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Everyone you meet feels cold. They lack the fire you so desperately desire. They do not live for beauty and ideas like you do. They do not seem to care about the things you feel are important or true. You do not seem to fit in anywhere. Your desires and beliefs do not seem to be shared.

You realize you are an alien, without any people of your own. You despair over this discovery. But you also tell yourself it isn't true. Your people exist. They must exist because you find them in the books you read, so they must be out here in the world too. But where are they?

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“People do not want immortality, they simply do not want to die. They want to live… They want to feel the ground beneath their feet, see the clouds overhead, love other people, be with them, and think. Nothing more. Everything that has been said beyond that is a lie. An unconscious lie.”

— Stanisław Lem, Memoirs of a Space Traveler

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A human being is a body — a physical entity that takes up space in the world. This seemingly obvious fact is often obscured by the nature of contemporary experience. Physical bodies do not seem relevant in the realm of the internet. Here, we do not care about our own bodies, let alone the bodies of other people.

Inside the virtuality of online spaces, we exist as disembodied entities. We can forget about our bodies entirely and interact with others in ways that exceed our ordinary abilities. We can engage in situations where we would otherwise face harm. We can enter into contexts we would not be able to enter as embodied beings. Disconnected from physical existence, we engage with each other in these spaces as though we really are disembodied.

By extending the range of our experience, the freedom of virtuality makes us more powerful. But power is also dangerous.

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“Atomization is advancing not only between men, but within each individual, between the spheres of his life. No fulfilment may be attached to work, which would otherwise lose its functional modesty in the totality of purposes, no spark of reflection is allowed to fall into leisure time, since it might otherwise leap across to the workaday world and set it on fire. While in their structure work and amusement are becoming increasingly alike, they are at the same time being divided ever more rigorously by invisible demarcation lines. Joy and mind have been expelled equally from both. In each, blank-faced seriousness and pseudo-activity hold sway.”

— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 84

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“You always stand somewhere inside and outside of every language you encounter. Orphaned in Vietnamese. Clumsy in French. Adopted in English. Mastered by Theory. Awed by Fiction.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

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Everything she does is wrong. She feels she's wrong about everything. She knows this isn't true but she still feels it like a weight pressing on her chest. She knows she doesn't act how others want and expect. She knows she's strange. But she's only trying to do what she knows is right — to create her own path in the world.

The world refuses to yield even an inch. The world is relentless in its fight against her. Being herself has become so difficult that existence itself feels like a burden. Why can't she catch a break? Why is her life a constant battle?

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“Whoever seeks will doubt. But genius tells so boldly and surely what it sees to be happening within itself because it is not hampered in the representation of this, and therefore the representation is not hampered either, but rather its act of contemplation and that which is contemplated seem to be freely in accord, to combine freely in one work.”

— Novalis, Miscellaneous Observations

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If I am not honest with myself then I run the risk of living a lie. I can easily delude myself into thinking something is real and true when it is actually fake and false.

To keep myself honest, I need to ask myself questions. I must question my intentions, I must question my understanding, and I must even question my values. By posing these questions, I gain an opportunity to become more aware of myself. But how do I know my answers will be honest ones?

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“They were in no hurry. The journey ahead was long. There was no promise ahead. There was no need to rush now.”

— James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

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“It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done it yourself. You feel no intellectual jealousy at seeing yourself outstripped in this way. You only feel jealous when you are overtaken by your shadow.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

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Paying greater attention to the world might alleviate your boredom or it might not. Perhaps you simply aren't excited by what the world has to offer right now. But there is also more for you to experience than just the world. There is also yourself, and in particular, your own imagination, which can take you far beyond anything that already exists.

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