i am fairly fearless and confident for better and worse. sometimes people ask me for tips on being confident and less shy (eg: in performing) and the main secret is perspective + existential crisis + ego death + feelings of nothingness. look at the vast expanse of the universe and feel small. your nervousness shakes into barely a whisper in the gravitas of the cosmos. you are nothing. there is a loosely held deceit separating you from your surroundings. you are part of the quantum pie mixture of reality. the fabric of space has no concept of you or me, only mush, we are mush together, we are nothing together.

your feelings of shame are the results of maladaptive chemicals and electrons firing pulsing and putting you off doing what you want to be doing. societal expectations are wrong, we all know that. they whimper against the magnitude of core truth, the untruth of everything. relativity is rejected for being inconvenient, but it can also be a tool to see old things with new lights with nothingness, clean slate, blank page, from scratch.

if you plot out the history of earth over 100 meters, humans aren't even a speck. even the dinosaurs existed a mega-multitude longer. they are in the hundreds of millions of years, we are only hundreds of thousands, but both of us are short-lived compared to the history of life on earth. the human mind cannot comprehend this scale. even living to a hundred years is nothing, we have nothing. so the slight timidness you feel when walking up on stage or using the mic or sharing your creation is nothing too. what meaningless drivel it is, it's all mush. see it for what it is and you won't unsee it. the things you waste your time on, the pains you waste away on, it's all for nothing, pure nothing. once you see this you cant help but be brave. you might have money in your wallet or purse or account but it's not yours, you don't own it: your palms are a klein bottle, your body is an eddy in a whirlpool, you are only a ripple passing through. any pride you have in yourself is invented. it doesnt belong to you any more or less than it belongs to everyone and everything around you. whether predetermined or down to chance, it makes no difference: either way the credit is not with you because there is no you, or me, or anyone. we invent boxes to make sense of the world to make us exist in this pattern longer, but that can only last so long.

soon, humanity will fade away, just like everything else did beforehand, either through ending or by changing into something else. you are theseus's ship in this moment. you inherit the past, and the present, and the future(s?). what are you to do?

and at this point i look up to see they've already nervously walked away

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