I’m writing this because I’m lost inside my own outline.
I keep sprinting toward answers that never resolve,
convincing myself the grass is greener, somewhere.
Other people probably envy a neat subset of my life.
I sample theirs and assume a higher mean happiness.
Selection bias.
I know it.
I still do it.
I still do it.
They’ll name it despair.
Not as theater, just a thin weather laid over the day.
I inventory the noise:
Bias in every window.
A happiness curve that spikes on other people’s pages.
Error bars I widen like sleeves I’m still growing into.
My mind widens its aperture.
More, more, more...
The wound obliges with cleaner definitions.
Future-me will reread this, polished and annoyingly correct,
and ask again if a “happy life” exists.
Present-me answers like a coward:
It depends on the people.
It depends on the people.
Some permit it.
Some forbid it beautifully.
Some forbid it beautifully.
Meanwhile I stand between versions, in the doorway
between longing and judgment,
leaning on cold railings and pretending they’re choices.
If I stand still, I’m a measurement.
If I move, I’m a rounding error.
If you’re here too.
Half suspended, half blunt.
Try this with me:
Stop measuring your life against theirs. This is ours.
Retire the prototype called Perfect, it only ships delays.
Let opinions pass through like weather.
Quit hoarding pain like currency. It never buys what you need.
Test for lightness, not salvation:
Seven days without comparison. Do the error bars shrink?
Replace “ideal” with “sufficient”. Does the graph stabilize?
One value-aligned action, fifteen minutes, no flourish. Does it draw a line through you?
Maybe the answer moves by one percent.
Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t.
But if anything shifts,
even the way the air sits on your ribs.
we’ll count it as evidence.
And evidence, however small,
is the first mercy I trust.
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