Most people seem to count down the days, plan parties, and invite everyone they love to celebrate. I think that’s beautiful. I’ve just never felt connected to the idea. So, every year, as my birthday appears on the calendar, the same question comes to mind:

What is wrong with me?

I know what I prefer: a calm day with the people I truly love—and who truly love me—doing something simple. Still, choosing that over a big party with people I may have seen only a few times can feel wrong. Almost ungrateful.

I tried to understand why. I knew I wasn’t ungrateful, but the possibility that someone else might think I was bothered me. Eventually, I realized that part of what I was feeling was disappointment: even when I was happy, I felt frustrated that the day didn’t match what I thought it was supposed to be.

In my family, a celebration was supposed to look like a celebration. I grew up with a certain idea of what a birthday meant. How, then, could I convince myself that it was okay to want something different?

We often treat expectations as if they simply mean waiting for something to happen. But they do much more than that. They shape what we believe is possible, what we think we should want, and even what we expect ourselves to feel. We are shaped by expectations that come from other people, as well as those we develop within ourselves.

In neuroscience, expectations can be understood, in part, as predictions informed by past experience. Our brains use what we have encountered before to help interpret what is happening now and anticipate what might happen next. In a sense, we are always preparing for the world we believe we are about to meet.

But when the experience we anticipate doesn’t match what we genuinely want, we can feel caught between two things. Even if we are happy with what we chose, we may still feel frustrated about what we thought was supposed to happen. An expectation has been broken.

With birthdays, I know the script: I should be happy, invite my friends, and celebrate as a way of showing gratitude. But the more I think about that script, the more I want something different. And even when I don’t want that kind of celebration, I can still feel uncomfortable about not meeting the expectations attached to it—whether they come from me or from the people around me.

It is as though I’m caught between two desires: the desire to honor what I genuinely feel and the desire not to disappoint an expectation I’ve learned to associate with being loved and appreciated.

The strange part is that no one necessarily has to demand anything from me. Sometimes an expectation has been internalized so deeply that I keep enforcing it myself.

That is what makes expectations more powerful than we might imagine. They can begin to feel like rules: how we should act, what we should want, how we should feel. Birthdays may seem like a small example, but life is full of these expectations—and the frustrations that can follow when our experiences don’t match them. We are often choosing between what feels familiar and what feels genuine.

We inherit ideas about what adulthood should look like, when we should fall in love, what success should mean, how we should dress, and even how we should react to the events of our own lives. Today, social media can make these ready-made scripts travel even faster. Other people’s carefully selected moments become quiet reference points for our own experiences.

Eventually, we begin measuring our lives against standards we never consciously chose.

The problem isn’t that expectations exist. We need them. They help us anticipate, plan, and make sense of the world. The problem begins when we mistake a prediction for an obligation—or assume that because something usually happens a certain way, it must happen that way for us.

What’s difficult is learning the difference between expecting ourselves to feel happy and allowing ourselves to discover what happiness genuinely feels like.

Listening to ourselves requires more than identifying what we want. It also means accepting that our choices might look strange from the outside, that they might not fit a familiar tradition, and that someone else might not understand them right away. It means allowing ourselves to want something different without turning that difference into a flaw.

Then came the night of November 19, 2025.

With about ten minutes left before my birthday, I was overcome by a strange feeling: the simple sensation of existing. I didn’t need to explain it or turn it into something meaningful. I just wanted to stay with it.

So I did one of my favorite things. I lay down on my bed, left the window open, and looked at the stars. And, surprisingly, I saw a shooting star.

It lasted only a moment, but something about it made me genuinely happy.

Perhaps it was the unexpectedness of it. A shooting star appears without an appointment, without following a schedule we can control. We don’t know when it will arrive, and we can’t make it stay.

I made a wish for a happy birthday

For once, I allowed myself to be open to the unexpected.

When the morning of November 20 arrived, I let my parents decide what we would do. I tried to experience each moment without comparing it to an imagined version of how my birthday was supposed to be.

The day was nothing like I had expected.

And it was beautiful.

It was special because I stopped trying to make it fit an expectation and allowed it to become something of its own.

We spend so much of our lives anticipating what comes next that we sometimes forget to leave room for the possibility that we might be surprised. We build models of how things should happen, then become so attached to them that reality can feel disappointing whenever it takes another direction.

But not everything meaningful needs to be anticipated. Not every feeling needs to arrive on schedule. And not every beautiful experience has to look the same for everyone.

Sometimes, the most genuine thing we can do is let go of the person we think we’re supposed to be—even if only for a day.

I used to wonder what was wrong with me for not looking forward to my birthday the way other people did.

Now, I think the better question was why I had assumed my happiness had to look like theirs.

That night, beneath a sky I had no control over, I wished for a good birthday.

And the best part was that, for once, I didn’t need to know what would happen next.

*A little note: This post was published before, but it didn’t feel quite right to me anymore, so I decided to rewrite it and bring a new perspective to the ideas I shared. I guess our thoughts change as we do, and sometimes it’s worth going back to something we’ve written and looking at it differently. As always, feel free to leave a comment and share your thoughts. I’d love to know what you think!

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Genuine freedom.

I’m currently reading Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky’s short and unsettling novel. To be honest, I never imagined I would recognize so much of myself in a book.

Before you ask whether that is a good or a bad thing, I have no idea. As I said at the beginning, right now I don’t want to think. Why categorize something I identify with as good or bad instead of simply allowing myself to identify with it? What is the point of trying to find meaning in everything?

But this book has affected me so deeply that I decided to write about it.

Maybe the meaning will appear along the way.

I’ve read 66 pages so far, and I have already broken my personal record for highlighted sentences per page: 29 highlights.

“It is possible that I consider myself an intelligent man only because, throughout my life, I have never been able to begin or finish anything.”

This was one of the first sentences that made me feel as though the narrator were speaking directly to me.

Maybe it sounds presumptuous, but I’m kind of in my own space here. I have always considered myself intelligent—not out of superiority, and not even rationally, but as a visceral feeling that I am somehow above average when it comes to intelligence.

Sometimes, I still feel that way.

But in all the efforts I have made, I have never really been able to prove the intelligence I claim to feel.

I have started countless hobbies: music, soccer, art, writing, and many others. I have always ended up abandoning them before becoming particularly good at any of them.

I have always been mediocre.

Today, I wonder whether I was afraid to go further because I was afraid of destroying the image I had created of myself.

Perhaps I consider myself intelligent precisely because I have never finished anything.

And, just as Dostoevsky suggests in the following sentence, perhaps this is the fate of those who consider themselves “intelligent”: talkativeness, an endless and deliberate transfer of an inner emptiness.

Because that is how the character is preserved.

In the following pages, the subject of freedom begins to emerge.

Human beings long for a deep kind of freedom. In some way, we want the ability to act according to our own will. Even if human existence could be studied well enough for us to establish patterns of behavior that would supposedly lead to a perfect life, there would still be a desire to break them.

Not necessarily because we reject a perfect life, but because we need to exist for ourselves before existing for the world.

A conditioned choice stops being a choice.

“Man, whoever he may be, has always and everywhere enjoyed acting as he wished and never as reason and self-interest dictated.”

Interestingly, this pleasure does not seem to come from reason or logic. It comes from somewhere deeper.

Something emotional.

For a moment, I understood freedom as the possibility of feeling before thinking.

It is the subjectivity of each individual consciousness.

Reason satisfies our rational capacity, but the simple act of wanting—of wanting something intrinsically—may be one of the rawest manifestations of being alive.

Reason is shaped by acquired knowledge. It is structured, physical, and understandable.

But human nature is something else entirely.

Conscious and unconscious.

And even when it lies, it continues to live.

“There is one case in which man may intentionally and consciously desire something harmful and stupid for himself: he may have the right to desire something very stupid for himself, without being bound by the obligation to desire only what is intelligent.”

To me, this is one of the most compelling definitions of freedom.

Everything we consider intelligent has been learned through some kind of logical construction. No matter where we are in life, we are constantly being shaped—and limited—by a rational world.

And all of us—or at least I—sometimes carry the desire to want something that makes absolutely no sense without feeling ashamed of it.

As someone who has always tried to understand things, and who grew up surrounded by people constantly looking for explanations, I know that I carry a great deal of knowledge with me.

But at what point does knowledge stop being worth it?

The more distinctions we make between what is right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, intelligent and stupid, the more deeply we become immersed in the duality created by reason.

More distinctions can create more limitations.

Eventually, we begin to notice our own ugliness.

Our darker side.

“The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was ‘beautiful and sublime,’ the deeper I sank into my mire.”

In that sense, I understand why ignorance can feel like a blessing—not because it necessarily makes us freer, but because it temporarily protects us from seeing all the ways in which we are trapped.

Rational knowledge expands us, but it can also limit us.

Perhaps this is where the hard problem of consciousness comes in.

Maybe human beings are more than bodies. More than matter.

Or perhaps the feeling that we are more is itself one of consciousness’s deepest illusions.

There is something singular inside every individual that no machine can completely replace.

A living soul.

But I also do not know what a living soul without reason would look like. I cannot say, because I have never experienced it—and perhaps never could.

A singular consciousness living in a shared world is forced to adapt. We are expected to live in harmony despite being completely individual versions of ourselves.

Perhaps, by following the same purpose, different pieces can eventually recognize one another and become a complete puzzle.

“Condemned to consciously and deliberately make our way toward a goal, eternally and incessantly, wherever that may be.”

We search for meaning in life, relationships, careers, and material possessions. Yet we often seem to enjoy the process of reaching something more than the thing itself.

We are beings of transformation.

The path is life; the goal is the finish line.

A kind of two plus two equals four.

“In reality, two plus two is no longer life, but the beginning of death.”

Maybe that is why we sometimes resist arriving at our purpose. Once the destination is reached, the uncertainty that kept us moving begins to disappear.

And perhaps that is also why breaking things can sometimes feel so good.

Because it delays the arrival at the beginning of an ending.

Consciousness is infinitely greater than two plus two.

And for this reason—or perhaps only because of it—even though I often wish I could be normal, I would rather remain trapped in the illusion of intelligence.

Because then I can still feel an ache for something greater.

An ache for something I cannot even name and will probably never find.

But the feeling itself is bittersweet in a way that keeps me attached to it.

And even though I genuinely believe all of this, I remain trapped in that endless talkativeness.

No matter how much I believe my own words, I always feel as though I am constantly lying.

I feel something so deeply, and at the same time, it feels as though I feel nothing at all.

Everything is false.

And I am a liar.

I’m reading the Portuguese translation, so some of the quotes may differ from versions you have read before.

These are simply my thoughts, interpretations, and moments of identification with the first pages of the book. I believe everyone will have their own perspective. As I said at the beginning, this was written without my usual filters of logic.

If you enjoy this kind of text, I might write a second part about the rest of the book and the sentences that stayed with me.

I hope this was a good read—and that, somehow, something in it felt familiar to you too.

And if you’re new here, welcome to Thoughts in Progress.

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One of the things that disturbs me most about studying consciousness is the idea that the only experience I know with certainty is the one unfolding inside my own mind. I can see you smiling and assume happiness. I can see tears and infer sadness. I can hear your words and try to understand what you feel. But in the end, my entire world is shaped by my understanding of what other people are able to show me. And we rarely notice how much we depend on those signs until silence appears.

Silence can emerge in all kinds of relationships: romantic, familial, friendly. Often, it comes with a kind of absence that is not necessarily physical, but emotional. It is when the signals a person used to send me, and that I had grown used to interpreting, begin to fade. Words become fewer, certain gestures disappear, and slowly, it feels as though the person themselves is beginning to disappear from our awareness. What remains are memories and a blank space where signs once existed.

But what if someone were living a complete experience on the inside and simply had no way of showing it?

In 2006, something similar happened in a much more literal way. A young woman who had shown no behavioral responses for more than five months was placed inside an MRI scanner. From the outside, diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, she appeared absent. Inside the scanner, however, researchers asked her to imagine playing tennis, and her brain responded with a pattern of activity similar to that of healthy volunteers performing the same mental task.

She did not begin to speak. She did not raise her hand. She did not move to prove she was there. Physically, she remained silent. What changed was what the researchers were able to infer about what may have been happening behind that silence.

I began writing this post intending to talk about science and about how little we still know about what it means to be present. But as I wrote, I realized there was such a beautiful parallel between that case and the way we live our relationships that I completely changed the direction of the text. I realized that, just as those doctors had to find another way to look for signs in that patient, maybe I also do not know how to recognize someone behind silence.

Or perhaps, sometimes, I am the one who is absent.

We see neuroscience as a kind of window into the brain. And we see words, actions, messages, expressions, and gestures as windows into other people’s feelings. The problem is that none of these windows can fully reveal the most fundamental part of being alive: subjective experience.

In theory, I could observe what happens in your brain while you look at the night sky. I could identify regions involved in vision, memory, and emotion. And yet nothing in that image would show me what it is like, for you, to look at that sky. Maybe you feel small. Maybe free. Maybe you think of someone. Maybe you feel absolutely nothing. The brain can be observed from the outside; experience continues happening on the inside.

And I think this goes far beyond the brain.

Through the actions of the people around me, I make assumptions about myself. I infer feelings, love, anger, fear, interest. When silence enters any of these relationships, it is easy to feel as though that thing simply no longer exists. If someone stops showing affection, I may think they have stopped feeling it. If someone does not say something, I may assume they never thought it. We are so used to understanding feelings through what we can observe that, when expression disappears, we almost automatically conclude that the experience disappeared too.

But it may still be there. It is just not being expressed in the way we were used to recognizing it.

We are individual worlds that no one else will ever fully access. There are aspects of me that will probably exist only within me, just as there are parts of the people I love that I will never truly reach. No one will ever know me completely, because no one has lived inside all my memories, thoughts, fears, and meanings. We are made of what we express and what others are able to perceive, but we are also made of absence. Of everything we feel and never say. Of conversations that happened only inside our own heads. Of emotions that existed for years without ever finding a way out.

What we transmit is often what we want to express, or what we have learned is acceptable to express in society. But the parts of us that we are uncertain about, the ones we are afraid to reveal or cannot quite explain, may spend entire lifetimes in silence. That does not mean they never existed.

In the brain, and in relationships too, there is a huge difference between not responding and not having any experience at all behind that lack of response. And maybe our eyes are far more likely to confuse those two things than we would like to admit. We spend our lives looking for external signs to find meaning behind them, and when those signs disappear, we treat silence almost like confirmation of emptiness.

The phrase “Is it better to speak or to die?” went viral recently, and when I thought about it, I realized that for a long time my answer would probably have been die.

I remembered moments when I seemed absent simply because I did not express myself. To someone else, maybe there was nothing there. But I, as the only person with direct access to my own experience, knew there was. I knew the feeling. I knew the meaning I gave certain interactions. I knew everything I thought and never said. The other person, on the other hand, only had access to my words and actions. If I showed nothing, how could they know?

Maybe there are people who will never know the meaning they had within experiences that existed entirely inside me.

I was absent.

But I was there.

Just like the woman in the scanner.

During the scan, she did not move. She did not speak. Physically, she gave none of the signs we were used to looking for, and she remained silent the whole time. Whatever was happening inside her did not suddenly appear in that moment. What changed was our ability to perceive something that had been hidden before.

And I think there is something deeply human in that.

We spend our lives trying to understand inner worlds through what they manage to let slip outward. Sometimes we receive words, gestures, tears, laughter, hugs, explanations. Other times, we receive silence. And maybe silence is so unsettling precisely because it places us before something we never like to admit: we never have full access to another person’s experience.

The unknown is not necessarily empty.

Maybe silence does not mean that no one is there. Maybe there is feeling, fear, love, regret, or an entire story unfolding on the inside that simply has not yet found a way to cross to the outside.

Sometimes, being silent is not the same as being absent.

Sometimes, we just have not learned how to listen yet.

So, for you, is it better to speak or to die?

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and if this is your first time here, welcome.

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Every night, or almost every night, something extraordinary happens. We lie down, close our eyes, and the world around us quietly dissolves. Time slips away. Identity loosens. Moments later, we find ourselves somewhere else — surrounded by memories, emotions, conversations, fears, and desires that feel, without question, real. For a while, we belong to another world.

The strangest part is not that dreams exist. It is that, while we are inside them, we almost never question them. We accept impossible places, impossible events, and impossible people without hesitation. Somehow, consciousness creates a reality convincing enough to fool itself completely. And if the brain can create an experience that feels so real, what truly separates a dream from waking life? What assures us that we are not dreaming right now? And how can we know with certainty that reality itself is not, in some sense, shaped by consciousness?

Between falling asleep and waking up lies one of the greatest mysteries of neuroscience and psychology. Conscious awareness seems to disappear. Time disappears. Identity disappears. Hours pass without us noticing. Yet beneath that apparent silence, while we seem absent, the brain remains remarkably active, constructing worlds we never consciously intended to create.

Why?

Modern science offers several possibilities. Dreams may help consolidate memories, regulate emotions, strengthen learning, and reorganize the countless impressions gathered throughout the day. In this view, dreaming is not so much a mystery as it is the brain quietly organizing itself while consciousness rests.

Other perspectives, however, look at dreams through a different lens. Carl Jung believed they were far more than random neural activity. To him, dreams were symbolic expressions of a much larger psychological world hidden beneath ordinary consciousness.

Jung believed that beneath our everyday awareness lies an immense landscape of forgotten memories, emotions, instincts, fears, desires, archetypes, and unrealized possibilities. A place we rarely have direct access to. A place that remains hidden during ordinary consciousness.

If that hidden part of the mind cannot speak directly, perhaps it speaks through symbols instead.

To Jung, symbols can express meanings that ordinary language cannot fully capture. They suggest rather than define. They reveal rather than explain. They are echoes of deeper psychological movements — traces of mental processes unfolding long before they ever become conscious.

After all, we already know that the unconscious often reaches conclusions before consciousness does. Sometimes we suddenly wake up with the solution to a problem that seemed impossible the night before. Sometimes intuition quietly tells us something we cannot yet explain. Consciousness often receives the conclusion without ever witnessing the reasoning.

History is full of discoveries, inventions, and creations that seem to have emerged from this hidden territory. Paul McCartney woke up with the melody of Yesterday. Dmitri Mendeleev reportedly saw the arrangement of the periodic table in a dream. Perhaps dreams do not hand us answers out of nowhere. Perhaps they simply reveal conclusions our minds had already been quietly working toward. While consciousness rests, something continues connecting memories, patterns, and possibilities until, occasionally, an idea rises to the surface fully formed.

Nikola Tesla described something remarkably similar. Although not necessarily during sleep, many of his inventions first appeared as vivid mental images. Before building a machine, he would construct it entirely inside his imagination, testing every detail before a physical prototype ever existed. His experience reminds us that some of our deepest creative processes seem to emerge from mental activity operating beneath deliberate awareness.

Personally, I do not believe dreams are supernatural messages. Nor do I believe they are meaningless noise.

Perhaps they exist somewhere between those two extremes.

Perhaps they are the closest thing we have to a conversation between consciousness and the unconscious.

A passage we cross every single night.

For a few hours, one part of the mind quietly reveals to the other what it still cannot clearly see beneath the noise, information, and worries of everyday life.

Perhaps dreams are not an escape from ourselves.

Perhaps they are the way we return to ourselves.

And so, despite remaining one of humanity’s greatest mysteries, every night we surrender our awareness to something we still barely understand. We enter worlds that feel completely real. We wake carrying emotions from experiences that never physically happened. And then we continue with our day as though nothing extraordinary had taken place.

Perhaps dreams are not interruptions in the flow of consciousness.

Perhaps they are consciousness looking inward.

I was certain.

Somehow, I knew things would work out, that I could make extreme decisions like leaving college and going after something bigger because it would all make sense in the end. That was how I started this year: full of positivity, flowing with whatever came my way. And I have to confess, it was a beautiful feeling. I remember truly believing that everything I did would somehow work out. I remember telling my mom that this year I was open to whatever opportunities life had for me, waking up every day and thinking, May I be pleasantly surprised today.

The hardest part of living a full life is consistency. Even though I felt the lightness that came with that positivity and felt genuinely good, it is very easy to get carried away by circumstances, to get stressed by the process, and to get lost in the instant pleasures that go against your future desires. And that is exactly what ended up happening. After the first few months of feeling so sure about everything, I stumbled into distractions and, even while trying hard — waking up early, working toward the same goals with all my strength — something felt different. I had lost the spark. I had shifted from the energy of flowing to the energy of forcing, and I found myself stuck.

I have the term toxic positivity in my head, but to me it means something a little different: the pressure to always be positive, always present, always unwavering — almost too much. But real positivity can become toxic when it is external, when it becomes a performance instead of a state. That kind of positivity silences real feelings, blocks pain, and creates a knot of repressed emotions that eventually bursts open. It is the act of pretending everything is perfect until everything falls apart. Positivity as a state of faith, on the other hand, allows you to express yourself. It allows you to cry, to regret, to be afraid. But it also becomes a quiet voice in the back of your mind, something deep down that reminds you that, no matter what is happening in the present, your future is still there, waiting for you.

I had a click the other day and realized that this is what happened to me: I moved from a state of fully believing to a state of trying and trying through brute force. And I wanted that certain version of myself back.

The truth is, I realized that things do not happen when you force them to happen; they happen when we are aligned with them, and believing is what aligns us. Trying too hard to control circumstances is often a sign that, deep down, you do not believe it will work. It is an energy of fear — the fear of not succeeding — that leads to overthinking, overdoing, and even more fear.

The most important things in life, like true love or a moment of peace, cannot be forced, or else they lose their meaning. They happen when you let them be and trust. Trying to control everything only proves, again and again, that we are not actually in control.

Belief is wisdom. And that is where positivity belongs.

When I had that certainty in life, it felt like moments lasted longer, like I lived more, because I was not spending them thinking about the results or the future. Since I already trusted that everything would work out, I simply appreciated being alive. Without forcing anything, the moments flowed.

Of course, I was not doing nothing all day, waiting for my dreams to knock on my door. I was doing the necessary things to reach my goals. But I also enjoyed the moments when nothing was happening. I could appreciate the process. I was used to silence and, honestly, happy because it symbolized faith. I was present enough to notice the things in my life that were already working, and I had stopped seeing myself as someone behind in life. After all, behind for what, if my reality is the only one that exists for me?

I think what happened to me is what most often happens to people who dream and then suddenly stop dreaming, and something so common that no one really notices: you can get what you want and still lose yourself in the process. You can force a relationship, a career, even success. But if you become disconnected, anxious, and exhausted by the time you finally get there, then what was the point?

Belief is the glue between who you are and what you want, because when you believe and move with that certainty, you do not compromise yourself along the way. You do not abandon your values. You do not silence your intuition. You do not look for people out of fear of being alone. Instead, you begin to honor your inner peace, listen to your body, and become even more genuine.

True belief is not passive. It is active, not a lazy hope. It is doing what needs to be done, getting up, and showing up as if the result had already been achieved. As a part of the Bible says, it is acting by faith and not by sight.

Trusting is acting with certainty, because belief brings clarity, and clarity will always take you farther than control ever could.

It means letting go of the banal, the unreal, the expectations. It means believing even when nothing makes sense. Because what is meant for us always tends to arrive quietly.

Somewhere after the beginning of the year, I kept searching for the same goal, but I stopped truly believing. You may think I am just talking nonsense here and that the only way to get things is by sweating for them, and that is okay — everyone has their own point of view. It is hard to believe in the power of belief when we are constantly taught to move by fear: the fear of not arriving, the fear of not meeting expectations, the fear of failure. But now that I realize I lost that spark, I confess that I cannot wait to light it again, because the feeling — the certainty in your chest that you are on the right path — is something indescribable.

I have a phrase on my phone case that reminds me every day to stay positive and have faith. It says that we are never late for what is meant for us, and I don’t know about you, but I believe that. So if someone reads all the way to the end and wants a piece of advice, start trusting life.

Because, just like the song says, “everything works out in the end.”

It is strange how deeply particular everything we live through is. My high school experience had little in common with my sister’s, even though we walked the same halls. The moments that stay with us are never generic; they are the result of countless factors aligning at once, an intimate collision of inner and outer worlds that will never repeat themselves in quite the same way. And at the center of all of this is one of the most essential tools of being human: memory.

Memory is a gallery of rare combinations. It holds the moments that move us most — the joyful ones, the painful ones, and everything in between. It is through memory that we evolve, learn, readapt, and slowly become who we are.

If life is a vinyl record spinning through time, memory is the turntable beneath it — the steady foundation that allows the music to play. It is what gives experience shape, rhythm, and continuity, transforming isolated moments into something that feels alive and whole

“Memory gathers the countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole. Without the unifying force of memory, our consciousness would shatter into as many fragments as the seconds already lived.”
— Ewald Hering (in Cassirer, 1994)

Every second, we are flooded with thousands of pieces of information through our senses: smells, sights, sounds, textures, sensations. Most of them pass through us like smoke. Only a few are selected, stored, and carried forward. I can remember fragments of a film, lines from a book, or moments from a trip, but if I try to recall everything in detail, I quickly realize how much of my own life has already begun to fade.

And yet, that is part of what makes memory so beautiful. The things we remember most clearly — my grandmother’s cake, a first kiss, a birthday long gone — are shaped by invisible transformations happening quietly beneath the surface while life continues moving forward. Experience does not enter the mind unchanged. It is constantly reorganized, interpreted, softened, sharpened, and stitched back together into meaning.

What is most fascinating is that memory is never still. It is not a museum of moments left behind, but something constantly in motion. A new experience, or even a single detail, can alter an old memory — adding something, removing something, reshaping it entirely. What we hold onto may not be the event itself, but the version of it that was built each time we returned to it. Memory becomes the place where past and future meet.

That is what I find most striking about Heraclitus’ line, “A man cannot step into the same river twice.” In so few words, it captures the constant state of transformation in which we exist. Our memories, our learning, and our experiences continuously reshape the meaning of what we live. The river keeps moving, and so do we. The moments we forget are like water flowing away forever — carrying with them the versions of ourselves that no longer remain. But what stays with us does not stay unchanged; it is refined, reinterpreted, and woven into who we are next. With each passing second, we are not simply continuing as the same person. We are becoming a new version of ourselves, shaped by what remained, what changed, and what slipped away.

A few days ago, I was listening to one of my favorite songs by Fontaines D.C., and I found myself holding onto one line in particular: “You choose or you exist.” Something about it stayed with me. Maybe the song isn’t the kind that people instantly fall in love with, but the lyrics certainly are. There was something in the search for a word that could hold the weight of the world, and in the simplicity of arriving at choice, that made me pause. It felt like the kind of line that doesn’t just sound good. It lingers.

I’m still young, fresh out of school, with so much of life still ahead of me. And yet I already carry a few regrets, choices I made and choices I didn’t make, that might have changed who I am today. Talking with my mother, who has lived enough life to understand how quietly decisions shape us, made me see choice differently. It is like a steering wheel, turning us minute by minute toward certain paths and away from others. Choosing to stay or go out, to carry an umbrella or not, to speak or stay silent, to exist or to live fully. Every small decision seems ordinary until you realize it has been drawing the map of your life all along.

Imagine a blank canvas stretching endlessly ahead of you. A child, given a brush, might paint a sun, a smile, or a creature only she understands. An abstract artist would splash emotions and instincts across it, letting the world glimpse the storms and joys hidden inside. A genius like Da Vinci might create a Mona Lisa, mysterious, unforgettable. Every painting, whether simple or complex, becomes a singular expression of the hand that made it.

But what if life itself is this canvas, and each of us, whether we realize it or not, holds the brush?

Though it may seem like a simple metaphor, science shows that something very similar happens in the world of our ideas and in our brains. The brain is not just a stable gray mass. It is dynamic, with millions upon millions of connections constantly being shaped by our experiences, thoughts, and choices, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. Every time we focus on a goal or repeat an action, the brain strengthens the pathways being used, while the less-used ones fade into the background. Like painting a line over and over again, what begins as a faint scribble slowly becomes a strong, visible stroke, almost impossible to ignore. This is how we are shaped: by the habits we create and reinforce, the skills we develop, and the personality we build throughout our lives.

With this understanding of our neural pathways, we can better see the importance of focus, something that emerges only through a deliberate choice and real intention. When we have a clear and precise intention, our prefrontal cortex becomes active, helping us filter distractions and prioritize actions aligned with our goals. At the same time, dopamine is released, a neurotransmitter responsible for motivation and pleasure that not only rewards progress but also reinforces the path toward focus, making our purpose feel more real, more urgent, and more possible.

Having a clear goal and investing emotionally in it changes the chemistry of your brain. You become more alert to opportunities, more resilient in the face of setbacks, and more persistent when challenges arise. Every conscious choice becomes a small act of self-transformation.

And because nothing in life is easy, changing, and choosing to change, takes a lot of willpower. We live in an age of constant distraction. We wake up to notifications on our phones, go straight to social media, and reinforce a reality we may no longer even want to be part of. We drift away from an intentional life and begin to live in a state of waiting, waiting for notifications, waiting for change, waiting for something external, when what should be transforming is us from within. Studies show that today, a person receives more stimuli in a single day than someone years ago might have received in months. As our brains adapt to this chaotic world of constant input, it becomes harder to stop, reflect, focus, and choose.

It is easy to fall into the so-called “default mode,” to live on autopilot instead of creating. Like in The Matrix, everything seems real, but if we look closely, we may realize we are following scripts written by algorithms, trends, and external expectations, a canvas being filled by accident rather than intention.

Just like in art, simply splashing random drops of paint across a canvas will rarely surpass a painting that was carefully thought through, crafted detail by detail to become magnificent.

Just like Fontaines D.C. says, we can choose or simply exist. But choice is what makes the world move.

As Nikola Tesla once said,

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

Thoughts, focus, and choice are all forms of energy. They flow through the brain and through life, shaping not only what we can see, but what we will become.

So, if life is a blank canvas, what will you paint? Will you let the noise and routines of the world dictate your story, or will you pick up the brush and choose for yourself?

Maybe the real masterpiece is not the final image, but the ongoing act of choosing, creating, and discovering what you’re truly capable of.

We live our own story. We smell things and remember them. We hear sounds that make our hearts race. We move through life as if we were eternal protagonists. And yet, at the same time, we are the spectator, the actors, and the director of the whole scene. We are the equation and the ones trying to solve it.

Studying something like consciousness feels, in a way, like asking science — a science built in the third person — to explain a very particular fact that only ever truly exists in the first person.

Consciousness experiences itself.

When we bite into an apple, something strange and almost magical happens. We see its color through the occipital lobe, we feel its texture through the somatosensory cortex, we taste it through the gustatory cortex, and we hear the sound of it through the auditory system. And still, despite all these different signals moving through the brain, what we actually live is simply the experience of eating an apple.

That is where the famous hard problem of consciousness lives. And yes, the name is a little uncreative — sorry, David Chalmers. But the challenge is real: how does matter become subjective experience?

Even after we study brain structures, their dynamics, their functions, and the role of every part of our gray matter, science still cannot answer the most difficult question of all: why is there consciousness at all?

This question has become one of the great obsessions of philosophy of mind, and it has also drawn the attention of psychology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics. But I honestly think that with the science we have today, and with traditional methods alone, we will not solve it. Maybe it will take something strange. Something unexpected. Something almost too obvious to notice. Or maybe the answer is hidden so deeply in plain sight that we keep walking past it.

If the hard problem is ever solved, I don’t think it will come quietly. I think it will change the way we understand reality itself.

Because maybe a hard problem does need an extreme solution.

But as I said before, we are the problem that needs to be solved — and also the ones who will have to solve it.

How do electrical signals around the skull become the feeling of being alive?

Consciousness does not only observe the world. It gives the world meaning.

Chalmers, the philosopher who gave us the term hard problem of consciousness, suggests that we have two choices: either deny consciousness and act as if it never existed, or place it on the same shelf as gravity and electromagnetism, as one of the basic features of reality.

Either way, we are still left with something science does not easily know what to do with.

Thomas Nagel brought us another haunting question: what is it like to be a bat?

No matter how much we know about bat brains, bat biology, or bat perception, we will never fully know what it feels like from the inside. And maybe that is where the real mystery begins.

Because consciousness is not just information.

It is the texture of being.

It is the red you see, the pain you feel, the private quality of experience that only belongs to the one living it. These are qualia — the strange, intimate details of being conscious. I have a whole post about qualia, but in simple words, they are the things we know directly, but can never fully give away to someone else.

Consciousness is almost automatic. We do not know how to exist without it.

It is there when we wake up, when we dream, when we feel pain, when we remember, when we hope. It sits so close to us that it becomes hard to imagine how we could ever be wrong about it. Maybe we can be wrong about whether an apple is really red in the world. But can we be wrong about the fact that it appears red to us?

And if someone has never lived an experience, no amount of description will ever truly become the experience itself.

A person who has never seen blue will never really know blue through words alone. That is the strange limit of language. We can point, compare, explain, and repeat — and still remain outside the thing itself.

So if consciousness cannot even be fully described, how could it ever be completely explained?

That is why so many theories have appeared over time.

Some, like the eliminativists, say there is no real problem because consciousness itself is an illusion. Others try to reduce it into simpler functional terms, as if experience could eventually be translated into mechanisms and processes.

But if we accept that consciousness is not merely a physical phenomenon, then we arrive at dualism — the idea that mind and matter are not the same thing.

And from there, the possibilities branch out in many directions: the idea that we exist beyond matter, that consciousness is a nonphysical property of the brain, or that consciousness itself shapes our behavior in ways we still do not understand.

Some theories even try to bring quantum mechanics into the conversation.

On one reading of quantum mechanics, events at the quantum level move in a deterministic way until observation happens. After that, some interpretations suggest that things become indeterminate. If that is true, then perhaps consciousness has room to play a role in how decoherence happens — how the quantum wave function collapses into the classical world we see and live in.

But even this beautiful possibility carries its own problems.

The tiny uncertainties of the quantum world may have little to do with the everyday feeling of choosing to get up, walk to the fridge, and grab a beer. And even if consciousness were somehow tied to quantum events, another question would remain: how do these microscopic properties become our lived, human experience?

How do they come together into the mind we know from inside?

Maybe that is why this subject is so captivating. Because every theory seems to bring us closer and farther away at the same time.

Still, after all the arguments and all the ideas, I keep coming back to one simple thought:

consciousness is more than something to be explained.

It is me.

It is my world.

And for you, it is you and your world.

It is the place — or maybe the non-place — where matter organizes itself into a film full of twists, emotions, memories, and meaning.

Einstein once said that the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, and I agree.

Not understanding something often leads us to better questions. And better questions lead us to better answers.

Consciousness is a mystery

Maybe one of the most mysterious things we can experience from the inside.

So what do you think? Is consciousness a mystery waiting to be solved, or is it only an illusion that science has been chasing for years?

I feel a deep desire to dive further into this uncertain ocean, and maybe one day contribute to the strange theories and wild studies that try to understand it.

And that is what this series of posts will be: the gathering of my learnings and doubts in a search for more mystery.

Thank you so much for reading. I hope you enjoyed this little journey, and I hope to see you in the next chapter.

Inspiration :

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “The Hard Problem of Consciousness.” Available at: https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/

What fascinates me is that even the wildest hypothesis might hold a piece of the answer to something this complex. So much of what we say we know today is still based on interpretation, experiments, and the way we choose to read reality. And yet consciousness remains deeply personal in every person.

I keep thinking about how strange it is that we spend our lives trying to understand something we only ever experience from the inside. We can describe the brain in detail, map its regions, study its signals, but still never fully touch the feeling of being someone. Maybe consciousness is something that goes beyond our usual way of understanding, and maybe that is exactly why it is so hard to define.

Over the past few books I have read, some videos, and even the Bible, one thing kept catching my attention: the number three. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Body, soul, and spirit. Past, present, and future. Id, ego, and superego. Conscious, unconscious, and subconscious. I could keep going forever with examples like this. Different ideas, different contexts, but somehow a similar structure keeps showing up.

That curiosity led me first into meditation, where I kept seeing the idea that we should let go of time and space to enter our subconscious and then reach a larger universe where everything becomes possible. Later, in physics, I found a similar idea, only in different words. In Biocentrism, Robert Lanza says that time and space are constructions of the mind, and that reality needs an observer in order to exist. According to him, when we observe, we collapse one of many possible realities.

Because I grew up in church, I also started connecting these ideas to the Bible. The idea of body, soul, and spirit began to feel like another way of describing the physical world, our own consciousness, and a greater world where anything is possible. That connection stayed with me.

Last week, during communion, my mind suddenly filled with questions after hearing the same words for the millionth time. This time, something clicked differently. I became hyperfocused on why Jesus tells us to drink the blood. I understand the symbolism of the flesh, the idea of killing sin, and even the meaning behind blood itself. But what if there is something more? What if the soul, or consciousness, is somehow connected to blood? What if the mystery of consciousness is also tied to the unique way our blood interacts with the other tissues in our body?

I know this may sound a little crazy, but honestly, what is science without wild theories and new questions?

That is why I made a list of topics to help me either challenge this idea or maybe even develop it further, and I decided to turn it into a series for anyone who wants to follow along. This first text is just the beginning. The next one will be about the hard problem of consciousness, and from there I want to explore other topics like neural blood flow, sleep, dreams, hormones, drug reception, and hemoglobin.

I also want to make one thing very clear. I am extremely untrained when it comes to neuroscience. I do not have formal education in the field, and maybe that is exactly what makes this journey even more interesting. I want us to discover things together, update our ideas, change our minds when needed, or even give up on theories if they do not hold up.

I will also always leave sources in the series, because I want this to become a real discussion about theories, possibilities, and evidence. My hypothesis about blood may sound absurd to someone who already knows a lot about the field, but that is fine. What I want is to find the obstacles myself and see where this idea breaks, or where it might still have something worth exploring.

Because in the end, that is what thinking is: not the comfort of certainty, but the courage to keep asking.

I invite you to come with me on this journey.

To be honest, I don’t think I have ever fully known. Or maybe I have known, but only in fragments, buried underneath years of trying to be the “right” kind of person.

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Have you ever felt like a fraud? Not in the obvious sense of lying about something, or pretending to be someone else. I mean something more unsettling: the feeling that what you show the world — and even what you show yourself — might not be real. That is how I have felt for a long time. I have always tried to be the best person available to me: the girl with good grades, no parties, no drinks, no boys, the friend everyone liked, the one who never argued. I am still that person in many ways. But lately, it feels less like identity and more like performance. And I no longer know where it starts or where it ends.

Maybe part of this comes from privilege. Maybe because I had a relatively stable family, I started feeling like I owed something to the world — like I had to repay my life by never disappointing anyone around me. That pressure made me smaller. It made me careful. It made me afraid of becoming anything that could disturb the image I had built. In a strange way, my life on the surface looks almost perfect. And that is exactly what makes this feeling so difficult to explain. It is not dramatic sadness. It is not a life visibly falling apart. It is something quieter and harder to name: a sense of being trapped inside an ordinary routine while something inside me quietly collapses.

Psychology might say that this makes sense. The brain is deeply social, and being rejected or judged can register as a real threat. Research in social neuroscience suggests that exclusion activates many of the same regions involved in physical pain. In other words, the fear of disappointing people is not “just in your head” — it is your nervous system trying to keep you safe. People-pleasing, perfectionism, and self-monitoring can become survival strategies. They are often not signs of vanity or weakness, but of a body that has learned that approval equals safety.

And maybe that is why changing feels so hard. If I have spent years performing goodness, then stopping feels like a risk not only to my relationships, but to my sense of self. It would require disappointing the people I love, yes — but also disappointing the version of me that believes being good means being agreeable, controlled, and easy to love.

What makes this even more confusing is that I can know all of this intellectually and still feel stuck. I can read books, collect insights, listen to advice, and still end the day thinking: maybe none of what I said, felt, or did was genuine. Maybe I am still missing something essential. Maybe I am incomplete. And maybe the worst part is that I have spent so long pretending to be complete that I no longer know what completion would even look like.

For a long time, I thought this was just theory. In real life, I told myself, you simply act. You do the work. You move on. But that is where it gets complicated. The mind does not separate itself so neatly from the body. If I have learned that certain things are unsafe — speaking too openly, expressing anger, saying no, disappointing someone — my body reacts before my logic even has a chance to intervene. Sometimes even the idea of saying a swear word, of stating what I really want, or of showing a strong opinion can make my stomach twist with guilt. That is not because these things are wrong. It is because they feel dangerous to the version of me that was built around approval.

Recently, I was talking to my mother about some behaviors my sister has, and I found myself judging them with a kind of adult certainty. I pointed things out as if I had complete authority to do so. But inside, I felt hypocritical. How could I judge someone else for being messy, direct, or imperfect when I have spent so much of my own life refusing to allow myself the same freedom? That is one of the strangest parts of living this way: you become very good at noticing what is wrong in other people because it is easier than looking at the place where you have restricted yourself.

My performance was never about seeking attention. If anything, it was a way to hide more deeply. I wanted to avoid discomfort, conflict, shame, anger, rejection, and anything that might force me to confront the fact that I am human. Over time, that avoidance turned into a kind of internal snowball: fear of disapproval, fear of failure, fear of death, fear of being ordinary, fear of being fully human. So I performed — not to be admired, but to stay safe.

I used to think I was different from other people because I never liked the things most people my age seemed to like. As a child, I hated playing tag, dolls, ribbons, the usual performance of girlhood. As a teenager, I wasn’t interested in boys, drinking, or parties. And now, as an adult, I still resist the automatic life: work, repeat, distract yourself, survive, die. For a long time, I thought that meant I was authentic. But maybe I was only different in style, not in structure. Maybe even my resistance was part of the same performance.

At my cousin’s birthday this month, I watched everyone laughing, drinking, dancing, and having fun in a way I did not feel drawn to. I sat at the edge of the room, observing. Part of me was relieved that I did not want that life. But another part of me wanted something I could not quite name: the freedom to exist without constant self-surveillance, the freedom to be messy, to experiment, to make mistakes without immediately turning them into evidence against myself. I did not want their exact life. I wanted their ease.

And maybe that is the real conflict. Not that I am empty, but that I have become too full of rules. Too full of caution. Too full of the scripts I wrote in order to be acceptable.

The beauty of existence is that no one ever fully knows anyone else — not even the people we love most. I will never know my mother entirely, or my father, or my sister, and they will never know all of me either. That uncertainty is not a failure of life. It is part of what makes life human. We are all partially hidden, partially performed, partially understood. We move through different rooms as different versions of ourselves.

So maybe the goal is not to become perfectly authentic, because perhaps that is another impossible script. Maybe the goal is simpler: to stop letting the performance become the whole person. To leave room for contradiction. To allow myself to be clumsy, unsure, imperfect, and still real.

I do not know how to stop being the impostor in my own life. But I do know that recognizing that something is wrong may be the beginning of something more honest: the chance to discover what is truly mine, what I truly believe, and what my own idea of right and wrong really is.

Thank you so much for reading and for supporting the newsletter.

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This piece was one of the strongest inspirations for this post. I am very grateful to have read it, and I truly recommend it to everyone.

In These Pages

When the Good Girl mask slips

It first started as a whisper: am I doing something wrong? I could hear it during conversations—in the quiet moments where people around me paused. Had I said something that didn’t make sense? Was I being judged? Was I doing something wrong…

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8 months ago · 13 likes · 11 comments · Layla

If you feel like you’re always racing the clock, it might be because you’re living inside the wrong kind of time. Most of us move through the day ruled by hours, deadlines, and notifications — as if time were an external force chasing us from behind. But there’s another way to experience it, one that humans knew long before watches and calendars existed.

In ancient times, men going out to hunt didn’t ask “What time is it?” They asked, “Is it time yet?”
It may seem random to compare today with thousands of years ago, but in truth these are two variations of the same reality: one listens to the clock; the other listens to the world.

Listening to the world required full attention, a different mode of consciousness in which the day wasn’t divided into artificial blocks. Rain would arrive and bring change. The ripening of fruit was an event. The hunt began and ended. The stars shifted in the sky. Life was a dance with nature.

In this “event time,” relationships were deeper. Without slicing life into fragments, hour by hour, they simply lived. If you’ve ever lost yourself in a flow of creativity, fallen in love so intensely that only the two of you existed, or disappeared into the sky while staring at it, then you’ve already tasted event time: a crack in the usual sense of time through which the light of presence leaks in.

According to neuroscience, what we call time is, to a large extent, the brain tracking change. When attention narrows into deep focus or expands into gratitude and awe, our inner clock slips. Brain regions tied to the ego, to the narrative “I,” begin to quiet down; sensations light up and take over. Psychology calls this a flow state, but the feeling is of something much older and more primordial: stepping out of clock time into event time, where minutes stop being counted and start being lived. What’s real is your breathing, the inner tide of your own body. No longer the calendar, no longer the stress about tomorrow. You stop being a machine and return to being a fleeting pattern in a living cosmos.

You might think I’m saying that time is infinite. I’m not. What we need to discard is this linear idea of time stretching out forever, a ticking that runs outside of us, on a conveyor belt, while we stand still. When mystics and physicists talk about infinity, they’re often pointing to something else: time as a psychological construction, invented through comparison, through the act of becoming. You were this, you will become that, you failed before, you hope to succeed tomorrow. The mind lines up these comparisons and calls that line “time.” Ambition ferments along this line, but this psychological machine is a slippery slope.

We do not move through time like a boat through water; we are fixed points in a fabric that already is. The illusion of change comes from consciousness sweeping across one moment after another, like a flashlight moving over a still painting. In this sense, “infinite time” is not an endless thread; it is total simultaneity. Every breath, every ignition of a star, every death, is already embedded in the whole.

Every human cell carries mitochondrial echoes of ancient bacteria. These structures do not know time as we do; they respond to fields, to chemical signatures, to fractal rhythms that existed long before our “before” and “after.” In their world, infinite time is recursion.

Human time, however, is anxious. We flinch before the seconds as if they were sharp, always calculating, always counting: birthdays, deadlines, data limits. We measure life in little calendar squares and grow restless when we can’t fill them. Our time is prosthetic: outsourced to screens, watches, and buzzing alarms. Without them, we feel lost.

Our bodies age in decades, our societies shift in centuries, but all of this is a flash compared to Earth’s slow rhythms. The flow of time passes through you, but it also passes as you. The stress you feel about time slipping away comes from the belief that you should be controlling it. Maybe you’re not here to control time; maybe you’re here to move like it.

Human time demands speed and urgency; geological time demands patience and endurance. The ground beneath our feet outlives our lives and our stories. Our rush is just a brief disturbance on a stage built by processes far older and slower than we can perceive. Geological time also reveals the power of the invisible: most of Earth’s transformation happens beneath our feet, unseen.

In geological time, destruction and creation are the same event. A volcanic eruption destroys, but it also creates land. A glacier carves valleys, but leaves behind fertile soil. Time is builder and destroyer at once, a paradox we almost always miss when we think in straight lines.

You measure time in hours, but it measures you in choices. They say time changes everything; in truth, you are the one who must change. Time is the school in which we learn, the fire in which we burn, the moving image of eternity itself. It doesn’t simply pass; it carves you, moment by moment, into whatever you choose to become.

That was the only thing running through my mind while everything seemed to be going wrong — this feeling of internal stress begging for some kind of extreme release. Maybe tears, maybe screaming, maybe running until my legs give out. I just knew that somehow I needed to externalize that feeling before I imploded.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little dramatic.
But that’s exactly how my mind sounds when I’m stressed. Maybe it’s just mine. Everything feels so extreme and terrible, even when there’s no obvious reason at all.

You know those days.

You wake up and something small already feels off. Then you spill your coffee on the floor. You go to make another one and realize there’s no coffee left. You give up, leave the house irritated, start walking to work, and suddenly the sky closes and it starts raining — and of course you don’t have an umbrella. Somewhere in the middle of all that, you decide: today is not my day. The universe is clearly conspiring against me.

But maybe it’s not the universe.
Maybe it’s our brain.

We’re wired for predictability. Our mind is constantly simulating possible situations, rehearsing words and actions, calculating consequences — all as a defense mechanism. It’s trying to keep us safe. The problem begins when reality refuses to follow the script. A sequence of small, unpredictable problems creates this feeling that we’re losing control. The stress that comes after isn’t just about the events themselves, but about the sense that the “model” we had in our head is falling apart.

That’s why seemingly tiny things can trigger such an intense reaction.
On paper, everything is fine.
In the body, it feels like the end of the world.

Murphy’s Law captures this sense of chaos perfectly: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” On days like that, this phrase feels less like a theory and more like a lived reality.

What’s most interesting is how much our perception shapes this experience. It’s not always that more bad things are actually happening. Often, the brain simply switches into a pessimistic standby mode, scanning reality for the next problem. When you expect everything to go wrong, you start noticing only the evidence that confirms that expectation.

Psychology has a name for this: negativity bias — our tendency to pay more attention to negative events than to neutral or positive ones. For our ancestors, this was incredibly useful. It was more important to notice a predator than to admire the sky, the flowers, or the wind. That bias kept a lot of people alive.

Today, with no predators hiding in the bushes, that same mechanism can distort our perception and push us to the peak of stress, fear, and anxiety. A single criticism echoes louder than ten compliments. One setback is enough to stain an entire day.

And it’s not just the brain that seems obsessed with chaos.
Physics says the universe is too.

There’s a concept called entropy — the natural tendency of things to move toward disorder. Nothing organizes itself. Nothing stays stable without effort. Your relationships need energy to stay alive. Your home needs maintenance to remain livable. Your work needs attention and dedication to keep moving forward. If we don’t put energy into something, it slowly starts to fall apart. The pattern is always the same: without effort, everything drifts toward disorganization.

There’s a strange kind of beauty in that.

If the entire universe tends toward chaos, then living is, in a way, an act of resistance. Because the world naturally slides toward disorder, we have to spend energy to create and maintain some kind of stability. The psychologist Steven Pinker summarizes this in a sentence I really like: “The ultimate purpose of life is to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy.” In other words, part of being alive is waking up every day to push that tide of chaos back, even if just a little.

When I think about it like that, those days when I just want to scream start to look different. It’s not just “bad luck” or some personal curse. It’s my brain trying to protect me from unpredictability. It’s my nervous system reacting to a series of broken expectations. And, on a larger scale, it’s the universe simply doing what it has always done: sliding toward disorder unless someone, somewhere, spends energy to hold something together.

Maybe the problem isn’t that things fall apart.
Maybe the real miracle is that, so often, they don’t.

Think about how many things have to go right for a “normal” day to even exist: your alarm has to ring, your body has to wake up and function, water has to come out of the shower, your phone has to turn on and connect to the internet, people have to answer your messages, the bus has to appear more or less on time, your heart has to keep beating without you asking it to. Most of the time, we don’t notice any of this. We only notice when something fails.

I’m not saying we should minimize what we feel or romanticize bad days. Sometimes life really is unfair. Sometimes things break in ways that are not poetic at all. What I am saying is this: when I feel that urge to scream, it helps to remember that my experience is being built from the inside out. The chaos I feel is real — but it’s also a story my brain is telling to try to make sense of unpredictability in a universe that is, by nature, unstable.

On those days, maybe the bravest thing is not to be perfectly calm or endlessly positive. Maybe it’s simply to notice what’s happening inside, take a deep breath, and choose where we’re going to invest our limited energy: which thoughts are worth feeding, which problems are truly worth solving, which relationships are worth protecting, which parts of ourselves are worth holding together.

Because in a universe that naturally tends to fall apart, the real miracle isn’t that things break.
The real miracle is that, somehow, we manage to keep anything whole at all.

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In Brazil there’s a song called “Se eu usasse sapato” by the duo Anavitória that talks exactly about this kind of curiosity: the idea of wondering what life would be like if it came from different choices, habits, or even small actions like turning a corner. It’s a song I really recommend for anyone who spends a lot of time imagining “what if”, besides being very pleasant to listen to.

Lately I’ve been studying and reading different kinds of content, and among everything I came across, one topic in particular caught my attention and made me think about it more deeply: the power of being bold.

Most of us are afraid of living an average life. Even if that life contains many good things — a comfortable house, a stable job, and a nice family — the idea still seems to bother us in an almost sad way. It’s the fear of never leaving the bubble of what is considered “normal”, and never experiencing what life actually has to offer with all its unexpected opportunities.

And it’s with anyone who feels like this that I’m speaking today.

Life on autopilot is nothing more than a series of actions unconsciously determined by the ego — by the self-image we build from external conditions, social expectations, and the way we learn to see ourselves in the world. Our actions rarely happen outside the limits of that self-image, and because of that it becomes extremely difficult to create outcomes that feel different from the life we already expect to have.

It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into something if, in your own mind, that thing feels impossible or unrealistic. When our internal perception tells us something won’t work, our behavior almost always adjusts itself to confirm that belief. Because of this, taking care of our self-image might be one of the biggest secrets to building a more complete life. Only when that internal image begins to change can our actions start producing different results.

The biggest obstacle in changing that self-image is the fear of failure — and especially the fear of not being perfect. This is a very complex defense mechanism of the brain that exists to keep danger away, or at least what the brain interprets as danger. In many situations, however, what it is really protecting us from is simply the unknown.

Conditioned to avoid uncertainty, we end up staying exactly where things feel predictable and controlled. We keep the same habits, the same routines, and the same expectations about what our life should look like. Ironically, this protection mechanism often traps us inside the very thing we fear the most: an ordinary life with no real challenges and no major changes, just enough stability to keep everything the same.

Perfectionism, therefore, quietly kills dreams.

It blocks change in our actions and convinces us that we should only try something if we are completely prepared to succeed. The problem is that this moment of perfect preparation almost never arrives, and because of that many people spend years waiting instead of experimenting with different paths. When perfection becomes a requirement for action, curiosity slowly disappears and life becomes smaller.

Choosing the unknown, on the other hand, does something interesting. It challenges the identity we are used to carrying and forces us to see ourselves differently. Some people might call this the death of the ego, because the version of ourselves that felt safe and predictable slowly begins to dissolve. As that happens, new possibilities start appearing in places that once felt completely ordinary.

This kind of life naturally includes attempts, mistakes, and uncomfortable situations. But it also becomes much richer in terms of personal meaning and self-fulfillment, precisely because it is built from experience rather than avoidance.

In a way, it reminds me of the mindset that Anthony Bourdain often expressed through the way he lived his life. If you assume you know nothing, then nothing is really familiar and everything becomes an experience worth having.

Comfort zones kill dreams.

At this point, after reading all of this, someone could easily think that the solution is simply to start doing different things, change their self-image, and eventually achieve everything they want in life. It sounds like a simple formula: take risks, succeed, and finally feel fulfilled.

Unfortunately, real life rarely works that way.

Reaching goals often brings happiness, but that happiness tends to last for a surprisingly short time. We achieve something we wanted for a long time, we feel satisfied for a few days — maybe a few weeks — and then the feeling slowly fades away. Soon we find ourselves looking for the next achievement that might bring that same feeling back.

It becomes a cycle of chasing things in the physical world in an attempt to fill something that might not actually belong to the physical world at all.

Maybe real fulfillment works in the opposite direction of what we were taught. Instead of trying to achieve things first and hoping those achievements will eventually make us feel fulfilled, perhaps the feeling has to exist internally before anything else. Only after that does it begin to appear in the physical world through our decisions, attitudes, and actions.

For most of our lives we are taught a different sequence: work hard, push yourself, achieve goals, and only then will you feel satisfied with life. But maybe that order is inverted. Maybe fulfillment is not the final reward of external achievements but the starting point that shapes them.

In that sense, the cause would be who we are internally, and the achievements would simply be the visible consequences of that internal state.

Or maybe I just wrote a bunch of nonsense.

The truth is that I didn’t want to spend another day procrastinating and trying to write the perfect article, only to end up writing nothing at all.

So this is the result of deciding to write anyway.

Take bold actions. Don’t wait until you feel completely ready to move. If we wait for the perfect moment, it may never come.

How many turns in life have you avoided simply because you didn’t feel ready yet?

Kill your comfort zone before it kills your dreams.

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next post.
If you liked the topic and you’re not a subscriber yet, feel very welcome to join.

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*I’ll leave some links to videos I’ve been watching this past week below, for anyone who wants to go deeper into what I talked about here.

I remember many scenes from my childhood: me imagining the space between the car seats as if it were my surfboard and standing up on the downhill, only to wipe out the moment the car braked; me creating the most tragic story in my head while I watched my favorite hair tie go away with the rain, unable to do anything from the parking lot at home; and me playing with my grandma’s perfume bottles and nail polishes as if they were characters in my game, each one with its own personality and way of being. I miss, I confess, being a child – but I miss something almost more vital: that feeling that moments, no matter how simple, seemed infinite and magical.

Many self-help and science books, and even the Bible, tell us we should be like children. Don’t expect me to explain in this text how to achieve that or what exactly it means to “be like a child”, because I have no idea. But when I look at my past versions of myself, I see that it has a lot to do with possibilities. Our world is so small when we’re little, but at the same time so full of crazy possibilities. There is room for limitless creativity, questions that don’t need answers, and full presence in every second that passes. An innocence that, instead of limiting, does the opposite: it sets us free. It frees us from paradigms, limitations, and everything that programs our society to be what it is. Our truest version is our child version.

One theme that fascinates me a lot, precisely because it carries this air of not knowing, is the mystery of human consciousness. Even if one day we master every field of science, physics, or whatever it may be, we will never be sure about the subjective experiences around the world. It’s a question that cannot have an answer. In the end, my dad was right: it feels really good to have questions. Too bad this capacity has been crushed by the rise of the internet and artificial intelligence, a flood of unnecessary answers to things we don’t even want to know, clogging our brains and creating a blur over what really matters. It’s getting harder and harder to truly discover things – ironic, since we have tons of data in the palm of our hands.

The other day, on a Sunday afternoon, in that “useless day” mood, I just got tired of everything. My phone was annoying me, just like the TV or any book. The clock said it was around six in the evening. I lay down on the cold floor of the dark living room, with the orange light from the street lamps softly coming into the house, and I just stayed there, looking at the lights, feeling the wind coming in, and existing. Suddenly, something changed. A will to cry came all of a sudden together with the greatest joy I had felt in weeks. Tears of happiness filled my eyes and there I felt like I was 4 years old again, playing with my cousins at my grandma’s house. The light became, somehow, more light; the wind, more wind; and I, more me. Time stopped. I don’t know if minutes or hours passed, but that was my greatest flow state so far.

Meditation is an important tool precisely because of this: it brings our innermost self back to the present and helps us free ourselves from our “appearance self” in order to find our authentic self, which often collides with our purest versions, a “child self”. I’d actually like to ask if anyone reading this also gets overly emotional when meditating. All it takes is for me to close my eyes and the tears and that absurd feeling of gratitude are already there. In fact, that’s happening while I write this text.

I know this was a piece of writing outside the usual scope of the page – nothing scientific or about psychology in the classic sense, and totally fact-free – but I felt this urge to be, once again, that child who told stories about her favorite hair tie. I needed to write without topic limitations or researching facts, I needed to be the text.

But if someone really read this all the way to the end, I’m not going to break the pattern and leave you without a reflection, right? I truly recommend having some time without distractions to organize your mind and let ideas flow while you enjoy the moment. And most importantly, just like those kids who believed the Bermuda Triangle was going to kill them in the future, or that quicksand would be a big problem, or, for the more positive ones, who believed in Santa Claus, I leave you with an invitation to believe. To believe in ourselves, in our dreams, and in all the questions that appear out of nowhere. To believe, even just for a moment, in our world of fantasies without limitations, without ready-made answers and with space for all the questions. Because now I believe that yes, it is the questions that move the world.

Thank you to everyone who read all the way to the end. This was an unusual text, but definitely the one where I exposed myself the most and felt the most “me” while writing. I hope you liked it, and I’m sorry to those who were expecting something different.

p.s.: fun fact — while I was crying writing this, my headphones were blasting Drake and Don Toliver. lol

Many dreams live in me, some perfectly aligned with my ideal self and others that do not always feel quite right. Distant echoes of an unconscious that rarely comes to the surface. Far‑off sides of me that I do not fully understand.

We are used to defining people by what they do or fail to do. We say that someone is something, even when we have no idea what exists beyond the actions we observe. We do this because we were trained, from very early on, to do the same with ourselves: I am this kind of person; I am not that kind. Conditioned by habit, we reduce our own complexity to labels and call this reduction “identity.”

Lately, I have felt drawn to the connection between mind, thoughts, emotions, and the physical world. In this search for answers, I picked up Joe Dispenza’s book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, and a question immediately formed in my mind:

What does it really mean to “be someone”?

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What, in fact, is our personality, and how does the brain create and store this particular essence that feels so uniquely ours?

Psychology offers a starting point for finding an answer, or at least for beginning to shape one.

When we talk about “personality,” we are, in broad terms, talking about the way a person usually relates to the world and to their own inner life. Throughout childhood and adolescence, these ways of relating gradually consolidate into relatively stable patterns, the so‑called traits. To a large extent, they guide how we act, think, feel motivated, and experience emotions.

Because every human being is a particular universe, psychologists have spent decades trying to organize this diversity into models. One of the most well‑known is the “Big Five”: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Instead of putting us into rigid boxes, this model suggests that each of us occupies a unique point on each of these dimensions: more curious or more cautious, more organized or more scattered, more sociable or more reserved, and so on.

Longitudinal studies that follow people over many years show that these traits tend to be relatively stable, but not immutable. On average, over time, people become a bit more conscientious and agreeable, and a bit less neurotic. In other words, there seems to be a “core” that remains, but also a real margin for change.

As research advanced, this picture became more refined. Instead of seeing personality as a single block, many authors began to distinguish two main components: temperament and character.

Put simply, temperament is our basic tendency to react to the world. It is like the emotional climate we are born with, which colors how we respond to stimuli. A widely cited model, proposed by Cloninger, describes four broad temperamental tendencies: harm avoidance, novelty seeking, reward dependence, and persistence. These dispositions are connected to fundamental emotions such as fear, anger, attachment, and ambition, and they appear to have a strong biological basis, linked to neurotransmitter systems such as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine.

Character, on the other hand, has more to do with what we choose to do with this initial temperament. It involves our values, goals, and the way we define what is important to us and to others. If temperament is our innate inclination to react in certain ways, character is the story we build on top of it: who we want to be, what we believe in, what kind of person we decide to become. Research in human development suggests that character is particularly sensitive to experiences, education, culture, and conscious decisions throughout life.

When we look at the brain, the picture becomes even more complex. The neuroscience of personality is still under construction, but some points are relatively consensual. We know that what we call our “way of being” emerges from broad neural networks, influenced both by genetic factors – twin studies indicate a moderate heritability of the main traits – and by experience, especially early experiences, which literally shape the structure and functioning of the brain. Certain personality characteristics have been associated with activation patterns in regions such as the prefrontal cortex (linked to planning and impulse control), the amygdala (processing fear and threat), and the striatum (motivation and reward).

At the same time, this biological picture does not condemn us to a fixed script. Research in personality psychology and in interventions such as cognitive‑behavioral therapy shows that people can in fact modify attitudes, behaviors, and thought patterns in response to new experiences and deliberate efforts to change. Studies on personality change observe small but significant shifts in traits like neuroticism and conscientiousness over a few years, especially when there are clear goals and consistent practice. In other words, we are not a blank slate, but we are not made of stone either.

Even before modern neuroscience, Freud had already proposed a way of organizing this inner territory, still influential today, though much debated. For him, the force that drives personality and behavior is the libido, a psychic energy that fuels three instances: id, ego, and superego.

The id, present from birth, is the most primitive part of us, seeking immediate satisfaction of basic needs and impulses. The ego emerges to mediate these impulses with the demands of reality, trying to find viable ways to satisfy them. The superego, which develops last, incorporates the ideals, norms, and values we absorb from our caregivers and from culture.

These three instances do not function separately; they intertwine and are in constant tension. The superego pressures the ego to follow idealized moral standards; the id demands gratification; the ego tries to balance desire, guilt, and the limits of the real world. Much of our internal conflict and our ambiguous behaviors can be read as the result of this ongoing negotiation.

But in the midst of so many models and layers, an uncomfortable question remains: where, exactly, does this peculiar character we call “self” actually live?

From a neuroanatomical point of view, there is no single “self center.” Different aspects of the self seem to rely on different “archipelagos” of brain regions that communicate with one another all the time. There is a bodily self – this immediate, physical “I” that feels, moves, and perceives the body in space – linked to proprioception, internal sensations, and the integration of bodily signals, involving areas such as the insula and the somatosensory cortex. And there is a narrative self – the “me” – that remembers, imagines, plans, and tells stories about who we are.

This narrative self is strongly associated with the so‑called default mode network, a set of regions (such as the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the precuneus) that become active precisely when we are not focused on external tasks: when our mind wanders, revisits autobiographical memories, or mentally rehearses possible futures. In other words, a large part of what we call “I” seems to be a story the brain keeps telling itself, almost by default, whenever it can.

This realization opens a series of unsettling questions: What would it take for a person to stop being “the same person”? Are we really identical to who we were a minute ago, a day ago, a year ago, ten years ago? If we answer yes, what exactly do we still share with those earlier versions of ourselves?

Centuries before we had MRI images, the philosopher John Locke had already proposed an answer. For him, a person is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.” What makes us a person, in this view, is not some mysterious “thing,” but the capacity to think about ourselves in the past and in the future, in different situations, and still recognize there a thread of continuity.

Today, with psychology and neuroscience, it is hard to deny that this continuity depends on the brain: without a functioning brain, there is no person. But at the same time, it seems to be something more than the physical organ itself. Perhaps this “something more” is not a separate substance, but the way the brain organizes experience into a coherent narrative over time.

When we believe that this narrative is something solid, fixed, “real out there,” we tend to treat it as if it were unchangeable. Yet it may be that what we call “personhood” is, to a great extent, a mental construct: a useful schema that links the present self to the past, future, and imagined self. Cognitive psychology speaks of the “autobiographical self” precisely to highlight this quality of a story in constant revision.

Buddhist philosophy takes this intuition to the extreme. For the Buddha, our refusal to see the transient and conditioned nature of this “self” is the root of ignorance and suffering. The concept of anatta (non‑self) suggests that what we call “I” is only the momentary combination of physical processes, sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. When we stop clinging to a rigid ego – when we loosen our defensive attachment to a fixed self‑image – we open space for different ways of being and relating. Paradoxically, by renouncing a rigid “I,” we may become more present, more joyful, more compassionate, and experience the only form of transcendence that is truly accessible: living each moment with clarity.

If personality is at once biology, history, narrative, and habit, then perhaps “being myself” is not a destination, but an ongoing process of observing, questioning, and, when necessary, rewriting who I believe I am. Research in psychology shows that small, intentional changes — setting goals, practicing new behaviors, placing ourselves in different contexts — can gradually shift our traits in meaningful ways. We are not completely malleable, but we are not carved in stone either.

Seen from this angle, my many dreams stop looking like contradictions and begin to feel like hypotheses about the future: ways of testing the boundaries of what I currently call “me.” Whenever I move toward one of these “strange” dreams, whether by studying a new subject, trying a skill I was not “born with” or imagining a version of myself I cannot fully inhabit yet, I feel both the fear of losing an identity and the excitement of expanding it.

Maybe wanting to be too many things for just one lifetime is not a mistake, but something deeply human: the ability to see ourselves in multiple ways, across multiple stories, knowing that none of them fully exhausts who we are.

Maybe real freedom is not about choosing a final, definitive identity, but about recognizing that I can take an active role in the story I tell about myself.

If that is true, then wanting to be many things in this brief life is not a problem to be solved, but an invitation: to keep living with curiosity about who I might still become.

Thank you so much for reading and for supporting the newsletter. If you’d like to support my goals or learn more about this initiative, feel free to contribute through the button below. Let’s grow together

Buy me a coffe

I think that, in the past few weeks, almost everyone has seen or at least heard about the viral penguin video: a simple, unusual animal behavior that turned into a kind of moral lesson for those who tried to find a deeper meaning in what it was doing.

How penguins usually behave

To begin with, it’s important to understand the traditional behavior of penguin groups. They are social creatures, living in colonies that vary in species and size, and they communicate through specific vocalizations for different situations. In many ways, their reproductive behavior resembles human social structure: they form monogamous pairs that share responsibility for feeding and caring for their chicks.

There is, therefore, a very concrete mode of existence, almost like a ready-made script: be born, follow the group, mate, raise chicks, survive the cold in community. Everything is structured, predictable, and repeated over generations.

And that’s exactly why the penguin in the video stands out so much.

When someone steps off the script

With such a defined way of living, the image of a single animal stepping off the path and seeking something different feels deeply strange. Instead of following the colony’s flow toward the sea, it chooses the opposite: it walks toward the mountains, away from food, away from the group, away from the “right” route. And it doesn’t do this just once, but repeatedly, even when it is brought back to the community.

From a biological point of view, the most likely explanation is simple: navigation error, neurological issues, some kind of sensory damage. For science, it may be “just” a pathological deviation in behavior.

But for those watching, the reaction is rarely neutral. A deviation from the route in an animal so visually associated with order and routine almost automatically turns into a metaphor. That penguin becomes a symbol of something that doesn’t quite fit into words, but resonates with anyone who feels trapped in rigid structures.

Habit, brain, and autopilot

From psychology and neuroscience, this discomfort gains clearer contours. The human brain is profoundly economical: it prefers what is familiar, repeated, and requires the least effort. In neurobiological terms, habits are neural pathways strengthened by repetition; over time, much of mental life is managed on “autopilot.”

As Charles Duhigg (2012) describes, habits follow a loop of cue–routine–reward, and once this loop is established, the brain tends to conserve energy by repeating it automatically. Daniel Kahneman (2011) also distinguishes between fast, automatic thinking (System 1) and slow, deliberate thinking (System 2), showing how much of our daily life is governed by the quickest, least effortful responses.

In physics, the concept of entropy describes the natural tendency of systems to move toward states of lower organization and greater energy dispersion. In an analogous way, the mind tends to follow the path of least resistance: repeating the same thoughts, the same reactions, the same choices. Not because they are necessarily better, but because they are easier.

Just like the penguin colony, human life organizes itself around routines, norms, expectations, and patterns. What is “normal” is to follow the flow. What is strange is to step out of it.

Freedom is not just outside

In this context, the word “freedom” is often used in a superficial way, almost always associated with the external world: traveling, consuming, moving to another city, doing whatever you want. However, from a psychological perspective, this idea of freedom appears as a very shallow layer.

On a deeper level, freedom is not simply the absence of rules or the endless multiplication of options. It is closer to the capacity not to be governed only by internal automatisms and external pressures. Instead, it involves the possibility of consciously choosing which limits, routines, and efforts will be embraced.

Freedom, then, is not so much about breaking everything, but about refusing to live purely by inertia. It is not just doing anything; it is being able to align what you do with what, in fact, makes sense.

Self-discipline as a form of freedom

From this perspective, freedom is not really out there in the external world. It is not necessarily about traveling, buying everything you desire, or doing whatever comes to mind. In a deeper and truer sense, freedom is having the self-discipline to dream and believe in infinite possibilities, to allow yourself to pursue what truly brings meaning and happiness, instead of merely following what is automatically imposed in everyday life.

Self-discipline here does not appear as the opposite of freedom, but as its condition. It is the ability to sustain, over time, choices that are not the easiest, but are the most authentic. It is refusing the numbing comfort of the colony when it no longer matches the life you want to live.

The penguin and the “why?”

From above, that penguin in the video seems to be living its own form of rupture. It keeps, almost obsessively, following the urge to walk toward the mountains, despite the structure of its community or the fact that it is always brought back to the starting point. It breaks, alone, with a collective pattern that seemed unquestionable.

The answer to why it is walking toward the mountains, I honestly don’t know. Maybe it’s an error, maybe it’s instinct, maybe it’s just a meaningless deviation.

What I do know is something else: while it insists on leaving the route, you remain stuck in the cluster of penguins, repeating the same path every day, on autopilot, never breaking away.

Why?

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Late at night, there I was: Pinterest open, Spotify playing in the background, and my mind lost in images of everything I still want to become—houses, cities, bodies, possible futures. I kept scrolling as if I could roll time itself forward.

Suddenly, the song changed, and something inside me shifted as well. “Never Grow Old” by The Cranberries started playing. I was familiar with the song; I had sung it many times, but always on autopilot. I had never really taken the time to listen to the lyrics, especially since English is not my first language.

Without realizing it, I stopped scrolling through Pinterest. I closed my eyes and tried to understand what the song was saying. I began connecting one line to the next, and little by little, I realized that the song seemed to be asking the person it addresses not to grow old, as if aging itself were something negative. Then came the line that stuck with me: “Forever young, I hope you stay.”

It hit me hard.

I have always been a very nostalgic person, but not always in a healthy way. I miss my childhood, as if there were a more authentic version of myself living back then. For a long time, I viewed growing older almost as a loss of identity, as if each passing year pushed me further away from that girl I wanted to freeze in time. Deep down, I longed for what the song expressed: the desire to press pause on life and remain forever young.

However, if I’m honest, I didn’t really know what it meant to be young, much less what it meant to grow old. How could I grasp the weight of “never grow old” if I wasn’t even clear on the concept itself?

From a scientific perspective, we know that it is impossible to stay young forever. While we might be able to delay a few wrinkles, take care of our memory, or run every day, inevitably, we all change and grow older, both on the outside and, especially, on the inside.

That was when I decided to go beyond nostalgia and beyond the lyrics. I wanted to understand what it really means to get older in terms of brain, body, and identity. What lies behind “blowing out candles on top of a birthday cake,” and what do we really mean when we talk about aging?

How the Brain Ages

When we think about aging, we often picture physical changes like wrinkles, gray hair, and alterations in our bodies. However, a significant part of aging occurs in an unseen realm: the brain.

Throughout life, some structures within the brain undergo changes in size, function, and connectivity. Certain regions may shrink slightly, communication between neurons can become less efficient, and cognitive processes, such as processing speed and sustained attention, may slow down. At first glance, this might seem like a straightforward loss, but the reality is more complex.

The brain is not static; it is more akin to a living city that continuously reorganizes itself. This capacity to change over time is referred to as brain plasticity. Importantly, brain plasticity does not vanish with age; it merely shifts in pace and form. In childhood, the brain learns rapidly, almost as if it is in “sponge mode.” In adulthood and old age, plasticity remains but requires more repetition, intention, and context for learning to occur.

Memory also evolves with age. Recent memories may slip away more easily, names can momentarily evade our recall, and details might get mixed up. In contrast, older memories—especially emotional ones—often remain vivid. This is where music acts almost like a time machine.

Most people have a song that encapsulates a moment in their lives. When a familiar chorus plays, you might find yourself transported back to a specific bedroom, trip, relationship, or even an entire summer. The brain uses music as a thread that weaves together memories, emotions, and sensations into a cohesive experience.

In these moments, it can feel as though time halts momentarily. You might be older now, but within that piece of music, you can reconnect with a version of yourself from the past that still resonates within you.

Perhaps brain aging is not solely about forgetting; it is also about what remains and the enduring impact of certain experiences—especially emotional and musical ones—that continue to resonate.

How the Body Ages

If the brain is like a city constantly reorganizing itself, the body serves as the territory that visibly bears the marks of time.

The cardiovascular system, for instance, undergoes gradual changes. Blood vessels can become stiffer, the heart may need to function differently, and circulation can alter. Muscles lose mass if they are not engaged, bones can become more fragile, hormone levels fluctuate, and the body manages inflammation differently. None of these changes happen overnight; they represent ongoing adjustments over time.

What stands out, however, is that the body does not age in isolation. It ages in constant interaction with our lifestyle choices. Movement, diet, sleep, stress, relationships, and social contexts all continually influence our cells. Each choice, routine, and imbalance leaves microscopic “notes” in the body, collectively shaping our experience as we move through time.

Nonetheless, no matter how meticulously we care for ourselves, there is no way to escape the passage of time. Even the healthiest individuals will notice physical changes. Endurance may decline, recovery may take longer, skin may not regain its firmness as easily, and fatigue may present differently. Time insists on being felt.

This phenomenon can lead to a certain cognitive dissonance. Internally, we often do not feel as “old” as our bodies suggest. It’s as if our self-perception lags behind the observable signs of aging. While the body visibly ages before our eyes, the mind may take longer to come to terms with this reality.

Perception, Time, and Identity

There is a type of aging that does not appear on any scan, but can be felt very clearly: the aging of perceived time.

When we are children, a year feels like an eternity. Vacations seem to last forever, and a single day is an entire universe. As the years go by, time appears to speed up. Ten years can pass like a slightly longer weekend. Routines repeat, days look alike, and the brain stops recording details with the same intensity. It’s as if the tape of our experiences becomes more compressed.

At the same time, our life narratives become more complex. We are no longer just “who we are now,” but also who we were at ages 5, 10, 15, and 20. We carry earlier versions of ourselves, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict.

The tension between who I was and who I am serves as a silent marker of aging. Some people look back with affection, recognizing their changes, while others reflect with guilt, longing, or denial, as if the past were a place they wish to inhabit forever. Some feel they have betrayed their own stories; others believe they have finally moved closer to the person they always wanted to be.

Perhaps aging, on this more existential level, means continuously revising our own storyline—retelling the same stories with different meanings. We look at the child we were and the adult we have become, trying to find a thread of continuity or accepting that, in some places, that thread has broken.

Psychological time does not follow the calendar. Sometimes, a few months of a particular experience can age us more than a tranquil decade. Occasionally, a single encounter, loss, or discovery can change how we view everything that has come before and everything that is still to come.

“Never grow old” as wish and metaphor

When someone sings “never grow old,” they often desire more than just agelessness; they are typically expressing a longing for certain aspects of life to remain unchanged.

Biologically, this request is impossible. Our brains change, our bodies change, our connections shift, cells accumulate marks, and memories reorganize themselves. There is no existence outside of time, and there is no love, friendship, body, or identity that is not affected by change.

However, if we examine this wish more closely, we can interpret it differently. Perhaps “never grow old” does not necessarily mean “never age,” but rather a desire to preserve certain ways of being in the world. This includes maintaining our curiosity, ability to be amazed, capacity to be moved, and willingness to learn new things. It’s about avoiding complete cynicism, indifference, or numbness.

To grow older while still being able to be touched by a song, to laugh until it hurts, and to fall in love with ideas, places, and people is significant. It means retaining the desire to start something new, even when we are aware that time is limited.

If “staying forever young” is not feasible in a physical sense, perhaps it is achievable in another way: by keeping a certain inner vitality alive and fostering a sense of openness. It’s not about denying the passage of time, but rather about choosing how we navigate it.

The real question may not be about resisting aging but about exploring: who am I becoming as I grow older? Which parts of myself do I want to release, and which do I wish to keep alive, even if in new forms?

The body will change. The brain will evolve. Memories will shift. But between each change, there is always a small space for choice: the way we narrate our own story.

Ultimately, our most sincere way of “never growing old” may lie not in a body that remains unchanged but in the courage to continue questioning, feeling, and rebuilding, even while acknowledging that everything, including ourselves, is transient.

Thank you so much for reading and for supporting the newsletter. If you’d like to support my goals or learn more about this initiative, feel free to contribute through the button below. Let’s grow together

Support my dreams

And yet, if we were to open the skull in search of this “I,” we wouldn’t find it anywhere. We would see living tissue: a tangled forest of neurons firing electrical and chemical signals. No colors. No flavors. No longing. Just impulses, discharges, synapses.

How, then, do these patterns of signals become the “inner movie” of experience? At what point does matter become mind? This may be the greatest open question in science, and at the same time an intensely personal one: what is it, really, to be conscious?

Philosophers have walked this terrain for centuries. Thomas Nagel, for example, argues that there is a structural limit to our understanding of consciousness. Even if we one day map every physical process in the brain, we still will not know what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or even the person sitting next to us. We can describe the brain in exquisite detail, but we do not cross the border into subjective experience. That is why, for Nagel, consciousness makes the mind–body problem “really intractable”: it is the point where objective explanation seems to hit an invisible wall.

Part of this puzzle hides behind a modest word: qualia. These are the subjective qualities of experience. The sharp sourness that bites your tongue when you taste a fruit. The distant call of a bird at dusk. The deep, burning red of a sunset that seems to suspend time. The ache in your chest when a certain name appears in your mind. None of this is the object itself, but the way it shows up in your awareness. We do not live in the “world in itself,” but in a field of experiences that consciousness weaves out of it.

It is easy to forget this. We talk as if we see the world “as it is”: clean, direct, objective. But the reality you perceive is not a mirror of the universe; it is a construction. Consciousness filters, organizes, interprets, and edits. It does not hand you raw reality. It gives you a version just coherent enough for you to survive, love, work, suffer, and keep going.

We are not passive spectators sitting in the audience watching a finished film. We are, at once, screenwriters, directors, editors, and main characters of a story unfolding in real time. Consciousness is not just a witness to reality; it is its quiet architect.

If that is true, then the old question “Who am I?” becomes stranger than it sounds. Since antiquity, philosophers and spiritual traditions have distrusted the idea that the “self” is a solid, separate, self‑evident thing. In the Vedic tradition of Hinduism, for example, the individual self, Atman, is said to be, at the deepest level, identical to Brahman, the universal consciousness that pervades everything. The individual, in this view, is like a wave in the ocean: it looks separate, but it is only a temporary form of the same water.

In a very different register, the Talmud, a central Jewish text, offers an equally provocative image. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says that each person should see themselves as if the entire world was created for them. “The world was created for you.” At first glance, this sounds like an invitation to narcissism. But through the lens of consciousness, something else comes into focus: the recognition that the universe, as you live it, always exists in relation to your experience. The world, for you, exists only to the extent that it appears in your awareness.

This idea echoes in many accounts of deep “spiritual awakening.” People who go through intense meditation retreats, psychedelic journeys, or radical existential crises sometimes report a disturbing realization: a kind of absolute aloneness. Not social loneliness, not “I have no friends,” but the recognition that the only immediate certainty is one’s own consciousness. Everything else, body, world, others, appears within it like images on a river: arising, shifting, dissolving.

Neuroscience does not solve the mystery, but it does add texture. We know consciousness is not an on/off switch; it comes in states. In waking life, our attention oscillates, focus contracts and expands. During sleep, especially REM sleep, the brain generates entire worlds, vivid dreams that can feel more intense than waking life, almost completely disconnected from the external environment. That alone is revealing: we do not need the outside world for experience to occur; the brain can build universes from the inside out.

Under general anesthesia, the picture flips. Large‑scale communication networks in the brain collapse, and experience seems to drop out like a wiped chalkboard. In coma or vegetative states, the line between the presence and absence of mind grows blurry. Some patients who appear completely unresponsive show faint signs of consciousness in brain scans when asked to imagine playing tennis or walking through a house. The boundary between “there is someone in there” and “there is no one” is far more fragile than we like to think.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of consciousness, though, is the sense of self: that feeling that experiences “belong to me,” that there is a subject behind each thought, emotion, or perception. From the brain’s point of view, this “I” looks less like a thing and more like a process, a story in constant revision, useful for organizing experience, planning the future, and maintaining a minimally stable identity. Under certain conditions, such as deep meditation, psychedelics, or near‑death experiences, that story can dissolve, leaving behind what many traditions call “pure consciousness,” a state of presence without clear borders between self and world.

If the self can dissolve and something conscious still remains, then perhaps the “I” is not the core of consciousness, but just a recurring character inside it.

In the end, studying consciousness is less about classifying mental states and more about facing the raw fact of being alive from the inside. To be conscious is to be able to suffer and to rejoice, to love and to fear, to contemplate beauty and to confront death. Consciousness is not just another phenomenon to be explained; it is the stage on which everything that matters takes place. Einstein once wrote that “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” Consciousness is that mystery, seen from within.

Maybe we will never arrive at a final theory of how matter becomes mind. Maybe the answer requires a shift in our view of reality so deep that, today, we cannot even pose the question properly. But in the meantime, something remains available to us at every moment: conscious experience itself. The simple fact that you are reading these lines right now, feeling the weight of your body, the noise around you, the silent echo of your thoughts, all of this is the mystery in motion.

If everything you know of the world must pass through consciousness, then, in some sense, you are not just someone in the universe. You are the opening through which the universe becomes experience. And perhaps taking care of the mind, the quality of your attention, the thoughts you feed, the stories you repeat, is, in the end, the most concrete way to honor this mystery that looks back at us, quietly, from within.

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Beginnings are always full of endings, and every ending is nothing more than a new beginning. We stop being children to become adults, and we stop being just adults so we can go beyond that. The problem is that we’re trained to crave beginnings and avoid endings, as if they were opposites —When, in the end, they’re the same thing, just seen from different sides.

We learn to see the world through an invented sense of place and time: a linear, continuous existence, made of actions and consequences, that hurts from the inside out whenever it slips off its axis. Any break in the narrative opens a hole: a void, a loss, an uncertainty. But maybe endings only hurt this much because we insist on seeing them as walls and refuse to recognize them as doors.

Life is, before anything else, a matter of letting go: Letting go at the beginning, because every beginning is born from some prior end. In classical physics, there’s the concept of the arrow of time:Time that moves forward and can never return. But if we stop thinking about life in terms of theory and start feeling it in a human, everyday way, we begin to understand that, in practice, everything is a cycle. Days that rise and fall, seasons that come and go, birthdays, new years, relationships, versions of ourselves. Existence feels less like a straight line and more like the movement of a tide: coming and going, filling and emptying.

One day, I came up with a phrase and thought the moment to use it would never arrive, but I think we’ve finally gotten here: “the beginning of a new beginning.” Terrible redundancy? Yes, maybe. But the real question is: what are beginnings, after all? What is a “start”?

If life is a sphere, why do we insist on crossing it like an arrow? The beauty of existing is circular: understanding the complexity of holding on and letting go,
the importance of being and not being, and, circumferentially, existing.

Living obsessed with an ending is like freezing the present and merely surviving, trapped in an endless rehearsal of what you hope to become but never allow yourself to be. It’s turning life into a hallway when it was meant to be a home.

Maybe that’s why we toast the end of one year in the same way we toast the start of the next. The glass is the same, the gesture is the same, the cycle continues,
But we have the chance to change. The year turns, yes, but the ones who truly turn, inside, are us.

If life is a sphere, it makes no sense to just run. It makes much more sense to learn how to spin. To spin around ourselves, around time, around others, and, with every turn, to recognize that nothing ever comes back quite the same.

Embracing endings is, deep down, accepting that they were never really the end: Just the curve where life quietly changes direction. Embrace your endings, because they can be incredible beginnings in disguise.

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But then, if you’re so smart, tell me why you’re still so afraid?

I chose this song as inspiration to talk about fear. We often see it on TikTok or other social networks, used as a source of motivation and inspiration. However, it holds an even deeper meaning when we take a closer look. After all, what is fear? I may have written on my page that I would use scientific sources—and I definitely will, a bit later—but first, to explain fear, I want to share a simple concept I once heard at church that says a lot about why our generation is so afraid. Fear is the absence of certainty; it is doubt, the intangible, a limbo between where we are and where we want to be, and it is the result of too much information.

I can definitely say that I am someone who is often afraid, and lately I’ve realized that most of my fears come from the overwhelming amount of information at my fingertips. I bet you’ve also felt some pain and searched it on Google, hoping for reassurance, only to find terrifying possibilities that left you panicking, convinced you might be having a heart attack, a stroke, or some deadly disease. I’ve been there too. This overload of “what ifs” is making our society even more anxious. That is why Billy Joel’s line makes so much sense: the more you know, the more doubts you have—whether you’re capable, whether you’ll be okay, whether you’ll achieve your goals. Maybe we are not really afraid; maybe we are simply full of doubt.

Fear is a shadow flickering at the edge of our vision. It is the cold knot in your stomach before speaking in public, the sudden jolt when a car gets too close, the pulse racing at night when you hear footsteps behind you. Fear is ancient, primal, and at its core vital for survival. Doubt, on the other hand, is a mental block that feeds on these fears, creating a cycle of negative thoughts that keep us stuck. At the center of doubt is the amygdala, often called the brain’s fear center. This small, almond-shaped structure is responsible for processing emotions, especially those tied to fear and anxiety. When you feel doubt, your amygdala lights up, triggering a cascade of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These chemicals prime your body for a fight or flight response—which is great if you’re facing real danger, but not so helpful when you’re about to give a presentation or try something new. The result is sweaty palms, a racing heart, a queasy stomach—all common symptoms of doubt.

It is not just the amygdala at work. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for rational thinking and decision-making, also gets involved. When you are doubting yourself, your emotional brain and your rational brain end up in a tug-of-war. This internal conflict can leave you paralyzed or unsure of what to do next.

Neuroscience studies show that doubt also activates the anterior cingulate cortex, a region associated with conflict monitoring. When you are faced with uncertainty, this neural circuit quickly evaluates competing possibilities, creating that familiar feeling of hesitation. This is not a flaw in our cognitive architecture, but an evolutionary adaptation that helps us avoid impulsiveness when the stakes are high.

This battle between parts of our brain is not just theoretical—it plays out in my own life and probably in yours too. Think about how this happens in everyday decision-making. Your prefrontal cortex recognizes ambiguity and detects multiple interpretations or possible outcomes. The limbic system assigns emotional weight to each consequence. You become aware of your own uncertainty, and then you try to resolve doubt by searching for more information.

So what does doubt actually feel like? Phenomenologically, it is a temporary suspension between multiple possible worlds, each with its own truth and consequence. Doubt is not just the absence of certainty, but the presence of competing certainties. The mind literally keeps contradictory possibilities in superposition, like quantum states before observation. This cognitive flexibility lets us imagine alternatives—not just what is, but what could be.

Doubt is also shaped by society. Different cultures and communities have varying tolerance for uncertainty. Some traditions value decisive action despite incomplete information, while others prioritize contemplation and withholding judgment. Even educational systems reward or punish expressions of uncertainty. These social dimensions shape not only how we experience doubt, but also how we communicate it and how we judge others who express it.

I dream of moving to another country, of traveling the world, of skydiving—and even simple things, like starting a relationship. All of these things scare me. The new challenges us to step out of familiar neural pathways and behavioral patterns, forcing us to confront experiences we have no way of predicting. This brings doubt to the surface once again—the kind that paralyzes, diminishes, and sometimes even destroys dreams. The unknown is like a distant cousin of doubt. While doubt is a persistent “what if” inside our minds, the unknown is a “what if” that plays out in our actions, always accompanied by uncertainty.

Imagine you are putting together a puzzle and, as you near the end, you realize a piece is missing. Even without that final piece, your mind tries to picture the whole image. That is exactly what happens in our brains when we face the unknown. Lacking information about what lies ahead, the brain starts filling in the gaps—often with negative scenarios—which in turn triggers anxiety.

This doubt, whether about our own abilities or the potential outcome of our actions, can be so demotivating that many people do not even try. In today’s world, success seems deeply tied to external validation, and there is constant pressure to measure up. As a result, it becomes easier to aim for safe, familiar goals that will bring quick approval, rather than risk pursuing dreams that are uncertain and intimidating. Doubt undermines our self-confidence, turning even the smallest failure into something terrifying, something to be avoided at all costs.

As mentioned earlier, the fear of failure often leads us to postpone taking action. The longer we wait, the more doubt grows within us, making it even harder to get started. In many cases, this cycle ends up killing our dreams before they have a chance to begin. Research shows that procrastination is actually an unconscious mechanism our brains use to protect us from our deepest fears, especially the fear of disappointment. That is why, when we are about to try something new, we almost always find ways to delay, cancel, or convince ourselves that we should not even try unless everything is perfect.

Next week I turn 19, and lately all I see are comments about the “crisis” of turning 20, or 30, or 40—or any age, really. But these are not cursed ages where everything suddenly falls apart. They are simply phases filled with doubt and self-questioning about who we are, our purpose, and our goals. These moments are necessary; they force us to recalculate our expectations and adjust our path, helping us evolve as people. After all, if every year we were sure about everything, we would never grow beyond just adding another candle to the birthday cake.

Although fear is rooted in our instinct to survive, it is also a powerful catalyst for growth. Every act of courage is born from fear, not from its absence, but from learning how to move through it. When we confront what scares us, we actually reshape our brains. The circuits for fear and learning are deeply connected. Facing our fears, especially in a safe and controlled way, does not just make us less sensitive to them; it can truly transform us. Fear is not a weakness. It is a signal. It shows us that something matters to us. Our brain’s ability to feel, process, and learn from fear is not a flaw—it is one of the most beautiful adaptations we have.

As Billy Joel sings, “You can get what you want or you can just get old”. Maybe doubt will always be with us, a shadow at the edge of every new experience. But living one day at a time means accepting doubt as a companion, not an enemy. We can risk failure and step into the unknown for the sake of our dreams, or settle for a life that grows smaller with each year. I would rather take the risk, because even if doubt never fully disappears, it means I still care, I am still growing, and I am still alive.

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