Lonely

"Let me be clear. I understand very little, least of all the people closest to me."





I've been watching Lie to Me - again - well, mostly to pass the time until I get tired. It takes longer than you might think.

There's this prevalent notion that as you understand more about human nature you become more isolated. It gets harder to be around people for very long, difficult to maintain friendships and relationships.
In short, you become lonely. That's the price for the knowledge.

The notion is true.

Understanding human nature means you can see into the mind, be it your mind or another. That sight, that comprehension, slowly makes you hate people. Everyone seems to be okay with the "people are stupid" mentality; the sad truth, though, is that the further along the path to grasping whatever secret life is supposedly keeping from us you get, the more you're able to consider the singular instances of that collective stupidity.

In more plain English, you can not only read the actions, but the thoughts. The motivations are often more depressing than the results could ever hope to be - and if you've seen the news in the last decade or so, you may have some clue of precisely how crippling that reality can be.
Sure, you can hide it. A lot of us heavy thinkers drown our sorrows in one addiction or another. I won't tell you mine.

But the more you are around others, the more these things eat at you.

There's a catch, though. This deep understanding prevails in certain crisp and clear moments, but it isn't as if you become a psychic. You can read people and situations better and better, but only in these moments. Pieces, if you will.

This inevitably leads you to notice what you are naturally inclined to notice - be that the darkness everyone carries or the happiness or anything in between.

Somewhere along the way, though, you forget that there's this entire spectrum of thought and motivation that you are not seeing. Especially with people close to you.

If you're like me, you catch the moments that make you feel isolated, and your mind clings to them until they weigh you down like a mountain on your back. But we always forget, there's more to it.
What you see is a single instant of the inside of another mind, not the whole. The whole of humanity is bound, simply by probability, to produce these thoughts and motives from time to time - be they dark or light.

You can never forget that there's more to your friends, family, loved ones. Or you really do end up alone, because the insight slowly erodes your ability to trust.

"Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."

- C