I have said that I was the most ordinary faux extraordinary person there ever was.
No one has agreed with me and that makes me wonder how quiet the inside of their heads are.
Being human is not for the weak.
Shall we pick at my cognitive illusions?
From the inside, everyone feels ordinary. Consciousness has no contrast setting. You are immersed in your own thoughts the way a fish is immersed in water, so your mental weather feels like baseline reality rather than something distinctive. Meanwhile you only ever encounter other people through their outputs β speech, behaviour, style, choices β which are highly compressed summaries of what is happening internally.
You live inside the noise. You observe everyone elseβs surface.
This creates a persistent perceptual distortion: your inner world feels dense, loud, effortful, while other people appear comparatively streamlined. It is very easy for a reflective, mentally active person to look around and conclude, βHow are they all soβ¦ calm? So certain? So untroubled by the constant cognitive circus?β
But subjective silence is largely invisible from the outside. A person can look composed while their mind is a pinball machine. Another can look chaotic while experiencing remarkable internal stillness. There is no reliable behavioural marker for βhow loud a mind is.β
Human brains are unreliable narrators about this because introspection lacks reference points. You cannot directly sample another consciousness to calibrate your experience. So your mental intensity feels like a weird personal anomaly when it is actually a common feature of being a nervous system that models reality, time-travels mentally, simulates futures, replays memories, and generates endless commentary.
The brain is not built for peace and quiet. It is built for prediction and error detection. It chatters because chatter is survival machinery.
My βordinary faux extraordinaryβ line: Most people experience themselves as deeply unremarkable internally and vaguely complicated externally. Every life feels normal from within its own continuity. The extraordinary quality we perceive in others often comes from distance, not from any dramatic difference in cognitive architecture.
And βbeing human is not for the weakβ is less melodrama than biology. A system that can imagine disasters, regret the past, simulate social judgment, construct identity, and worry about meaning is carrying an absurd computational load. Consciousness is a spectacularly strange arrangement β a universe briefly aware of itself and then burdened with grocery lists, social anxiety, and the memory of embarrassing things said in 2009.
Nearly everyone suspects their own mind is uniquely exhausting while assuming others have somehow been issued a simpler model of existence.
It is not easy for anyone. Not even theΒ ΓΌber-rich in their walled off, pristine existences. Jim Morrison told us that no one here gets out alive and we all know that.
Our playing field is the same and we are all heading in the same direction. Some of sprinting, some are crawling but we are all going the same way.
It is in some of our natures to want to help the crawling, slow moving types even if they do not ask.
Some others will kick them thinking it will benefit them somehow.
No matter how we walk that field, we are all walking the same distance to the same destination.
Mortality is the great equaliser, the one contract nobody negotiates their way out of. Bank accounts, status markers, carefully gated lifestyles β none of these repeal biology. Every human nervous system is running on the same fragile hardware, just decorated differently.
The mind loves to imagine radically different playing fields because the surface differences are so loud. Wealth, beauty, power, misfortune β they dominate perception. Yet underneath the costumes, every person is subject to decay, uncertainty, loss, and the slightly absurd condition of being aware that all of this is temporary. Even the most insulated life cannot outsource existential vulnerability.
This shared trajectory is not poetic exaggeration. It is a structural feature of being alive.
Where things get psychologically interesting is in the divergence of responses to this condition. Some people feel a gravitational pull toward the struggling, almost reflexively. Others react with avoidance, irritation, even hostility. The variation is not random; it grows from temperament, past experiences, fear thresholds, and deeply ingrained models of how the world works.
Helping behaviour, especially unsolicited helping, is a curious phenomenon. It often springs from genuine empathy, but it can also carry subtler motives β discomfort with witnessing distress, identification with the vulnerable, a need for coherence in oneβs moral self-image. None of these are inherently sinister; they are just part of the messy circuitry of social mammals trying to regulate both their own emotions and their social environment.
The darker counterpart (kicking others while they are down) has its own psychological roots. Fear of scarcity, status anxiety, projection of oneβs own insecurities, or the ancient primate reflex of distancing from perceived weakness. Humans rarely experience these impulses as cruelty from the inside. They feel like justification, self-protection, βrealism.β
From a sufficiently wide lens, both reactions are responses to the same underlying discomfort: vulnerability is contagious at the level of imagination. Seeing someone struggle forces a confrontation with oneβs own precarity. Some move closer. Some move away. Some lash out.
But the destination remains stubbornly non-negotiable. No acceleration lane, no cosmic VIP exit, no secret trapdoor for the well-connected. The existential geometry is fixed. Every life spans the same fundamental distance β birth to death β regardless of how wildly different the scenery looks along the way.
This realisation has an odd ethical side effect. If the endpoint is shared and unavoidable, then the meaning of the walk subtly shifts. The competitive frame (βhow do I get ahead?β) starts to look slightly surreal. Ahead of what, exactly? Toward where? The race metaphor collapses under its own logic.
Which leaves the only domain where differences actually accumulate weight: the quality of experience along the path, both oneβs own and that of others. Not in some grand moralistic sense, but in the very literal, moment-to-moment texture of conscious life. The universe is strangely indifferent to our hierarchies, yet exquisitely sensitive to lived experience β suffering feels like suffering regardless of socioeconomic packaging.
Humans keep rediscovering this, generation after generation, as if it were shocking new information rather than the oldest fact in the room.
