issues. There are still countries that act as dictatorships, and third world countries all over the map. But while not all issues have been wiped from the planet yet, that doesn't mean that progress hasn't been made. We may not be as accepting of people who are different as we should be, but we are working towards it. We may still be cutting down trees for the sake of buildings, but we have determined large areas of land that are essentially nature parks, and essentially not allowed to be touched by humans so that future generations will be able to see what a truly green place looked like. Yes, that's a little depressing that we're setting those up, but it's better than nothing, and it's not like trees have been wiped from the planet outside of those parks yet either.

And while I don't wish to dive into more controversial topics, I do encourage you to think about a problem that exists in the world. And then ask yourself, have things gotten better, worse, or have stayed about the same in relation to how that same issue was being handled two centuries ago?

I think more often than not, you'll say that it's at-least slightly better.

I think also the fact that we are working towards solutions for existing problems makes us focus on other problems. In a first world country, we don't really need to worry at all about how to get food most of the time, so we focus on other social problems and treat them as the ultimate problem of society. I imagine when we eventually managed to fix that too, we'll focus on a NEW problem that seems rather trivial today, but will be treated as the ultimate evil in future generations.

And once we have a problem essentially fixed, if that problem comes back up, we treat it as far worse than we would have back in the day. If for whatever reason, grocery stores all went out of business, and we had to resort to hunting animals in the wild for food, we would treat it as the worst of the worst scenarios, when in reality, it's how our ancestors survived from millenniums before us.

But as for the title of this post, I was just thinking to myself if I really had gotten Dumber. I'm in University now, and I remember when that seems so far away in my future that it wasn't even worth considering. I remember when even 6th graders seemed like adults, and now they seem like little kids. Now I'm in University, and I'm writing essays, and I often just feel stupid for not being able to fulfill everything the Prof always wants. But it's not like the Prof is perfect either. Sometimes you do need to correct them on their grading, and they'll concede.

But for me, I was mainly worried about my mathematical abilities. I haven't taken a single math course in University, and I most likely never will, as it all just seems too complicated. And occasionally when I'm given a math question In real life, I'll take time to think about it, and then other people will occasionally poke fun at me for taking so long. Sometimes I'll be asked what's 12* 5, and I'll take time to think about it, but other people just know it on the fly.

Eventually, I got sick of being treated like an idiot about it, and flat out asked them how they were so good at math, and through this discussion, I learned that essentially during their school, they were often told to stand up and recite the multiplication tables every single day, to the point that it was practically beamed into their brains.

That had things make a lot more sense. That environment sounds a bit more cruel compared to the environment I grew up in school, but in a sense, I was the same way. When I was in school, I read from a book called table time, and that helped memorize times tables, but it's been awhile since I've looked at the book, so I've naturally forgotten some.

Not to mention, it wasn't as if everyone else was always right. I remember once when I mentioned that a right angle is 90°, and the person I was talking to thought it was 45°. In fact, they were so insistent, that they just laughed and said that it really had been a long time since I've been in math class hasn't it? But as I began to pull up Google and actually search it up, they suddenly realized that I was right and apologized.

Just today, I realized that there was one person who is able to tell me if my mathematical abilities had truly declined, and that was my past self. I went into my basement and dug up my old math textbooks from grade 8. I remember in elementary school, grade 8 seemed like the ultimate test of math, but when I opened up the textbook, I was shocked to find that I practically knew the answers to almost everything in the book without needing to study it at all. It was questions like- What is 0.8729 times 10, or X + 2 × 7 = 16, Or even just circling the pyramid shapes.

Once I saw this, I was pretty convinced that my math abilities hadn't actually declined. It was very much so that the expectations had just increased. I remember in kindergarten, my teacher was shocked that I was able to tell what time it was on the clock, because of course the standards are much lower in kindergarten.

My main point here is, don't be too hard on yourself. It's tough in the adult world, when people expect you to be perfect- Because they're not either

God's love is greater than his power... and god is all powerful.

Maybe thats it... Thats the answer.

We question at times how could god allow such atrocities to occur on earth. How could he "sit back" and allow stuff like slavery, famine, death, war occur when he's "All Powerful."

The answer is probably that his love far exceeds his power.

Like a dad who could just feed us snacks to keep us silent or carry us to go everywhere and often times will. The father will patiently wait and watch. wait to see if the baby will grow as they should.

The father will watch... and the child may cry and wail and flail their arms around but eventually something just happens and that baby musters what little strength it has to stand upright... then take their first steps as the father watches with light in his eyes. Maybe thats the whole point. Not for the father to fix all of our problems even though realistically he could and often times probably does but to allow us room to grow to become our best and strongest/healthiest selfs.

I cant sit here and tell you that i'm the best version of myself. I cry. I wail. I flail around. But my father is watching. He's watching all of us and he knows that we have the strength to stand up for ourselves.

I recently watched an episode of an anime called re:zero about a guy who dies and is transported to a different world full of monsters and magic but for one episode the main character got to speak with his mother and father. At first the son was dismissive, didn't want to go to school, didn't want to really interact with his parents, and despite this the parents still walked him to school and fed him and walked around happily with him. At the end after a heartfelt apology for not becoming the type of man that the main character (Natsuki is his name) believed he should've been, the type of person who could provide for those around him including his parents who worked hard to raise him the parents said:

"Natsuki; We didn't have you so you could do something for us... We had you so we could do something for you..."