"Ok so I said how a way to combat propaganda or lessen its effect is to ignore the news cycle or to not participate in/think about the topic of the day but what is the advantage even of lessening the propaganda. In a sense if you are consumed by propaganda then you are working for someone for free without knowing it, pushing their agenda but does this really matter in the grand scheme? no matter what you do someone benefits from whatever you do. I guess the distinction is with how much what you do benefits you specifically, that is the problem or paradox with propaganda somewhat, the people pushing the propaganda make it so participating in the propaganda benefits you or at least you think it does. If you participate in the news cycle you might be a mouth piece for the elites but you get rewarded for this by seeming knowledgeable by your peers and they might like being around you more if they can participate in conversation with you. The thing is though this never really rewards someone as much as they think it does, it doesn't form deep connections with people, what people are attracted to is someone who can offer them something of value such as special knowledge. You might somewhat enjoy the company of someone knowledgeable on the news cycle as they can curate the important and interesting news for you but ultimately their absence from your life can be substituted easily by paying a little more attention to the news or someone else.

My point is that existing outside the news cycle makes you more interesting to others in a real sense, it allows you to study/experience unique things that others wont be able to experience on their own or vicariously through other people they know. Sure, most people aren't interested in unique experiences but the few people who are yearning for true meaningful connection or conversation will be more attracted to you.

This seems to exist beyond simply the news cycle, it is something about existing outside time in general that makes a person interesting to others but furthermore it makes them more interesting to themselves. If a person isn't swayed by day to day occurrences, if they aren't a product of the day then they have substance and something others can latch onto, work with or learn to understand. To the person outside time themselves though it forces them to create an overarching narrative for their life or come to terms with their deep ambitions or tendencies. If someone is existing within time then they don't have much reason to remember previous days, they can explain what happened on one day through purely uninteresting 'random' events or coincidences.

There is a contradiction somewhat as it seems happiness is being at peace and living in the moment rather than being concerned with the past or future or what you are fundamentally but the ability to live beyond today is what makes someone's life meaningful. This is not to say happiness and meaning are completely at odds with each other although only focusing on one will eventually hinder your ability to experience the other. What I'm saying is neither happiness nor meaning in life can be a goal on its own and even one on its own can be worse than a balance of both even if the overall sum is lower.

For example imagine you focus on meaning successfully, your life is very meaningful, you are accomplishing goals, feel like you have importance but you still want to cry everyday, you might then come to the conclusion that there is nothing that can ever make you happy as you are already where you feel you should be and start to spiral out of control.

Say you focus on hedonistic happiness and it works, you feel great during the day but you feel like something is missing and you eventually figure out you are missing meaning so you strive towards this but this removes some happiness, you might take it to the extreme and start to think that a meaningful life is miserable and life is inherently suffering. In reality though you just need to find a different form of happiness and meaning which aren't as far at odds with each other.

Maybe life is inherently suffering, it certainly feels like it some times, like now in particular but that is besides the point that a good life cannot be measured as an absolute function of meaning or happiness alone and that there are points where you might think you have the best combination of the two because any small variation from where you are makes things worse but really you are looking at one or the other in the completely wrong way and a more correct way to look at either would create an overall better combination.

I think this is some of the biggest propaganda the world has pulled though, how they have made people to overvalue happiness or even confuse a happy life with a meaningful life. Outside of the obvious propaganda I think there is also a psychological element as to how this occurred by reducing peoples attention spans so they have to live day by day and get caught up in the news cycles, unable to ever comprehend meaning or an overarching story for their life. This probably comes from the top, like it makes sense for an employer to want their employees to be happy, it makes them more efficient mostly by improving how well they interact with customers/other employees. It doesn't matter as much to an employer if their employees find the work meaningful as long as they are happy enough and stuck enough to keep doing it. I think this has happened on a global scale by the elites whether they conspired to do it or making the general population the most efficient slaves was just a natural progression. It seems to be man's most powerful quality, the ability to endure such depths of existential suffering has been exploited by employers/the elites. The more people can put up with the more they will be forced to put up with if it benefits someone else in another way. That is why in a sense all our modern technologies and our improved standard of living have ultimately lead us to be more depressed, we are happier and more comfortable so we are more able to endure a deeper lack of meaning so our employers or those who 'design' society can design systems that can afford to provide us with less meaning and still have us turn up.

Perhaps there is no way out on a societal level, humanity will always be pushed as hard as they can to output as much as they can by whoever pulls the strings, change and improvements will only be just enough to keep the working man from killing himself or being too despondent to work, society will never improve until it is no longer functioning properly meaning people start dropping out. I don't think it's this doom and gloom though, it is clear that individuals can break out, they can find their own meaning and happiness, enough to love life. If individuals can do it then society can do it too, parallel societies can emerge from groups of those who broke out and eventually overcome the existing society.

It seems what happens is whenever a new technology or piece of quality of life is 'invented' it is somewhat co opted by the powerful to screw over the little guy and benefit them as initially only the powerful world elites have the resources to understand such a niche emergent technology. Most of the time this means this new thing which should be a good thing in our life is actually a bad thing or at least not as good as it should be but eventually it becomes so widespread that the mechanics behind it become common knowledge and individuals learn how to utilise it to actually benefit them. Sure, there is a constant battle with the elites trying to poison the knowledge but ultimately the truth rises to the top and people find out how to make it benefit them.

I am confused whether society is actually improving or getting worse, on one side suicide rates have been falling consistently for years but surely there is a better proxy indicator for 'how happy/meaningful peoples lives are' than simply how many kill themselves, suicide is usually a severe combination of unhappiness and lack of meaning and not really a reflection of the average in all peoples lives, it's further muddied by all these drugs which basically put people into a zombielike state where they are just functional enough to get by. I have no data but it seems like on average peoples lives are no better or worse than they have been for thousands of years, in some ways they are better, longer, more unique, more recreation, access to meaningful art and in others they are worse, hollow, too much time that it leads to suffering, drug access to ruin themselves, 'meaningless' jobs in the sense that they are disconnected from others/the world. It really seems that as a whole society or humanity will always exist in the equilibrium balance between how much suffering people can endure and how much hedonistic pleasure they require. How fast humanity progresses and 'improves' (I use quotes because it is improve in a physical sense and not any sort of satisfaction with existence sense) is a consequence of how well society balances happiness/meaning, the problem with societies is most of the time you can only make gradual change although sometimes a society is so outdated that a drastic change is worth it for a new balance. My point is that this exists on an individual level too, how well an individual can improve in life in a tangible sense (whatever is valued to that person whether it is wealth, knowledge, experiences) is a consequence of how well they have a balance between happiness and meaning.

It kind of sounds like I'm not really saying anything as many would think that these tangible positives in life would be the happiness or meaning in their life itself but there is a difference. People don't really need to actually find the right balance between happiness and meaning, they can do this instinctively, what they do need to find is the most accurate general idea for these two concepts at the current point in their life and the balance between the two will be instinctive and then the benefits will flow as a natural consequence of what they simply focus on in life, I don't specifically mean focus on as in work towards but what they direct their attention to, you cant force working on something but if you are constantly directing your attention to something you will work towards it naturally.

So what is my point with all this rambling? how does it benefit you or me? I think the point is that you need to be aware of the two forms of life, focusing on the day and focusing on the overall story of your life and not get caught up in one or the other only. The further point is that people try to influence you to focus on one or the other, the elites who own you in some sense from the shadows want you to focus on the day, they make their money and relative power over you from being more patient than you, by looking at a larger picture than you, they want to confine you to the immediate. That is not to say power or the bigger picture is the most important thing and you should never focus on the day to day, you can definitely go too far.

Then you have the other side, the 'revolutionaries' or 'dissidents' who are actively working against the elites and want you to fight alongside them to undermine the elites control, they try to get you to see too big of a picture with subversive art, conspiracy theories that make connections where there are no meaningful connections.

The average person seems to fall into a few traps in particular, they don't realise just how much or how subtle the propaganda is of the elites and so they miss how it is distorting their reality/values in subtle ways. People also fall into the trap when they see 'anti propaganda' and they overvalue its message, they to some degree have an understanding of the most blatant lies the establishment tells so when they see something that goes against these lies they think it must be truthful, thinking sort of like 'this isn't by my enemy so it must be by my ally', like sure, in a sense they are your ally simply from having a common enemy but that doesn't mean your goals perfectly align.

Sure, there is definitely 'pro establishment' propaganda that makes it seem like they are the dissidents, sort of like controlled opposition but what I mean is even among real dissident (anti establishment) propaganda people seem to overvalue the message of this propaganda and not truly comprehend just how much acting on it benefits others more than it benefits themselves.

If you swallow too much propaganda of the elites your day to day story will not truly make you as happy as you could be, you will notice the stories they want you to notice and fight against things that they want to be fought or fight for things if they are using reverse psychology (or simply pointing attention to something people are genuinely supportive of) and not what benefits you. Similarly if you swallow too much propaganda from dissidents then what they suggest will be more focused around empowering people like you and not you specifically.

I'm assuming you, like me are a nobody, 'working class', little current power, just trying to find some peace and a meaningful/happy life, so in general you should lean towards opposing the elite propaganda and supporting the dissidents (although it is easy for groups to distort where a message is coming from), so the default stance should be to oppose anything that is being pushed by powerful forces and accepted by the masses even if you personally support it since their influence will no doubt convince some people who otherwise wouldn't support it and upset the natural progression of the world which is the most efficient for everyone.

Ultimately what it all comes down to is awareness, awareness of how artificial a message is and self awareness of your own thoughts/ideas to realise where they came from. This extends to a larger scale, a society can become self aware to a degree if the mechanisms of how it is influencing people, certain groups roles within the society are more well defined or publicly discussed. The more self aware a society is and open, the less resistant it will be to external or internal propaganda and distortion. Although some level of propaganda is good, it creates resistances to large changes and creates some stability, it simplifies the world for its inhabitants. Extending this to a personal level, some level of self delusion or brainwashing yourself into believing certain things is good for actualising yourself within the world.

To a point though sometimes people don't have control over whether they view the world day by day or through a longer more meaningful narrative, sometimes through sheer chance alone the events in their lives connect themselves in ways that are impossible to miss and sometimes they don't, sometimes a persons day to day life has enough excitement or pressing matters that they don't try to think about the longer term and sometimes it doesn't. Ultimately it's a complex combination of many factors in terms of whether people feel like there is some meaningful narrative for their life including propaganda, natural inclination, self awareness of their own drives, random events in life, general awareness/memory of events. My point is kind of that you can work towards finding meaning in your life through many ways, you can limit the effect of propaganda by learning to see it (since propaganda on average wants to reduce meaning in your life), you can think about what events occurred in your life and think about the connections between them that might not have been obvious, you can understand your own motives/desires more and how they shaped what events happened in your life, you can become more aware of what is happening or what happened in your life. Finding meaning in life and therefore fulfillment is mostly a function of intelligence (mostly a specific subset of intelligence being awareness but still) contrary to what nihilists or even atheists in general want to believe, they think they are smarter than others for not seeing meaning in life.

Finding happiness though, is that a factor of intelligence too? what is happiness again? it can take many forms but I guess simplistically it is being interested in the moment and at peace with what is currently happening. The easy retort to this is that it is contrary to intelligence because it requires you to not be aware of your past/future in the current moment but that's not exactly true. You can be aware of your past and what your future likely looks like (or you hope it to look like) and still be totally ok with whatever is currently happening. This requires being ok with the events that caused the current situation or at least understanding them well enough that you can reduce the likelihood the events occur again (if you don't enjoy what is currently happening). Being ok with the events that caused the current situation is not just an acceptance of the way the universe works but also an acceptance of how you acted in the past, accepting the way the universe works largely comes from a knowledge of how it works but accepting the actions you took in the past requires you to have acted consciously in a self aware manner. Sure, even if you are self aware, you will still do things you regret but at least you will be ok with having done them because you will know why you did them and be able to learn where your judgment was wrong, so being ok with the past seems to be a function of intelligence. Being ok with the future after this event seems to largely be dependent on intelligence too, if you know that you can learn from this bad event, you can minimize it's negative impact and maximise the positive or recover from it then you will be more ok with the future.

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It really seems that being at peace with whatever is currently happening is a function of intelligence. This isn't the only part of happiness though, it also seems to be determined by liking the current moment or at least being interested in it, liking the current moment can be influenced by the success of your past actions and what you made occur but it can also be dependent on chance and sometimes people just get screwed over by chance again and again. It is possible for someone to be incredibly intelligent and largely in control of their whole life but still be dreadfully unhappy due to sheer chance but at least they can be less unhappy than they otherwise would have been.

I'm not saying intelligence causes happiness and meaning to be found in someone's life but it is certainly highly correlated and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lacking in intelligence, consumed by propaganda or has been immensely unlucky. I don't like to mention that last one, immensely unlucky, while it's true, people miscalculate what is immensely unlucky. Virtually everyone (and rightfully so based on statistics) has had countless horrible unlikely things happen to them but many people fall into the trap of under estimating the number of times they 'rolled' at an unlikely chance and so think they are unfairly punished by life. Yes, life is harsh and everyone gets insanely unfortunate many times just due to the sheer number of days they live and events they experience but that doesn't mean becoming smarter or trying harder wont improve your life, that doesn't mean your life wouldn't have been worse if you understood less.

So where am I going with this? I guess I need to understand how much meaning and happiness I have in my life and how much I should have based on what has happened to happen to me. It seems like I have a lot of meaning or at least should have, everything feels connected, so much seems to be happening for a reason, I understand why I did certain things in the past and how that lead to where I am. Happiness though? I cant tell, I guess I live in the day, at most the week, I guess I enjoy most days or at least I find them interesting but why do I feel like everything is so horrible all the time regardless?

Like I understand I took a chance on Ner and it didn't work out, it was impossible to know what she liked before knowing her, I picked up signals and took an educated guess that she would like me making life interesting for her and it didn't work out. Why am I so mad and bitter over it? I knew it only had a chance to be true before attempting it. It's not like those years with her weren't interesting. It's not like I was technically wrong, sure, I lost the bet and she didn't want this but that doesn't mean the bet was wrong.

I think it's something to do with given perfect knowledge anyone would take that bet and so the only winners of that bet would be people who were wrong. I mean that there were no signs that she wouldn't like excitement over niceness/genuineness, it was impossible for someone to predict.

It's like the only person who could make things work with Ner is someone who misread all the signs, I guess that's why I'm bitter, it's not so much bitter that I can't win every time, it's more about how sometimes in order to win in the most important areas of life such as winning someone's heart you have to either be wrong or take the action that is least likely to succeed.

Or maybe I was right and she just changed over time, maybe it is my fault that I didn't notice the changes that were occurring in her life and how they would impact her to value different things and my fault that I didn't get ahead of them. Maybe if I really wanted her and to be the right person for her I should have been willing to change alongside her, but then it begs the question why should I be the one to change, why cant she or why cant it be a mutual compromise? Maybe nothing can be done about the change, maybe I could theoretically change alongside her to continue to be right but in a practical sense I cant force myself to do this or it could not be sustained, I wouldn't have to force myself to though, I really wanted to be right for her. Being able to continue to write our shared story, her intrinsic beauty and my 'irrational' love for her is enough of a drive to overcome something as trivial as my own personal desires to not change into what she wants.

I guess I'm bitter then because I couldn't see how she was changing, I'm angry at myself for being limited but maybe that comes back to the argument that if we were right for each other then I would have noticed, I would have understood without having to really try, I think that argument is bullshit but I don't have a rational reason to think so. I think I'm further bitter now as she wont give me a chance to try and change to be right for her, like I get it, she thinks I'm a horrible person but why does she think I'm destined to forever be? I think that's the core of my bitterness, this is someone I really care for and love to some degree and they think so little of me that they think I am incapable of change.

I shouldn't say that word, love, I guess I wasn't saying it with its 'real' meaning, I am never going to say concretely that I love someone until I am engaged or married and I'm committing to them for life. When I kind of said it here I was meaning that you were someone I could possibly love if we managed to align our souls, or even if I simply managed to align my soul to yours. I wouldn't say I never loved you, I certainly loved you in the sense of I loved the version I had of you in my head, the version where things turned out well and we were together forever, but it is looking increasingly like that version of you in my head will never be aligned with you in reality and likely never was.

Does all this mean I'm unhappy though? sure, I'm bitter, I'm tormented, the days are long and grey and miserable but they're still interesting regardless, I'm still invested in them, I'm interested, I want to see what will happen. I wouldn't say I'm happy but I'm certainly not unhappy and the amount of meaning I feel in my life right now is immense. Maybe this is the most optimal balance someone can achieve in my position given the events that happened to happen to me, the highest sum of both meaning and happiness, the best life.

I think I am struggling because I loved our shared narrative that we were creating and now it feels like it's ending and I don't want it to ever go away but maybe it's not exactly ending, maybe it's just a new chapter as corny as that sounds. Like maybe our shared story still continues until we die, the only real entries into it being the spaces between the words in other unshared stories of ours, subtle influences we left on each other, subconscious impacts. Maybe if we could physically write our shared story we would still add to it each day or every other day, a blank space here, a blank space there when our lives are shaped around the impact we had on each other for better or worse, maybe some entries would even be explicitly written, some concrete memory that came back and painted some certain shade on our day. It's still kind of sad though, after years of beautiful interesting words and events to now have pages of white with short sentences interspersed but I guess that's life, I guess we work on other books from now on, I don't know if any book will ever be as beautiful as ours was looking to be but I guess that's life. Maybe it's fine that our book was short, maybe it was a prototype, a practice for the next book, maybe it was complete, it doesn't feel complete to me.

I guess I will attempt to write other books, Sarah's is looking nice, it doesn't feel nicer than the way ours started but maybe the start isn't the only important part of a book, maybe that is why our book was never finished, the start was too idealised, unrealistic and full of holes that it could never be resolved in a meaningful way. Maybe it was my fault, I feel like it was your fault but what does that matter? maybe I am just not a good writer, I can learn from it, what choice do I have?"

He stopped and twisted his head up to the ceiling in some sort of belief it would help him think better, he was feeling unsettled by what he had just written but couldn't grasp exactly what, he kept trying to work out what he was feeling but his mind refused to confront it. He decided to go get some fresh air and maybe it would come to him but it brought him to a topic that he felt was unrelated which now fixated him and he returned to write about it after about 20 minutes walking around the neighbourhood noticing nothing that particularly caught his interest in the real world.

"So like that song, I wonder how much of my life is a consequence of reality or even what i attempt and how much is simply a product of my desires and what I pay attention to?"

Suddenly the thought popped into his head about what confused him earlier and had caused him to stop writing, it was a confusion over who he was writing to, whether it was himself, everyone or Ner but he left this thought behind, thinking it didn't matter concluding no one was going to read his words anyway and just kept writing.

"I cant see the connections between me idolising this sort of story and it playing out in reality but there are certainly real possible connections as to how my obsession with it could cause it to manifest itself especially over a time frame like ten years. There are many other times though when I imagine something and it ends up happening and there is no way my imagination could have actually influenced the world into making it happen, maybe these times though my memory of thinking about the event that happened is retroactively exaggerated, like I think of a thousand different things and slowly the memory fades of the 999 that didn't happen and I only remember the one that did and then think that all my thoughts ended up coming true. I get that this is probably an element, I know there is a term for this, confirmation bias? survivor bias? I don't know but it's not really relevant, I don't think this is enough to explain the connection I see between my thoughts and what happens in reality. There is another element where there are signs as to what is about to happen that I pick up on subconsciously and they influence my reality but because it's all subconscious I think my thought just came out of nowhere and I predicted things I couldn't predict. I know this is an element but I don't think it's enough to explain the connection between dream and destiny.

What is the point of living in the real world if simply what I imagine can have an impact on the world? what I mean is that the point of the real world is that it is supposed to exist outside your imagination and be objective but if my thoughts can impact reality in such a tangible way then it's not that different from a purely imaginary world. I get it, there is still something interesting about the real world even if you can influence with your thoughts because you cant entirely influence it, but I certainly seem to be able to influence it in all the important ways. Anything that I really want to happen and imagine happening seems to end up happening, what i find to be truly interesting ends up playing out in the real world. I justify what didn't happen that I imagined in ways such as 'I understand now that I didn't actually want this to happen', maybe those justifications are delusional and a way to cope with a reality that doesn't bend its will entirely to me but I wouldn't want one that bends entirely anyway. Lately or rather increasingly as I have aged it seems to bend itself more and more to me, there is a contradiction, it is getting more interesting storywise but it is also getting less real in a sense.

Again, why bother with real life if it's not functionally different compared to imagination/delusion? I guess the answer has something to do with the beautiful parts of life is where these two worlds meet, the inner world and the outer, their endless dance and competition to manifest their will unto you, how they play off each other in complex and interesting ways but it's gotten to the point where so much that I imagine ends up happening, it has become ridiculous. It's almost like there is an over abundance of interesting occurrences, an overstimulation, to the point that nothing is interesting anymore, I can see too many meaningful connections between events, see too many coincidences. I guess I should write them all out but even I can't remember half of them at this point, I dream of a very specific map that I could have never possibly seen before in my life and then the next day I see this in a video. This could be that idea of a global consciousness, maybe lots of other people were watching that video the day previous, it made its way into the global consciousness, I picked up on this in my dream then the next day the video was recommended to me. The global consciousness idea is usually more about how it seems so often that so many people have the same good idea simultaneously in a disconnected fashion, it does seem odd how much this happens but I guess there are some reasonable physical explanations to limit the need for the supernatural, mainly that these good ideas were somewhat the result of current events or developments in the world even if the connection and timing is suspicious, there are no doubt a lot of separate people on similar paths at any one time.

I guess it doesn't matter if there are physical reasons for why what I imagine ends up happening or not, the end result is that these reasons are complicated enough that I cant see them and nothing feels real. I don't know what would make things feel more real, would it feel more real if what I did had more of an impact on the world or if I was less consequential and more at the mercy of the world?

What does feel real even mean? I guess it mostly just means that reality feels real and as an extension you do too, not just that reality feels real but it feels interesting too, interesting enough for you to care about it more than your own imagination. The key defining difference between reality and imagination is how much control you have over it. There seems to be an equilibrium, if you care about reality then you learn about its rules and become better at operating within it and imposing your will on it but the more you can control reality the less fundamentally indistinguishable it becomes from your imagination. I think there is also an element of reality that distinguishes it from imagination surrounding it having unchanging rules that make sense but again, the more you become invested in reality and make sense of the rules, the less interesting it becomes. Reality needs to keep surprising you in new ways for you to keep caring about it but if it surprises you too much then it doesn't make sense and doesn't seem objective and you may as well participate in your delusions instead. I think this is what is happening to me now, it doesn't feel real because I feel like I have too much control over reality so how do I fix this? I think the key is that you want to connect the real world and your imaginary worlds, you want your impacts on the real world to have unpredictable influences on your emotional world. You need to do things and make things happen where you don't know how you will feel about them happening until after they are done, that is how you feel alive, you make it so even when you are in control and participating in reality and having a strong impact on it there are still surprises in other ways. You make it so you do something that will have an unpredictable impact on your emotions to such a point that you wont know what to do afterwards until after you have done it. This means you have to live in the moment, you can't simply play out this sequence of events in your imagination because you cant imagine what the result of the first step will truly feel like, it makes you feel alive to have to constantly adapt and re evaluate, even if you have a strong impact on reality you still create an interesting back and forth between you and reality. So the question is, what is it that I could do where I don't know how I would feel emotionally after having done it?"

He thought and thought but couldn't work it out and concluded this is one of those questions that you leave in the back of your mind and sooner or later your subconscious will come up with an answer. It was 4pm and he considered going to the park but didn't want to see other people, especially since it was the weekend there would be a lot of people around that he particularly didn't want to see right now, namely families. Instead he started to drink and ended up passing out just after 8pm after putting together a quick frozen dinner, the majority of his night was spent talking to an old friend online and sharing music that was popular when he was in his early teens, mostly romantic pop as that is what his tastes were limited to back then. He woke up at 2am and didn't get back to sleep until 6am but forgot everything he thought about during that time.