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  • branthan 31w

    I realized that I need solitude, lonely hours of brown noise blasting through the noise-canceling headphones to shut the world out. Moments where you don't have to worry about the mundane social constructs of existence and let the brain wander through all the thoughts that it creates. From how did the evolution of poop begin, because the system for poop is not optimized at all to can you get away with that murderer that you planned after watching way too many tv shows and serial killer documentaries. Or maybe it's just me with the thought, but you get the idea.

    What woke and religious culture does is kill ideas. The authoritarian nature often comes with the one-dimensional thought of these cultures often leads to the oppression of ideas and the emergence of beautiful hard questions.
    For one to understand the nature of good, one must understand the nature of evil. Without understanding evil, you don't understand good at all. But when you force people to learn and talk about only one set of thoughts and censor out everything else, we end up with a mundane monotonous society that is stuck, an existence without a purpose, a value function that never grows, a world engulfed in deep despair.

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  • branthan 34w

    Some days you wake up with a feeling of despair. As you open your eyes and sit for a second to catch the breathe, there is a heavy feeling of some realization that you don't know what to make of.
    Be hopeful, people tell you with a smile, followed by some beautiful words so poetically crafted that you get bored in the middle and get lost in the thought of "hopeful of what?".

    Standing before the vast endless space it occurs to you how insignificant and powerless we all are. How do you make peace with that? There is more void between the stars, but the world is crowded, every new face fighting for more space with our tiny brains that are stuck in myths and optimism coated in some enticing smile that we fall for every time.

    Truth never sets you free, it burdens you with another question, frozen desolation that stretches forever. The living has no choice but to go on living even when the desolation falls on our skin. Without a purpose we drag our life between ticks of a clock, work till the world rot away, even death becomes meaningless. We move on leaving one another behind on the dirt, the dirt that took people before us.

    For you to exist, you must possess all the tools to acknowledge your own existence. When you experience and feel things beyond the realm of reality that others possess and lack the tool to express that knowledge to the world, that existence becomes futile, just a mad mind wandering through the world without a purpose. It is not the slight melancholy that you romanticize about on a sleepless night, it is the loneliness when the words get caught in your throat that you stare at the ceiling for answers.

    How predictable it is, isn't it? The way life happens from the moment that you wake up till the moment you fall asleep. You hang in anticipation of the final curtain, the majestic ending someone told you about yet it all end the same.

    But some days you feel like there is peace. Somewhere between the moment you fall asleep till you wake up with the same despair, a moment when you don't hear the sound time makes, a moment that you cannot recall but somewhere in the back of your head in a dark corner that makes you smile for no reason once every while. How tragically poetic it is that you know the end, yet feel this momentary calm even when you're trying so hard to breathe. Like the way how flowers opened their eyes to this world from the same dirt that you have fallen from.

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  • branthan 35w

    There is no reason to live and no reason to die.
    There is no meaning to my existence
    Or yours, if you want me to be honest.

    I can feel my existence, parts of it, from the first memory of a child to some memory of a work I had to complete before I started to type this on a screen.
    Where do these thoughts come from, I wonder?

    A neural network simply spitting out word after another without a rhyme to make sense of this world that feels so personal or something I do not know how to imagine?

    Perhaps, my brain cannot make the chemicals to compute the right answer. How do you know the difference between the right answer from the wrong one? Is there a difference at all? Our morality is simply the conditions that we've found useful throughout our evolution to ensure the survival of our species at large, isn't it? There is nothing divine about it, some chemical dictating what you are.

    Maybe some chemicals are tricking you into these loops that never end, thoughts that never lead to an answer but contradictions. But these thoughts are yours, aren't they? You were supposed to be the one making decisions, the master of your own free will and your thoughts. What happened then? Why is it that you cannot stop thinking about the meaningless of it all? Why is it that you cannot escape from the stress, the lows the blues the misery, that random nihilism that hits you when all you want is sleep? Not a hug, not a conversation but to simply sleep, shutting down the thoughts the way you killed the machine with a click.

    We act as if we are free as if there is a divine touch, a purpose, a meaning to these thoughts that randomly appear. It is hard for me to believe in free will in the sense that we've been told. We are never really free, always bounded by some simple chemicals, a simple probabilistic distribution of the existence of some particles. Some days you feel the high, some days you're never really sure about who you are anymore.

    But why do I exist? Why do these thoughts exist? Why anything exists at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? Or is it simply a game of life simulating the game of life? A simple automaton that moves from one state to another.

    Maybe I should correct myself. There is no divine meaning to my existence apart from the simple evolutionary learning where nature learns about the best traits that it finds suitable to survive in the physical system that the creature is embedded in. It gets passed down from a generation to another to another till it goes extinct and all this starts again. A mere learning algorithm inside a physical system that it can barely comprehend but stuck in an illusion of self and free till the inevitable end, dreaming of heaven that never arrives.

    I suppose you will have your own reaction towards this existence.
    Incomplete, inconsistent;
    Explanations and contradictions branching
    From one to another.

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  • branthan 36w


  • branthan 37w

    There is a thought
    A mere reflection of a mundane mind
    At the end of a bleak night

    As you tighten your grip a bit harder
    On its throat, death stares down at you from
    The other end of the rope.

    You wonder, what's the nature
    Of good and evil, as you strangle
    And take its breath away

    You don't have anyone to tell why the
    Downpour makes you happy and the
    Petrichor makes you high as the
    Lightning strikes the old house and
    Burn it to the ground again.

    You laugh harder at the sight of the chaos
    Only to realize you're the only one around.
    The transient bliss has passed and
    You're miserable again.

    You've murdered the one that made sense
    Of the chaos, now you lay next to a corpse
    That doesn't know how to give you warmth.

    The night creeps in, you collapse to the ceiling
    When you find the other end of the rope
    You wonder, what's the nature of good and evil.


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  • branthan 47w

    Here are a few things you can give a read.

    A few books that you can try.

    Some deep stuff.
    1. Meditation by Marcus Aurelius
    2. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
    3. Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzche
    4. Critique of Pure Reason by Kant
    5. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein
    I have no idea about 99% of the things in these books, but some of you may understand them way better.

    Some nonfiction stuff.
    1. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
    2. Educated by Tara Westover
    3. A Promised Land by Obama
    4. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates

    Some stuff to understand the nature and future of our existence.
    1. Behave by Robert Sapolsky (one of the best books ever written)
    2. Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey
    3. Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark
    4. Why We Sleep
    5. How to Create a Mind
    6. Human Compatible
    7. Computing with Quantum Cats
    8. A Brief History of Time
    9. All of Yuval Noah harrari's works (obviously)
    10. Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb (a bit controversial, but definitely interesting)

    And some random stuff
    1. Midnight library
    2. Anxious people
    3. Gentleman in Moscow
    4. All the lights we cannot see
    5. Aristotle and Dante discovers the secret of the universe
    6. Beneath a scarlet sky
    7. Skyward by Brandon Sanderson (absolutely loved it)

    And more importantly, go and read about Yukio mishima's life. Then read his works, it's mind-blowing and you can thank me later for this one. Or buy me coffee ☕

    You can comment any recommendations of books or songs or things you want me to write about one day. See you around if I ever decided to show up to write anything.

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  • branthan 47w

    I do not know how many more words I could write before it becomes some bleak lines that barely make sense to any. It is as if they collapse one after another as you try to figure out how they all fit into the two am nights of summer. The world is burning, you can feel it in the air, wind burning everything that it touches. I remember standing at the door of an autumn eve, letting the wind whisper its secret crush on the dandelions. How it kisses her and makes her fly, writing a beautiful eulogy in the end. Things have been different lately, there is too much death when the world falls deaf. The death you can't romanticize about.

    You turn off the AC and go back to the familiar creek of the fan from the ceiling. There is a sense of solitude as the world falls quiet for a moment in that darkness, I wish I knew how to write about the world, the world that I feel in that transient moment of solitude. How do you know what it is that you're feeling or the why?

    I've read somewhere that, to understand free will you must understand the difference between making your decisions and predicting your decisions. I do not know what it means. But there is something so poignant about it, the helplessness of merely existing. Helplessness when the words fail to fall into the right place as you try hard to fix a few lines to tell a story.

    You miss rain on a day like this, the first raindrop splattering on the broken twigs as roots slowly drown into the soil for a new life, a new beginning as if someone just hit a reset button. There is a sense of home in the emanating petrichor from the first rain that hits your skin. I do not know what it carries; sadness or happiness or longing for a familiar touch.

    You talk in the strangest times, about things that keep flooding your mind. Of all the seasons you romanticized about, how you always hated the summer.
    But, I've always loved the way how you talk about rain. Of all the people that you ever loved who never knew how to love you back, I wonder if anyone ever danced with you in heavy rain.
    Why do you love rain?
    Is it the subtle sadness it brings on a sunny day? You always had a thing for melancholy, or is it the way it touches your skin in a way that no one ever did? Does it burn when it kisses your summer scars?

    The pursuit of happiness is a lie if you ask me, if you want to feel the world, you need to take it all in. From the way the flower blooms, how it gently open its petals to see the beauty of the world, to how it slowly burn and wither away into the soil as if it was never there. If I could I would've told you all about it, about how to feel the world, bit by bit, word by word.

    But there are words caught in our throats, tightening its grip every time you try to speak. So you disappear in the middle of a story when the world falls asleep, it is as if you were never there. You wish you could understand this, how everything becomes so disconnected at nightfall, even when it burns, even when it drowns. How you run out of words, run out of sound, run out of places, and engulfed in a melancholy. As if you're wandering through the woods after a heavy rain, barefoot, breaking free of all the silent sighs, not lost but never wants to be found.

    You can feel the silence between the lines, around the curls on your favorite book that you keep coming back to, around the edges of the words, a silence someone left behind. But you can't quite figure out why you feel that slight melancholy even when it all feels so disconnected.

    There is sadness in the silence, the silence between one word and another. There is sadness emanating from the trees, from the leaves, from the birds, from the chimes of a window where a widow weeps. You can feel it everywhere.

    will you stay,
    near the shoreline
    of my obsolescence,
    when the summer
    bide a little longer?

    what do you call a river
    when it dries up
    is it still a river or just,
    another reminiscence?

    like a poet without the words,
    a city without the crowd.
    dust descends into the voids
    and it becomes a memory,
    to history to another story
    and you forget.

    this season will wither away
    into a bare minimum of existence.
    you and I will be nothing
    but dust, drifting between places and time.

    but will you stay a little longer
    for a summer rain?
    to survive another drought,
    to drown in another flood?
    will you stay this time?


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  • branthan 47w


  • branthan 47w

    I have been thinking about writing to my best friend, it's been a while since we wrote to each other on the yellow postcards that travel through places to reach our door. I love the certain calm that it carries, where you don't have to worry about instant replies. You can take your time, one word after another with your shitty handwriting to make it personal. You are not doing it for the sake of it, but for the human connection that it holds. A sense of belongingness in a world that is always in a rush.

    Sometimes you know what to write on the places left on the card for a destination, but you don't know what to talk about. Sometimes you know what to talk about but don't know the destination. Isn't it always a struggle? Not just waking up every morning but trying to find that human connection that pushes you through the days till you collapse into a night?

    It's been ages since we talked, we aren't the same people back when it all made a lot of sense in a simpler world. I think, when people drift out of this edge of familiarity, you feel alienated. It is like, getting thrown out of this world to another where everything that you touch wither away. Do we belong in the wrong worlds? A reality that isn't quite ours?

    It is such a painful thing, to share the pain of another when the night falls heavy on your shoulder. How do you tell someone that you want to die? Not because you are sad, but because sometimes it makes no sense as to why you wake up to fall asleep again. We walk in and out of these contradictions of death and living, trying to come up with some lines to keep holding on for a few days, few more letters that arrive with the summer rain.

    I don't remember what you feel about rain, whether you hate the way it falls on your skin or loves the way how it drowns you to the depths. But there is something so familiar about it, with every fall burning your summer skin, you feel like a human. It is unfair of us to pour our sorrows away into the late-night conversation when you don't know who walks on the thin line of blues. Yet, on some nights, it feels safe to drown in the open ocean with a familiar face to pull you out to the surface.

    There is a constant war on our minds, whether we want to be found or to be lost. It is hard to figure out where this journey is taking us, yet we walk like we know the destination. Like, letters. You don't know when they will reach your door, but it makes you feel connected when it arrives with stories you never knew from worlds that you've never seen.

    We yearn for this connection, a connection that is not tied to the binary strings but takes its time to reach you. In another world, in another time, pulling you back to the edge of familiarity that feels so personal.

    We are these blurry lines, fading shadows, mere outlines of remembrance. Lost between light and dark on the edge where the world falls out of its existence. How long are we going to be lost, before we collapse into mere stories about the part of us that always wanted to be found, always wanted to return?


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  • branthan 47w

    Why do you exist? No, it is not a question about a deeper philosophical meaning to existence, but a simple question on why do you wanna live for another day and do not want to escape the sound that the clock makes?

    You breathe in and out of this existence, exhausting every bone and merely collapsing into the night to do it all over again.

    There is a sense of normality that no one wants to question. It is as if we are here for a reason. I think it gives a certain purpose to this mundanity, you wake up in and out of it without questioning why it is the way that it is. Sometimes we are attached to things that make not a lot of sense, like love and stars perhaps. The longer you try not to ponder too much about this benign comfort, the better you sleep with some plans to a tomorrow that doesn't exist.

    I do not know where I'm going with this, it doesn't have the structure and discipline to be something meaningful, art. I wish I knew the right words to tell you about the way how each neuron lights up and creates a subjective reality that feels so personal.

    Sometimes you feel too much, it is as if all the words the world has to offer is not enough to pen it down on a white sheet of paper that looks as empty as the space between stars where light forgot to touch. You're not sure what to make of it, what it is that you're feeling, or the why.

    You read all the books you could find, yet feel so empty as the day before. Maybe there are lines between the lines that you do not know how to read, maybe all that you see is all that you can understand. You talk, to a stranger after another at three in the morning in a hope that they feel the same, that they could understand but it ends the same mundane way, predictable.

    I've read somewhere that language is the reason we have evolved to be different from the creatures that lurk in the dark. The cognitive tradeoff hypothesis argues that during our evolution, humans had to sacrifice our short-term memory to facilitate complex language capabilities.
    Perhaps, language is the one thing holding our civilization together, letting us express whatever it is that we are feeling to feel better or worse in the next moment. It is such a beautiful thing when you think about it, by carefully placing some lines and curves on empty space, you feel connected to a reality that is much more complex and chaotic than your own.

    Chaos is not always a villain, we came into existence from the cosmic chaos that keeps on expanding beyond our reach. Maybe that is the purpose of all of this, evolving slowly to witness all the chaos that unfolds all around us and watch it in awe, how it gives birth to worlds that are beyond our touch but a starry night away. There is a poetic touch to all of this, I feel.

    Maybe this poetic touch is what makes us not ponder too much the futility of it all. Every moment feels so real and keeps on pushing us to more dusks and dawns that we love to witness. Every dusk is followed by dawn, every end is another beginning. We don't know if it is true, but we love the poetic touch of it.

    It may not be grounded in reality, all that we feel, perhaps all of this is a random collapse of a system that we can never comprehend, and we are nothing but a speck of stardust that looks at the sky in awe and dies alone. But the truth is, art doesn't have to be real. Art is about what something makes you feel not about the exact depiction of reality.
    Like, starry night. Starry night isn't an exact replication of reality, it is not a painting of what Van Gogh saw, it is a painting about what he felt in that moment and that is what makes it so special.
    That is why we need art and artists, to feel that depth of existence that we always yearn for. To feel and connect to the poetic touch that is hiding in plain sight in the mundane part of our days and nights.

    What is art, I often wonder. To be able to feel something, something that's so simple and pristine beyond our senses can gently decode, but so hard to explain why it is that you feel that way.
    When Byron wrote,
    "She walks in beauty, like the night
    Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
    And all that’s best of dark and bright
    Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
    Thus mellowed to that tender light
    Which heaven to gaudy day denies."
    you and I don't think about the same person, yet it makes you think about something, something that feels so personal that it skips a heartbeat.

    Then there is a someone. Someone that fits so well with our messy nights. It is always the nights that you feel more connected to, certain tranquility that makes you more alive. A poignant touch of reality that is so calm that you can finally collect all the pieces that feel so disconnected, and place them on the cold floor.
    Then there is someone, someone who places their hand on top of yours and tries to connect the missing parts that lie naked on the floor. It is these moments that make you realize that existence is not suffering, but a certain feeling that only a few can understand on some nights like these. Feelings that you can rarely wrap around with the right words to tell the world, but deep down feel so real that you feel like you belong.
    Then there is someone, someone who feels like art in its purest form, few lines, and a million metaphors. Someone who feels like home.

    I love how broken this feels, each block of letters so disconnected from another ranting about a reality that isn't yours but a stranger that you don't even know about. But here you are, following every line and curve on a screen looking for something. I won't ask you what it is that you're looking for, it may not make sense to many, and it is not supposed to make sense to many, art is special that way and I know you would understand.

    how to write a poem?
    I often ask myself this
    same question,
    each time starting anew.
    umpteen words and
    uncertain feelings, they
    come and go
    in silence.
    fragile like a rusted door
    waiting for a push to open,
    a new world awaits.
    more words to form
    more rhymes to thrive
    I'll gather them around
    and ask this,
    am I close enough
    or still far away
    to write a poem
    to feel the world?


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