Joy and regret of an observer
It seems like due to various factors that I cannot seem to directly enjoy some of the joyful parts of being a human. I don’t seem to get terribly happy when I am with a friend. I seem to be perfectly capable of experiencing pain, uncertainty, fear, and frustration. But I cannot seem to fully enjoy simple things that bring joy in life anymore. Not games, not food, not snowball fights.
I seem to have a great deal of empathy. I can experience all of the emotions watching people experience emotions.
I seem to put a lot of value in considering life to be a mostly solo adventure. I find it poetic to say “the pain is mine; the joy is ours”, and “众人皆醉我独醒，举世皆浊我独清”. I enjoy being different. I enjoy being special.
When I was in school, during New Year parties, I participate in the celebrations. But I enjoyed more staying afterwards to clean up, and talk one-on-one with classmates who seemed to have something to say. At birthday parties, I like to stick with the host when other invitees are off having fun. I seem to prefer being the observer, rather than the participant.
Something that I like to do to wind down is to go people watching: I’d go to a park, pick a bench, and sit all day. I’d look at the 70-year-old couple and be amazed by the love that sustained. I’d look at 5-year-olds running wild and their parents chasing after them and marvel at the circle of life. I’d look at groups of people my age doing things I don’t do, and keep thinking about the fact that we are sentient meat, with emotions and social constructs that seem, for a lack of better word, weird.
I do love all shades of blue sky, sunrise and sunset, oceans and forests
I seem to have a different take on deep human connections (e.g. romance) as well. I don’t consider it to be a permanent thing. I don’t see myself being “soaked in love”; I don’t see myself being devastated when I break up. To me it’s more a temporary partnership. I consider life to be a lonely voyage. Sometimes you come across another ship going in a similar direction, so you two travel together for a bit. But your ship is still yours to run. Sure you can bind the ships together, but when the time is up, you’ll part ways. Whether you are sinking, a storm hit and you lost each other, or simply reached a branch on the map.
To tie everything together, I really want a partner that can observe the world with me. I like being special, but it is mentally taxing. I want a partner who can see what I see, can feel what I feel, can sit quitely with me, watching the happenings happen around us, without being part of it.
To be very honest, I am not fully convinced that I “rationally need” such a partner. I am not sure if you are familiar with Eliezer Yudkowsky’s lonely dissent essay: in essense, being the special one is terrifying, but being the special two is not, which likely stems from survival pressure. To me, being the only observer makes me feel lonely. Having a partner wouldn’t change what I do; but my perception of what I do would go from “I must be crazy and weird” to “I am just, different from the majority”.
Counterintuitively, I seem to subconsciously make finding such a partner difficult. I think the observer type people is not that rare, perhaps one out of every five or ten people. But I think easily finding a partner would imply that I am not that special and different after all; you think you are holding the yellow unbrella, but it was actually black all along.
I used to think that I am like this largely due to the, rather unique experience I had in my teenage years: going to a foreign country alone, not speaking the language well, look different than everyone else, and in summary, “less” than those around me. But now I recall that when I was still in primary school in my home country, I used to enjoy walking on the empty school ground when all other students were in class (I was given special treatment from time to time). I marked my classmates’ homeworks. My formclass teacher even made me lead a group to help the kids who were “falling behind”. I guess I’ve been different since more or less the beginning.
I often fantasize about me walking down the hallway of a grand building. I would hear the echo of my shoes on the marble floor, while the noise made by the people fade away; I fantansize about climbing a great mountain, looking over the world, admiring its beauty; I fantasize about being on an empty beach at night, with the moon and the waves.
I often joke that when my time on Earth is done, I’d get myself a spaceship and dive into the cold, dark, infinite void. I would visit every galaxy, every solar system, every planet. I am like Caesar: veni, vidi, but not vici. I resent how limited human life is, not because there are things that I want to do, but because there are things that I want to see. I am greedy in that I want to see the end of the world.
I used to think that I want to be remembered: that is becoming increasingly imprecise. In want to leave a mark. I want to be part of the history, but I don’t care about whether my name is any part of the history.
Alas, I don’t know why I wrote this.