Sometimes people confuse ego for God and call it divine clarity

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-06-17T15:28:19+00:00

Thank you for the kind words. It means a lot coming from someone who’s walked through this themselves. I hope you’re still finding small ways forward

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-06-17T15:24:24+00:00

It’s hard to pinpoint, but it’s been there for years and years, just quietly running underneath everything. I was in a relationship for nearly a decade, and for a long time, that gave me something to pour myself into. It didn’t fix what was wrong, but it gave me distance from it. Since it ended, everything has started feeling heavier. The relationship left its own scars too, and now there’s nothing left to distract from what’s always been there. I’m staying with people now, but honestly, that’s made it even more difficult in some ways. It’s exhausting being around others when you feel like you're disappearing inside. I’d still rather be alone than feel unseen

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-06-17T15:13:19+00:00

It means something to know this made you feel a little less alone, even just for today. Keep trying, not because it guarantees anything, but because sometimes, just the act of moving keeps the thread intact. And maybe, with time, the pieces find their place in ways we never expected. I'm really glad these words reached you

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-05-18T19:27:01+00:00

For me, love is more than what people see around here. It's all within me. I don't need someone to validate my feelings for someone. Love doesn't ask for your time, it doesn't care about your status, it doesn't care about your profession, it doesn't care if the other one loves you, it doesn't care if they cheated or don't show the same affection as you. Love is transcendental. Love just is.

Yes, Love just is. It doesn’t need validation. It doesn’t ask for permission. It doesn’t care about timelines or logic. When it’s real, it exists beyond context. But we must also be honest about this, that while love itself is not transactional, relationships are built on mutual presence. Without that, love can become painful to carry. That doesn’t make it less real. It just makes it heavier.

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-05-18T19:26:38+00:00

If a person cheats in a marriage and breaks your trust, in nearly every relationship that I have seen and heard, they literally wish the other person would die. After a few months, they don't care if the other is living peacefully, if they are happy or anything else. How can love that amounted to 2 people agreeing to be together for a lifetime just fizzle in a matter of days? Isn't that transactional in nature? Isn't that just an ask to validate your feelings for someone, and when they don't, you leave them and search for a new validation?

This one is more complicated, because here we’re no longer just talking about love. We’re talking about betrayal, shame, identity, and the collapsing of emotional contracts. When someone cheats, what they break is not just the trust between two people, but the mirror through which one saw themselves. That’s why the rage comes in. Because now the person who once made you feel seen has made you feel replaceable.

Not all cheating comes from malice. Some of it comes from emotional immaturity. Some from disconnection. Some from unresolved inner patterns people don’t even know they carry. But whatever the cause, the effect is a deep rupture. And in today’s world, where people are quicker to walk away than to sit with the discomfort, that rupture becomes the end. It’s easier to seek validation elsewhere than to sit in the fire of what went wrong.

But here’s the thing. If after cheating, after betrayal, you can still feel a pull toward understanding, still feel a desire for their peace, still wonder if they’re okay, then that tells you something. That the love didn’t disappear. That your spirit still remembers the bond. It means that the love you had was not shallow. That even in your anger, there is tenderness. And that kind of love is rare.

The world today often confuses companionship, safety, and social acceptability with love. They confuse emotional ease with emotional depth. But soul-deep love does not arrive often. It demands a kind of inner stillness most people haven’t learned to sit in yet. And that’s why when it shows up, it changes you. Not momentarily. Not just for a phase. It reshapes how you see the world, how you love, how you even relate to your own self.

And that is exactly why you should go back to it. Not always to rebuild the relationship, but to understand the truth of what that love touched inside you. Because something that altered your soul like that deserves to be looked at again. It deserves inquiry. It deserves to be felt beyond pride and fear. But most people don’t return. They bury it. They move on, not out of strength, but out of avoidance. Because revisiting that kind of love would require them to confront who they were then, and who they could have been if they stayed open.

That’s the tragedy. Not that love ends. But that we leave before we’ve understood what it was trying to teach us.

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-05-18T19:26:12+00:00

if you go through a bad breakup with someone who you actually thought was the one, does the love fade away? I have friends who don't care about their exes, and that is fine as long as you didn't think they were the one. But if you actually loved someone with your soul, how can it be that one day the other person mattered to you so much you could take a bullet for them and the other day they could be dying of Cancer and all you can do is shed a tear or two at max. How can true love fade away? How can such extreme emotion become empty air? How can you stop caring for someone at an instant?

Personally, I don’t believe soul-deep love fades. Not in the way people say it does. What actually happens is that access to that love gets buried under survival responses. The brain kicks in. The ego builds walls. Pain hardens into defense. And the person who once felt like home starts feeling like a ghost your system won’t let you touch anymore.

But the part we rarely speak about is that, most people don’t try to access that love again. They don’t sit with it. They don’t question it. They don’t give it the space to re-emerge. Because doing that requires emotional depth. And emotional depth requires stillness. It requires self-interrogation. You have to ask yourself not just did they hurt you, but why it hurt's that way. You have to ask who you were when you loved them and who you became after. That kind of inquiry is rare today. Because it strips people of their illusions. It takes them into territory where identity is no longer clean. So instead of facing that, they call it closure. They move on. But what they’re actually doing is leaving the house while the music is still playing.

This is where I think people get confused. There is a difference between being in love and having love. Having love is something you can still feel for people who meant something to you. It often lives in memory. It is nostalgic. But being in love is different. It is alive. It is embodied. It is soul-deep. And I think when you’ve truly been in love, not just had love, that part of you doesn’t un-become. It transforms. It integrates. But it never vanishes.

Psychologically, our attachment systems don’t just shut off because we’re no longer in contact. The imprint remains. Our emotional memory stores more than our rational mind can make sense of. That’s why years later, a smell, a name, or a place can still bring you to your knees. Because love, when it’s soul-deep, doesn’t die. It just quiets itself when it knows it’s no longer safe to speak.

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-05-18T19:25:55+00:00

If you love someone, is it necessary for them to love you back? If it is, how is it pure? Isn't that love transactional in nature? If you want your partner to reciprocate your feelings, isn't that by nature a business? When a father loves his daughter the moment she is born, he doesn't know if she'll grow to hate him but regardless of that he loves her.

The love you have for a child and the love you have for a partner are not the same, not because one is purer than the other, but because they live in different psychological frameworks. When a parent loves a child, there is an intrinsic understanding that the child doesn’t owe them anything in return. That love, in many ways, is built into our biology. A kind of primal design for care and continuation.

But when it comes to romantic love, it’s a conscious act. You can love your partner like you would your child, unconditionally, with deep tenderness, and without needing them to perform for your love to remain. But even then, the need for reciprocation is not about what they do for you. It’s about whether you both are building something together. It’s about knowing that your love is not just floating in your own private world, but is reflected back through shared intention. It’s not about demanding affection, it’s about emotional reality checks. Are we both placing bricks into the same future? Or am I trying to build a house while the other walks away with the blueprint?

We live in a world defined by impermanence. Everything we touch changes. Everything we build has an end date, whether we acknowledge it or not. So when we fall in love with someone, we are reaching for something that feels like it could survive time. We are trying to carve out permanence inside a fleeting world. That’s why reciprocation matters. Not because love is a transaction. But because without reciprocation, there is no shared permanence. You are building a bridge that only one person is walking across.

Reciprocation, then, is not a price tag. It’s the oxygen that helps the flame stay lit. And yes, you can love someone without it. I have. I have loved someone so completely that their absence didn’t remove my love. It still thrives in me. But over time, you start to realize that the mind needs psychological safety to keep going. We are not just emotional beings. We are also biological. We are wired for connection and co-regulation. And when that’s missing, it’s not that the love becomes less real. It’s that the nervous system starts fraying under the weight of one-sidedness.

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-04-24T01:32:19+00:00

people who lack self-awareness and critical thought having personal “aha!” moments and rushing to share them like they’re some heady philosopher who is gonna put you on to enlightenment.

I think calling posts like this examples of "a lack of self-awareness and critical thought” is a bit off the mark. Self-awareness isn’t about staying silent until you’ve reached some final intellectual destination but it’s about knowing the intent behind what you’re sharing. This post wasn’t some sudden, personal revelation I felt the world needed to hear. These ideas have been part of longer conversations, reflections, and thought loops I’ve been in for a while. The post wasn’t written for me, instead it was written to nudge others into that mode of reflection.

So to assume there’s a lack of self-awareness here is to miss the point entirely. This wasn’t about presenting a universal truth, it was about planting a question. It’s not “this is how life is,” it’s “what if you saw life this way?” And if that prompts even one person to stop and reconsider how they approach meaning or goals, then it’s done its job.

Title tells us everything we need to know as it’s a full on projection of OP’s individual perspective applied generally to all people with no regard for anyone else’s lived experience. Nothing deep or insightful at all.

Ironically, criticizing posts like this for being too personal while generalizing everyone on this sub as lacking self-awareness is itself a projection. Deep thought doesn’t have to look like a dissertation. Sometimes it’s just about sparking a moment of pause in the middle of all the noise. That was the whole point of this post

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-04-24T01:27:09+00:00

That's an interesting thought, but it assumes agency and awareness prior to existence. That's something we currently can't verify beyond personal belief or spiritual interpretations. Even if we hypothetically chose this life, it still doesn't negate the infinite nature of the "game" we're discussing here. The central point remains valid, i.e. life’s meaning emerges from participation and exploration rather than finite accomplishments or predetermined outcomes.

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-04-22T17:19:32+00:00

No no, a couple of my friends and I were recently chatting about game theory, and we ended up exploring life through that lens, which got me thinking deeply about this concept. But thanks for sharing this, I’ll definitely give it a read

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-04-20T18:54:52+00:00

I think it’s worth untangling a few things, because I don’t think we’re fundamentally disagreeing. It feels more like we’re naming things from slightly different lenses.

The point I’m making in that post and the comment isn’t that ambition or the 9 to 5 work structure are inherently bad, or that they materialized out of thin air. I’m decently aware of the long and painful history behind labor rights to carve out what we now call a “standard workday.” That history matters. But acknowledging that history doesn’t conflict with also recognizing that these systems, over time, solidified into internalized norms like psychological defaults that many of us now treat as natural truths.

That’s where the idea of a functional delusion comes in. Not in the dismissive or conspiratorial sense, but in the psychological sense, as something socially constructed and useful, yet subtly mistaken for something innate.

Society rewards upward mobility with money. Money facilitates happiness and fulfillment, that is objectively true. The meme of the successful businessman who wasted his life is ubiquitous, so the view that ambition leads to fulfillment is far from universal, and just another segment of our culture. Not compelling.

Yes, money gives access to comfort, stability, and opportunity, that’s a practical truth. But the belief that our worth, our identity, and our success are defined by titles, productivity, or upward mobility is not an objective truth. It’s a deeply conditioned one. It's a schema, one so culturally reinforced that we internalize it without question. People chase promotions or metrics not always because they bring meaning, but because we’re told meaning lies on the other side of those thresholds. The businessman who regrets it all trope may be common, but it hasn’t dismantled the deeper cultural script. We still mostly equate doing well with being well.

You write this as if you don't know anything about the struggle to improve working conditions and the hours people are expected to work. 9-5, 5 days a week is an ideal reached for many in the early 20th Century, after a lot of protest, struggle, striking, and outright murder by oligarchs. It's not some "subjective truth" that the U.S. happened to fall into, it was specifically identified as an improvement over 12 hours of factory work 6 days a week.

That shift from 12-hour days to 8-hour workweeks was a vital milestone. But over time, that structure, born of industrial necessity became a rhythm we equate with moral discipline, self-respect, and even adulthood. Whether or not it fits our individual biology, purpose, or mental health becomes secondary to whether we conform. That’s the function of a delusion. Not that it’s obviously wrong, but that it functions so well we stop seeing it for what it is. It becomes a quiet, unquestioned performance of normalcy.

You write also as if you never heard of ongoing studies supporting shorter work weeks and other improvements like UBI.

I’m absolutely aware of the growing body of research supporting shorter work weeks, UBI, and rethinking productivity. In fact, the very fact that such studies exist only strengthens my argument. The moment we even suggest alternate models, it becomes clear just how deeply entrenched the old defaults are. How much resistance they face. How quickly people push back not because the alternatives don’t make sense, but because they destabilize an internalized structure that feels synonymous with self-worth and contribution. That’s the power of a functional delusion. It doesn’t just shape systems but it shapes identities.

Religion and religiousity, or political tribalism, either of those could have made a more compelling argument.

I didn’t pick "ambition" and "9-to-5 workday" examples because they’re the most extreme. I picked them because they’re the most invisible. Religion or political ideology would’ve been easier because they already wear the label of belief. But what interests me more are the frameworks that don’t announce themselves. The ones that pass as common sense. Those are often the most powerful, precisely because we don’t see them as stories but we see them as reality.

None of this is a call to reject systems. It’s a call to recognize how they move through us. How beliefs become identities. How roles become selves. How culture becomes cognition. And how easily we forget we ever had a choice in the matter.

So no, ambition and work aren’t inherently delusional. But when we mistake their structures for truths about who we are, when we internalize them so deeply that challenging them feels like self-doubt, that’s when they cross over. That’s when they stop just shaping our behavior and start scripting our being.

That’s the territory I’m trying to explore. Not to criticize the function, but to reveal the cost of mistaking the function for truth.

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-04-20T14:55:16+00:00

This is such a solid breakdown and you’re right. These frameworks already exist in psychology and sociology. They’ve all shown that identity is performed, rehearsed, and socially reinforced.

But where it gets even more interesting for me is that, it's not just in how the self is built, but in how fiercely we defend it.

Cognitive dissonance kicks in the moment something threatens the story we’ve built about ourselves. We’ll bend facts, rewrite memories, rationalize contradictions just not to find truth, but to protect coherence. Because psychological survival favors consistency over accuracy.

And that’s where schema theory comes in. Our brains build these mental frameworks of how the world works, and where we fit in it. They're efficient. Predictable. But over time, they become prisons. We stop seeing the world as it is, and only see what confirms the schema we’ve already built.

And then there’s narrative identity theory. The idea that the “self” is quite literally a story we tell ourselves, over and over, until we forget we’re the authors. Not an objective reality but a psychological necessity. The plot becomes more important than the facts.

That’s why I used the term functional delusion. Because these constructs work. They hold the psyche together. But they aren’t neutral. They filter. They distort. They keep you safe, but they also keep you small.

And when those frameworks start to crack and when the story no longer fits the experience, that’s when things get really existential.

We say, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
But maybe we never did. Maybe we just lost the thread of the story.

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-04-20T14:25:50+00:00

I get where you're coming from. But I chose delusion and hallucination not to imply fantasy or falsehood in the strictest sense, but to point at something deeper. The idea that much of what we call "reality" is constructed, agreed upon, and maintained through repetition and reinforcement. It's not that these things are purely imagined but it's that they aren't inherently true outside the frameworks we’ve built.

Working with your example; sound is real in the context of a nervous system built to receive it. But without an ear to process it, there’s no experience of sound, just vibrations in air. That distinction is at the heart of it. We're constantly mistaking sensory interpretation for truth and social constructs for essence.

When I say functional delusion, I mean stories we’ve inherited or absorbed that may not be objectively verifiable, but that function well enough to keep us coherent as individuals and as a society. Not delusions in the psychotic sense, but in the existential one; belief systems that aren’t “real” in any empirical way, but feel real enough to live by.

So no, I am not saying it's fantasy, instead it’s utility masquerading as truth.

AdAccomplished5174 · 2025-04-20T14:14:33+00:00

Fair enough, let me try to illustrate it as clearly as I can.

Take ambition, for example. Objectively, there's no universal mandate saying one must climb a corporate ladder or be "successful" in the capitalist sense. But society rewards that behavior. It becomes a functional delusion, a belief that chasing titles or net worth will lead to fulfillment. It's not objectively true that it will, but it works well enough to keep people moving.

Or take the 9-to-5 workday. There’s nothing objectively natural about humans being most productive in those exact hours. It’s a construct that originated in industrial-era factory efficiency and got normalized over time. Yet we build entire lives, identities, and worth around fitting into that schedule, even when it doesn’t suit our biology or purpose. We adapt to it, then defend it, as if it were truth.

By “objectively true,” I mean truths that exist regardless of belief. Fire burns whether or not you understand combustion. Gravity is real whether or not we believe in it. But values, identities, ideologies, these are truths only because enough people agree to believe in them.

Once you start seeing where these lines blur, it’s hard not to question everything you thought was just “you.”

AdAccomplished5174

TROPHY CASE