2025: A reflection.
Isolating for Socializing
This is the year I have had the most social interactions and, at the same time, the strongest compulsion toward isolation. I cannot ignore the correlation, even if I wanted to.
Isolation is a mechanism I have used for as long as I can remember. I withdraw from everything and reduce my interactions to an almost non-existent level, not to perform a trendy aversion to socialization, nor to cling to the “coolest” personality archetype like a brooding junior school kid, but to reset and refresh in order to socialize again.
This has always helped.
I have come to believe, reinforced by lived experience, that healthy socialization is one that is naturally unimposing. You lose yourself, not mindlessly, but in a way where your mind is less burdened with the act of rightly being at that moment. A form of socialization that feels like home.
Nothing is really that deep.
Except the things that are. That God is One and the Prophet is His final messenger. That Hell is real, Paradise is real, as are the afterlife and the Day of Reckoning. That a significant portion of religion is a form of objective truth. That Palestine is Palestine, and that the “entity” and all that constitutes it epitomizes lowliness in every sense.
Everything else, mostly, is subjective and relative. Nothing is really that deep. Like nothing really.
That you are hurt, or that you cared for someone, or someone cared for you. That you are rich or impoverished. That you argued with someone online, or that you have a certain number of followers. That you have immense potential, speak well, write well. That you are strategic, perspicaciously insightful, that you have figured everything out, or that you are still undoing the cobwebs clouding your vision. That you are better, better than everyone else. Or that you are extroverted or a brooding introvert. That you are a chronic social media consumer, or that you abstain like a Sufi scholar preparing for khalwah, only this time eternal.
None of this is really that deep.
As I write this, an assessment follows. I do not believe this conclusion comes from cynicism or pessimism. Perhaps it comes from a place of observant reality, the ability to appropriately trivialize the indeed trivializable. To recognize that if these things were stripped away from us, life would not become unlivable, nor would they metamorphose a person into a dweller of Hell.
And hunger too, hunger too is very real.
Meanings are attributed.
From this follows the real question. What is deep? What is actually meaningful to us?
If nothing is inherently deep, then meaning is something we assign. We must not, therefore, expect, much less compel, others to accept our attribution of meaning to something that was barely meaningful until we gave it one.
Let others exercise the same act, to attribute their own meanings to things as well.
Unironically, this piece is.
Happiness Is the Next Best Thing.
No proper thoughts on this yet.
We have seen people be deeply happy on the inside, yet their faces remain inexpressive of the feeling. But happiness that is expressed, seeing people giggly, loud, openly happy, is an addictive sight. It is a beautiful thing to witness.
This is less about what people do and more about admitting what I have enjoyed this year. I would not even count myself as someone who falls into that category.
On the other hand, happiness that is unexpressed is still happiness. But I have to admit that I have not enjoyed that kind, at least not one I could see.
Do Whatever You Like, Think However You Want.
Yes, simple. No one really cares, except the people who do. If the expectations of those people matter to you, then maybe rethink it. And if obedience to God matters to you, then abstain from it.
But even that is a wrong presumption of the phrase. “Do whatever you like, think however you want” is more about not caring about the things that truly do not matter. The insignificant things that hold you down in being a certain way or pursuing a certain life.
Now meaning is indeed attributed. Insignificance is now defined by you.
Incompatibility Is a New One
I have a very pointed way of vetting people. I can usually tell what kind of relationship could be born, how much comfort I would be conceding, and the general dynamics of the relationship to come. I interact with people very intentionally.
But nothing really prepares you for incompatibility.
It does not ring alarm bells during the vetting process, because it is usually not just about them or just about you. It is both of you. Incompatibility is the consequence of two or more people coming together. It is a state of the relationship itself.
It is rarely about one person being insistently sinister or the other being rigidly intolerable. It simply is. It is the existence of a dynamic that does not work. It is an anomaly.
Incompatibility is very new to me. I always thought I was malleable enough to accommodate whatever another person brought, or that I could not be bothered to the point of suffocation. But I learned.
Indecision: An Advice
There is a YouTube channel I have come across often enough to explore its content. The host goes around asking people almost existential questions. One of them is, “What is the one thing you regret in life?”
One man answered, “Indecision.”
I have held on to that ever since. It is almost as though I had never really understood the word before. I had never considered the weight of it, that I could hesitate long enough to lose what was rightly mine and regret it forever.
Being decisive is not a holy grail. But what I like about it is this: even if I am meant to lose something, I lose it quickly or on time, so I barely feel it.
And if I am meant to take ownership of something, it becomes mine just as quickly.