an inner voice for an exurb1a video
It may seem when you look around at the others around you, it only looks as though everyone else has some kind of plan for life.
We have built a culture where we aggressively enforce the idea that confronting the sad truths of the world unhealthy, or weird, despite the fact that we all do it. Under all of it, under all the nice birthday cards and social media pleasentries, everyone is a total mess.
And you should be one too.
The Worst Day of Your Life
Right now theres around ~8 billion humans on the world right now, and given that there are on average about 26,000 days in the average human life:
chances are about 300,000 people are having the worst day of their entire lives… TODAY!!!!
And isn’t it wonderful that we are not one of them( but our time will come at some point of course ).
What does one do when ones life has fallen apart?
Lets think a little about the worthlessness of some*
Some Unimportant People
One obscure composer you might not have heard of, who in 1876 wrote to his nephew saying:
Indeed, my life is of little worth to anyone… Were I to vanish from the face of the earth today, it would be no great loss for Russian music
This was actually well, you know, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, one of the greatest composers who ever lived…
Or take some obscure writer, a struggling unknown.
He considered himself hideously ugly and stupid, and wrote to his friend requesting that after his death all his writings and belongings were to be burned.
He died at 40 of tuberculosis, and his friend, of course, disobeyed his wishes and had it published instead. This man was, of course, Franz Kafka, aruably one of the greatest writers of the last century.
These are artists, though, so I guess the whole self hating schtick kind of just comes with the job… But they aren’t alone.
The Company We Keep
Take Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter living in the shadow of her famous husband Diego Rivera. She was convinced of her own naïveté-a failure, she thought. Perhaps you’ve heard of her husband. You’ve definitely heard of her, though. Today we know Diego Rivera as her spouse, not the other way around.
Or consider Abraham Lincoln, an American statesman in the 1800s. He lost his mother at 9, his sister at 19, then his 11-year-old son himself. He suffered numerous bouts of depression, writing once:
I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would be not one cheerful face on the earth.
Add to the pile Michelangelo, Florence Nightingale, Beethoven-all of them slipping into periods when they reported going to a place from which they simply could not find their way back to themselves.
The thing is, we only know about their struggles because their lives are well-studied. We’re not famous, but we get the blues too. And oddly, it turns out that our brains mostly process physical pain and emotional pain in the same regions and find it rather hard to tell them apart. The sadness actually hurts. Have you hung out with people after their hearts have been broken? It’s like they’ve been shot.
The Silence Around Suffering
If so many of us go to that bad place in the course of our lives, and civilization is so old, how come we still don’t have an agreed sense of how to combat or even talk properly about the emotional ouchies? We know what to do about dicky tummies and broken legs. Why don’t we know how to fix broken souls?
Probably because we rarely know how to describe any of this stuff even to ourselves.
English is terrible for talking about complex emotions, especially the sad ones. Other languages are far more specific:
- Yahl (Arabic): hoping you die before someone you love, so you don’t have to live without them
- L’esprit de l’escalier (French): literally “the wit of the staircase”-thinking of the perfect comeback you could have said, but only after you’ve left the party
- Cavalier scalati (Italian): reheated cabbage-trying to restart a relationship that didn’t go great last time. It won’t go great this time either. Please stop.
But we’re lacking for nice things in English too:
- Cafuné (Portuguese): running your fingers through the hair of someone you rather like
- Koi no yokan (Japanese): when you first meet someone and already suspect the two of you might fall in love
- Waldeinsamkeit (German): the feeling of solitude you get when you’re alone in the woods. Not necessarily sad, but surely that can be the worst experience too. Because there are two modes of being in the woods: the one where you’ve got a map, a plan, and a big backpack full of hope. And then there’s the other mode, when you’re stuck in the woods lost at twilight, out of allies, with nothing but the terrible sense that you’re never ever getting out of this place, and you’re completely alone in the struggle.
The Prediction Machine Goes Haywire
There’s something interesting happening here. Your brain is fundamentally a prediction machine. Not in the mystical sense-in the Bayesian sense. Every moment, your cortex is generating predictions about what it expects to experience: sensory input, emotional states, outcomes of actions. When reality violates these predictions, you feel prediction error. This is how you learn, how you navigate the world.
But the brain is also recursive. It predicts predictions. It models itself modeling itself. Douglas Hofstadter called this a “strange loop”-consciousness emerging from these tangled hierarchies of self-reference. You experience your own thoughts. You have thoughts about your thoughts. You have doubts about your doubts.
Our brain is extraordinarily good at predicting the everyday world. Which coffee mug is on the table. How gravity works. When your friend is going to laugh at a joke. But it’s catastrophically bad at predicting certain kinds of things. Your own suffering. Loss. The precise shape of your future. The times when everything falls apart.
When you’re in the cave of despair, it’s not just that things are bad. It’s that your prediction machine has fundamentally failed. Your models were wrong. The world didn’t behave as expected. And worse, you didn’t behave as expected to yourself. You had a theory about who you were, what you could handle, what would make you happy. The theory shattered.
This is why the sadness actually hurts. Pain, whether physical or emotional, is a prediction error signal. Your brain screaming: something is catastrophically wrong with my model of reality. And when that model is about yourself, about your place in the world, the error signal becomes existential.
What the Ancient Dead Had to Say
There’s a useful way to think about consciousness: as a strange loop, a self-referential knot that ties itself. Douglas Hofstadter spent hundreds of pages showing how Gödel, Escher, Bach explores this: Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, the impossible geometry of Escher’s staircases, the recursive canons in Bach’s compositions-all pointing to the same truth. Consciousness is self-reference bootstrapping through levels of abstraction. A mind contains models of minds that contain models of minds. A system that can represent itself, and representations of those representations. The strange loop.
This insight-that intelligence emerges from tangled hierarchies, from a system’s ability to model itself-echoes across 2,500 years of Eastern philosophy. The authors of the Dao De Jing were grappling with something similar, even if they lacked our terminology. The text itself is recursive: the Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao. You cannot capture the pattern in language. The moment you try to define the way things work, you’ve already limited the way things actually work.
The central problem they identified: Cosmically, we know nothing about why anything exists. Historically, we’re powerless. In our personal lives, we’re strangers to ourselves. How do we live with this? This is the question your prediction machine asks when it fails. When your model of reality shatters, and you realize your model of yourself was incomplete all along.
The Daoist answer was wu wei-non-action, action without striving, doing by not-doing. Stop trying to impose rigid structure on the world. The sage acts like water: formless, following the path of least resistance, yet capable of wearing away mountains. Paradoxically, when you give up trying to control everything, you become more effective. Your prediction errors decrease because you stop making the mistake of predicting that the universe should match your will.
Why do birds migrate? Because they respond to what is, without fighting against it. The universe doesn’t consult them for a master plan. They simply act. The more you try to overlay your models onto reality, the more the world reveals how little control you actually have. So the Daoists offered: “Happiness is the absence of striving for happiness” and “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”
These weren’t mystical platitudes. They were practical advice for systems that had crashed into their own limitations. The original Daoists were caught in the same recursive trap we are: minds trying to understand minds, systems trying to predict systems that include themselves. And their reply, forged in times of collapse and civil war, was radical acceptance: We do not live in Utopia. We live in mystery and chaos largely beyond our control. The only real choice we have is how we respond.
The Historical Antacid
The Dao De Jing emerges as one of history’s first serious attempts to philosophize suffering. And it’s not coincidental that Daoism flourished a few centuries after Lao Tzu, when China collapsed into the Warring States period. Seven kingdoms tearing each other apart. Just when everything fractured, Chinese thinkers began hungering for a framework to survive the chaos. They needed a philosophy that accepted that they couldn’t win, couldn’t control outcomes, could only choose how to respond.
This pattern recurs throughout history. Something catastrophic happens, and humans scramble to find new ways of seeing. Athens pulverized by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and from the ashes comes Stoicism: an explicit philosophy of accepting what you cannot control. If you can’t extinguish the fire, at least you can choose not to panic while it burns.
But nothing stayed calm. 64 AD, the Great Fire of Rome. 79 AD, Vesuvius erupts. 165 AD, the Antonine Plague kills ten million. Then 536 AD - sometimes called the worst year in recorded history. A mystery fog (likely from an Icelandic volcano) dims the sun for two years. The coldest decade in 2.5 millennia. Crops fail. The Justinian Plague follows, killing tens of millions.
Then 755 AD, the An Lushan Rebellion in China slaughters 30 million. The Mongol campaigns wipe out perhaps 40 million more - so much death that we can still measure it in Antarctic ice cores, a reduction of 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
And yet, from disaster emerges innovation. The Black Death in 1349 kills millions in Europe, and the survivors invent Humanism - the radical idea of valuing human reason and compassion over purely theological answers. The Spanish Conquest, the Thirty Years’ War (8 million dead), the Industrial Revolution with its urban poverty and genius. Each catastrophe births new philosophies: the Enlightenment, Romanticism, utopianism.
Fifty million dead in World War One. Seventy million in World War Two. And from that rubble: existentialism, absurdism, pacifism - modern attempts to find meaning when the universe clearly has none for us.
It would be better without the tragedies. But what’s remarkable is that we keep surviving them. That despite everything imploding in both our personal lives and on the historical stage, we somehow remain capable of decency, creativity, and strange resilience. That we know - as well as our ancestors did - that life is cruel and intolerably awful at times. Yet if you dare to face directly into that abyss of pain and loss, something unexpected emerges on the other side. Not resolution or victory, but a kind of clarity. New eyes. And maybe beer as well.
The Cave of Despair
I used to see my neighbor in the lift of my apartment block. He was about 40, always disgustingly optimistic. Whenever I mentioned a broken foot or stolen bike, he’d respond with: “Oh, but that’s wonderful - you must have learned so much about yourself.” The relentless positivity made me fantasize about acquiring medieval weaponry.
Then I found an old death notice in the basement. It was about his wife. She’d died a few years before I started avoiding him.
His optimism was still irritating, but now I saw something else beneath it: an incredible quiet strength. The kind of resilience that only comes from having your prediction machine permanently broken by grief.
Everyone is secretly broken.
Childhood is this weird introduction to the world. “Over there is the library, the cinema, the bakery,” older people say. “And that’s the cave of hopeless despair where you’ll end up sometimes, where all of your dreams are crushed for no obvious reason.” Then they point you toward the juice bar, as if this is normal. As if the cave is just another neighborhood feature.
Something happens. Or nothing happens. One morning you wake up in the cave. It’s very dark. You wander looking for the exit. No problem, you think - I have a compass. But the needle spins uselessly. No problem - I’ll dig my way out. Your hands bleed. No problem - I’ll wait for rescue. But all you hear are distant voices from the outside world, people on the beach having a lovely time without you.
So you carve your name into the stone. What else is there to do?
Eventually, you do emerge from the cave. Often with help from friends. Sometimes through events as mysterious as the ones that brought you in. You fall back into the world. Everything is fine again.
Strangely, though, maybe later you return out of curiosity. This time you bring a torch. And you discover your name wasn’t the only signature on the wall. There were hundreds. Millions - everyone you’ve ever known, all the others who spent their lonely time in here.
Because it would be absurd to go through an entire life without occasionally losing the plot. It would be genuinely weird to be a conscious primate, aware enough to know that you know basically nothing, surrounded by loss and disasters, without having your predictions shattered now and then.
It’s not amazing that so much suffering has happened throughout history. Rather, it’s amazing that it happened and we continued. That despite everything collapsing in our personal lives and on the historical stage, we somehow remained decent. That we still created democracy, aspirin, and winter fashion for cats. That we kept going.
And because we continue - because we always return from the cave - we get to experience something profound. Standing on a high cliff one day, looking out at a warm world, with all the hard-won wisdom of having survived. You feel something without a word for it in English: the strange sense of having arrived in the future and wishing you could tell your past self that everything will be okay. Because it will be. Until the next time you descend into the cave.
And somewhere ahead in time, another version of you waits quietly, having endured those hard times as well. Ready to pull you back to yourself when the time comes. As we always, always do.
Self-Reference and Survival
There’s a strange beauty in understanding all this. You’re not just a prediction machine - you’re a machine that models itself, and knows it’s modeling itself, and has thoughts about those thoughts. A strange loop. Consciousness bootstrapping through levels of abstraction, a mind containing a model of a mind containing a model of a mind. This recursion is what gives rise to the very thing that suffers.
The Daoists understood this without our language for it. They knew that a system sophisticated enough to model itself would inevitably crash into unsolvable paradoxes. That trying to predict your own future while also being the thing that will shape that future leads to recursive knots. Gödel showed us this mathematically - any system complex enough to describe itself will contain true statements it cannot prove. This isn’t a flaw. It’s the price of consciousness.
So what happens when your Bayesian brain, this incredible prediction engine, meets something it cannot predict? When it tries to forecast your own suffering, your own growth, the precise moment you’ll break - and realizes it cannot? The prediction error becomes existential. The signal says: everything you thought you understood about reality was incomplete.
And here’s the radical part: that’s not actually a bug. It’s the only reason you ever change. The only reason humans develop new philosophies when the old ones fail. The only reason you emerge from the cave different than you entered.
Everyone around you is also broken. Everyone is navigating impossible recursions, trying to predict systems they’re embedded within, failing constantly and reorganizing their models of the world. The man in the lift carrying his wife’s grief. The brilliant composer convinced he’s worthless. The writer burning his own work. You, in whatever cave you’ve wandered into. All of us, trying to act as if we understand things that cannot be understood, all of us failing, all of us continuing anyway.
And this continues. From chaos comes philosophy. From breakdown comes breakthrough. From the recognition that you know nothing comes the acceptance that nothing needs to know anything for the universe to continue unfolding. You’re not special in your messiness. You’re human in it.
Maybe that’s enough.