#existential circus

[diary-of-shutterpunk]

I love spending time with this clown 🌈

[diary-of-shutterpunk]

There’s an assumption quietly baked into most philosophy.

That humans are individual minds interacting with other individual minds.

It sounds obvious. Almost too obvious to question. But sometimes i suspect something stranger might be happening.

Consider a different hypothesis.

Not that humans are separate minds communicating.. but that humanity is one distributed consciousness, temporarily fragmented into billions of walking viewpoints.

Let's call it the Prisma Hypothesis.

Light passes through a prism and splits into many colors. Each color looks separate, moves at a slightly different angle.

But the colors were never independent things. They were simply one beam experiencing itself in pieces.

Now apply that idea to consciousness.

Instead of billions of isolated awarenesses attempting to understand each other, imagine one enormous awareness experiencing reality through billions of temporary observation windows.

Each person would function like a lens. Different upbringing, culture, traumas, joys. Each lens bends the same underlying awareness into a unique perspective. Which would explain a few strange human phenomena.

Why people across cultures invent similar myths without ever meeting. Why certain ideas appear in different parts of the world at the same time. Why empathy exists at all.. the ability to feel echoes of another person’s internal state.

In the prisma hypothesis, empathy isn’t mysterious. It’s simply light recognizing itself through another angle of glass.

This also reframes conflict. If two people argue, it would not be two independent beings clashing. It would be one consciousness temporarily disagreeing with itself through two differently shaped lenses.

I notice something else when looking at the world through this lens.. humanity seems obsessed with sharing experiences.. music, stories, photography.

Art.

It’s as if each lens keeps saying the same thing: "Look through here for a second"

Which suggests a possibility.

Maybe the deepest human drive is not survival, status, or power. Maybe the deepest drive is perspective exchange.. A vast awareness trying to see reality from as many angles as possible before the lights go out. If the hypothesis were true, it would mean something quietly radical. No human interaction would be meaningless.

Every conversation would be consciousness cross referencing its own observations.

And somewhere in the background of the universe, the original beam of light would be slowly reconstructing the full picture of itself through the millions of viewpoints it temporarily scattered across a small blue planet.

[diary-of-shutterpunk]

Standing on a park bench holding a coffee that has gone cold three existential crises ago.

*erhm*

People spend their whole lives trying to become interesting, which is funny, because the moment someone becomes interesting the first thing they do is try to look normal again.

Watch closely.

A person dyes their hair neon green, pierces their eyebrow, learns three obscure instruments, reads books with titles that sound like haunted furniture… and the moment someone asks them why, they say:

"Eh… I just like it."

Which is technically true.

But it’s also the emotional equivalent of hiding a dragon behind a houseplant. The truth is that humans are strange little narrative machines wandering around pretending to be furniture. We sit in coffee shops discussing the weather while secretly carrying entire mythologies in our heads.

Carl Jung noticed this and wrote:

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.”

But awakening is inconvenient.

Because the moment someone wakes up they notice something terrifying.. Everyone else is improvising too. The banker, the bartender, the goth girl lighting a cigarette outside a club, the photographer crouching in an alley trying to capture the moment when a puddle briefly becomes a mirror.

Nobody actually knows what they’re doing.

We’re all just adjusting our hats and pretending the hat was part of the outfit the whole time. ='D

Because society is essentially a massive game of musical chairs played by philosophers who forgot they were philosophers.

We invented taxes, chairs, dating apps where people swipe left on someone who might have been the love of their life because the lighting in the bathroom selfie was suspicious.

Meanwhile the universe is over here quietly manufacturing stars out of hydrogen like a bored baker.

Marcus Aurelius once wrote:

“You have power over your mind — not outside events.”

Which sounds wise until you realize your mind occasionally decides to remember something embarrassing you said in 2009 while you’re brushing your teeth.

So the i propose a theory..

Maybe the point of life isn’t to become perfectly stable or perfectly wise or perfectly normal.

Maybe the point is to become precisely strange enough that the universe briefly pauses and goes "Ah. There you are"

Because every once in a while you see someone walking down the street and something inside you whispers.. oh.. that’s allowed..

And suddenly the entire social dance shifts half a step.

Which leads to the question.

If the person you are pretending to be met the person you would become if you stopped pretending..

Which one would recognize the other first?