In my, not always, humble opinion the best thing about the human experience is the ability to consciously decide it for ourselves. Conversely, it is also the worst part of our lives. Humans are able to make decisions to be happy, sad, content or envious of any situation they are in. This is not to say we are unaffected by the forces of socialization or class relations, but individually we have the option. This also means we are continuously conscious of our decisions and able to reflect on and regurgitate them in our musings, which dislocates the possibility of moving through life without regrets.
Instead of moving through time, experiencing each moment and then moving on, we bring time with us as it passes and project our hope and fear into the future. We are able to change how we see the past, how we engage with the present and how we anticipate the future because of the curse of self-consciousness. This means in quiet moments we play scenes over and over, acting them out the way we wish we had. We run scenarios of future events that will never come to pass. We spend altogether too much time in our heads, and too often forget that we interact with the world through our bodies.
The embodied experience of life has a profound experience on how we see and understand the world. Exercising makes us feel better about the world, and our relationships through the biological processes at work. And yet, I spend more time thinking about how to engage with the world then living in the world. Maybe this is the price of being an introvert, but the double edge of self-consciousness is hard for me to balance on.
What does this mean? Maybe I need counselling. Maybe I just need to get out of my head more often. Or maybe, I just need to accept the facts of living and be okay with them.
"Hell is other people." - Sartre
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