Collection: Ambiguous, Not Amphibious

Format: Aphorism

Author: Melissa Nadia Viviana

Date: January 9, 2025

Tags: Fascism, Tech Overlords, Boycotts, Consumer Ethics

Ambiguous, Not Amphibious is a reader-supported publication by Melissa Nadia Viviana: Author, Activist, Existentialist, & Philosopher.

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At every moment, there exists someone suffering more than you. 

And someone suffering less than you.

This was true for every person who ever lived, 

at every moment they were alive. 

As we get more globally connected, it begins to feel as if we live in one world or one reality, but this illusion is created & maintained by empathy.

Empathy tells you that your experience is connected to the experiences of everybody else on this planet. 

But they’re not.

Empathy tells you that your emotions are connected to the emotions of all the other people on this planet. 

But they're not.

Yes, I know that Eastern religions often tell us that we’re one and we’re all connected. I like that worldview too.

But for the purposes of being sane and productive in your own life, you can’t let empathy mislead you into believing that the internet is the same as that eastern concept of oneness.

The internet is just a global tool for communication. And it convinces us, via the power of narratives, to believe that we’re living in the same world and existing in the same reality.

But it doesn’t actually connect us through anything but the projections of empathy onto powerful storytelling.

Are localities more real than the global narratives we create via the internet? 

Are the universal realities that we create by averaging out the human experience so we can talk about it “generally,” from a bird’s eye view, actually obscuring reality because they disconnect us from locality?

While we’re at it, why don’t we just understand ourselves from the macro view of our world as seen from the universe? Where nearly nobody’s personal experience exists.

In actuality,

We're experiencing local worlds, 

local lives, local relationships, 

local problems, 

even local weather.

More importantly, we have local emotions.

Your emotions are connected to your individual reality. Which is your locality.

Your happiness is found in the present moment of your life. 

Afterall, if someone else kisses a loved one somewhere else in the world, you don't get to feel pleasure or comfort or peace because of it.

You can only feel love or comfort by kissing someone right in front of you.

So why when someone else feels pain, are you convinced that you should feel it as if it’s your own?

At every moment, there exists someone suffering more than you. 

And someone suffering less than you.

This was true for every person who ever lived, at every moment they were alive.

There will never be a moment on this planet when the entire world will be happy. 

There will never be a moment when the entire world will be stable.

If we could only celebrate our birthdays or anniversaries on days without suffering somewhere, we'd have no reason to celebrate ourselves on any day of the year.

Your emotions are deeply connected to your present moment and if you constantly train your emotions to ignore your present moment in order to focus on other people elsewhere, you're going to feel numb and agitated every day of your life.

No one who ever existed lived one moment of their lives in which someone else wasn't suffering.

Thus, no happy moment ever felt by anyone was contingent or dependent on existing at a time in which suffering didn’t exist.

So why put that conditionality on yourself, in favor of the globalized connectivity created by the internet?

Reality is the locality outside your front door. 

Reality is the people in your home right now. The connections you maintain with people you know personally and love personally.

Reality is the sensation you feel on your face from the crisp air or the warmth of the bright sun on your face… 

Those are the sensations that are real. Furthermore, those are the only sensations that will bring you a sense of well-being and peace.

You won’t find your happiness in global connectivity. 

You can only feel happy from sensations right in front of you.

Empathy is only an imagination of what’s real. 

It’s a powerful, powerful tool that can help us become functional in our social communities.

But it’s also a tool that can mislead us into forgoing our local reality, for a false, globalized version of reality only imagined to be real.