You are different.

29 Dec, 2025

Sometimes I feel like I am the only one who can understand myself. Recently I saw someone express this notion and I thought, yes, that's right. I know, even when I am watching something that I like, I am watching for reasons different to others, and, in the same way, the thing that keeps me interested, and I would even say, the aspect that I like, is different from other people who also like this thing. Maybe it is because of that difference; because I am able to recognize this distinction, that I am so interested in Reader Response Criticism — It isn't something I see as an outsider, I experience the dissonance between what I see and others see.

On the Internet, which is the only space where I can speak of, there is this necessity to be unique, and inversely there is a counter-current that contextualizes this desire for individuality as a childish sort-of chuunibyou-like phenomenon. And I get it, there are so many pseudo-revolutionaries on social-media, people that think that they'll change the world as if they are the only ones capable of doing so. Saying stuff like "We are going to bring the communist revolution!" is no different from saying "The demon sealed in my left arm will awaken and bring the end of the world!" It is at times like that when I also join the perspective of that counter-current; we are nothingness, we exist in groups that evaporate, shift and follow the fluctuations of subculture and its evolution.

All of this is the result of how we only get to see those changes in the world. Of course, we cannot learn of the things that did not happen, we cannot learn of the lives of people who died without a thing to their name, without a name at all. You, as a modern human in our modern world, get the possibility to make things people in the past would have never thought of — as change in this world can only exist on a personal level; perhaps it is the agglomeration of our personal desires that creates the collective a posteriori, and this cancerous mass needs to grow even larger for death to take place, much more that at any time in the past, when the organism was small, frail and highly independent.

1. All has reached perfection, and becoming a true person is the greatest perfection of all. It takes more to make one sage today than it did to make the seven of Greece. And you need more resources to deal with a single person these days than with an entire nation in times past.¹

Well, the matter is not of change. To lament that we were not born to see the world change in the ways we wanted it to change is not different from daydreaming. But alas, I don't want to say that because you are born, you are forced to become one more within the social circles, and that is evident. I have myself as proof of this fact.

When people speak of artists² they speak of highly devoted people, I guess, people who really enjoy something as if to make it an obsession, perhaps so much that they may hate it in the process. From this, our intuition may lead us to understand it backwards; the obsession as a result of the artist — if we are failing to do something, it is because we are not passionate enough. But of course, if you think about it, it has to be the other way around, and it may be that your obsession is rather dumb, it may be that you like things that others do not, and things that others think as boring, uninteresting or pointless.

I know this because I have a great deal of fun with nonsense and experimenting with text. Others would look at the thing and think of it as stupid, but I am entertained by writing a bunch of random sentences, more than I am by writing a fully thought-out poem. If I were to try and write poetry, hitting my head against the wall, I'd find myself lacking in the department that makes others so great; that unending, sickening, nauseating force that pulls their feet to the ground and makes them see it as an essential part of living, not undifferent from gravity.

Here's where an Evil Neuro-sama quote would go, but I can't find it, which demonstrates my point³, more or less.

What makes us different from the social-media chuunibyou is that our delusions exist outside of circles, or perhaps it is better to say that it exists in a small circle, a circle so small it can only contain a couple of people, and perhaps we are part of a larger circle, we cannot avoid them, yet still, we can remain lonely even when in company. But this is the thing that we find entertaining, for as long as we find it entertaining it is, not unlike gravity, ever present.