297. Seeing Both Sides

The more isolated you become, the more difficult it becomes to see the world outside of you. Greater and greater isolation means that the relevant part of the world shrinks until it contains no one but you. In this tiny world, you are in control, you are the arbiter of truth, and you determine what is real and what is fake.

As your interactions with others gradually cease, you stop participating in their shared reality, which means the norms and truths of that reality stop applying to you. Even the natural world, which seems to impose certain conditions on your existence, can be mostly avoided or at least mitigated through technologies that allow you to separate yourself from nature. When all of your basic needs can be met without interacting with anyone, then your isolation has become total. Your new world has a population of one, and its form is whatever you give it.

But your ability to shape the world is no aberration from normal. The truth is that the world is always your world, even when you are not isolated — you can always see whatever you would like to see in it. But the truth is equally that the world is not yours at all — it is always determined by factors that reside far outside your control.

Your isolation has made this second aspect impossible to see, and seeing both sides of the truth is essential. To see only one side of a truth is to almost guarantee despair for yourself. In this case, either the despair of the world being your own delusion and thus it is meaningless, or the despair of the world being entirely out of your hands and thus you are meaningless.

To overcome despair, you need to reconnect with the shared reality you have abandoned. But how did you get here? What drove you to isolate yourself in the first place? Your isolation is only a symptom of a larger problem — the problem of attachment that plagues us all. To see this problem in all of its troubling dimensions is your only possible path to salvation.