Sugar

I just had my first boba tea in recent memory. I asked for no sugar, yet it was sweet af. I thought, the sugar in my sip does nothing more than make me take the next sip. It has no nutrients other than unnecessary calories, yet the very fact one sip makes you take the next is why people love it.

Now look at society. Most of it is sugarcoated. Most services we use, products we buy, does nothing more than make us return for more. Companies, organizations, campaigns can form as an idealistic mission, but as its members’ incentives diverge and cancel out each others’, it can only take care the one common core fear of us all – fear of not having the next sip. Our aspirations are different, but our fears constant. Hope, comfort, pleasing others is what we do to collectively ease that fear by providing each other with soft landings for others. Most posts you like you do so because you want to continue this cycle. Likes on social media is collective insurance against nihilism.

Humans are weak, full of flaws and born selfish.

What we do about it – celebrate, unite, or profit off of it – is how we write history; interpretation of what we’ve written is meaning, but denying the premise will eventually leave us, or a later generation, without paper to even write on (literally, there’ll be no trees left).

I don’t really care either way. My traumas have prepared me well for the day when the paper runs out, so I have little motivation to alter what I think will happen. Maybe that’s why I write on this blog.

But what about you, young blood? Are you really going to give up, or retire to speculation from the shadows like me? Do you not feel sad being powerless in the flow of history? You weak, flawed and selfish structure of atoms. Do you not feel the desire to prove me wrong, reading what I write? Do you not want to save the degradation of this world?