A rabbit hole.. of an existential sort.

Duncan Jackson
3 min readSep 4, 2020
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

I never thought that the opinion I had of myself would influence so many of my actions and thought processes. It seems simple enough to make the connection when it’s written plainly on a page, but to make that connection from a first person view is quite difficult. We experience the entirety of our lives from this first person view. We are the protagonist, and at times, antagonist, of our own stories. Our minds have become so neurotic from the relentless influx of social media, provocative videos, and cancel culture ideology, that in the midst of it all, the authenticity of human interaction has been lost.

So? What’s the consequence? Can’t be that significant.

We can’t go for five minutes without checking our phone to see more mind-numbing content. I think of it as a diluted form of a neuralyzer from Men In Black. It doesn’t wipe your memory, but rather, fills it with useless and poisoning material, which limits your ability to see what should be regarded as “important” in life. Subjectivity is in abundance here, but it’s the closest thing to verisimilitude that we have in life. Why not something that is unquestionably real? I don’t believe “real” exists. Sounds like I’ve had one too many hits of the damn crack pipe, I get it. Really thinking about it, though, it makes absolute sense to me. There are plenty of things that the majority of individuals can agree upon. These things are generally considered to be “real.” What goes up, but never comes down? Age, of course. (You know you fucking laughed.) Is it really real, though? We have the obvious indicators that one would use to determine who’s older than the other- body composition, height, tone of voice, syntax, etc. What if the idea of age had many other factors and complexities that aren’t simply limited to the culmination of days since one’s birth? The intangibles- life experiences, genetic predispositions, these things that are much overlooked when it comes to “age.”

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

The (completely rational) conclusion?

It’s safe to say that if you were raised without the importance of understanding emotion, or feeling it because it was seldomly displayed towards you, this kind of treatment would make you a sociopath. (Unbeknownst to you, because it’s all you’ve experienced. You don’t see your behavior as morally wrong.) You could even argue that this type of person would have a proclivity to be smarter than the average joe. Their experiences have more than likely been in the realm of logic (or some deviation of it,) than emotion. Yes, their emotional intelligence is absent, but they don’t have the same emotional connection as you and I would have. In a sense, they don’t have that “weakness.” People have acted upon emotion time and time again. You cannot act upon something you’re not aware of. If you were to, it would be nothing short of coincidental. My rant is finished. If you’ve made it this far, I commend you for your immeasurable dedication.

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Duncan Jackson

An avid sports enthusiast; a student of the game, and always a student of life. IG: Duncan_Jackson