Coolness

 Coolness

Coolness is one of my most interesting traits, a trait which I keep or hold tightly within myself, and I always try to verbalise it. Whenever I have an experience, I use it as a means to verbalise this feeling. I take these experiences to abstraction and make coherent sentences to explain this feeling, which I have in me at all times, to others.

I want to give a very weird example of the reason for my complete indifference most of the time, and it’s going to be an interesting journey, starting off with something I heard. We will talk about absurdism, one aspect of it only, where Albert talks about how we don’t want to face this absurd world and hence we like to theorise everything. All our experiences, we try to lead them to abstraction and build theories to make sense of them. But we take it to the extreme, so extreme that the abstract theory supersedes our actual reality and lived experience. Hence, it is the theory which validates our experiences, rather than it being the other way around.

As someone who lives in their head all the time, this was like a slap, because it is so true. What happened today was that I was pissed off for no apparent or real reason, and everything was making me even more annoyed. I prefer isolation when I am not in this state of utter indifference, to deal with it alone, but obviously, we are interrupted by the world itself.

My dad was speaking to me about something, and I was very half-heartedly listening because I didn’t want to hear it at that time, I was pissed. He offered me an egg, which I took, and it was not salted enough, and I felt so pissed off again, no reason, no rationality to explain this, just a lived experience. But along with all of this, I was also feeling guilty, which stems back to India and how it’s deeply embedded in us since birth to respect our elders. Because I was only partially listening and not properly responding to my dad, I was not only pissed off but also simultaneously feeling guilty about it.

Along with these two things, I was also trying to rationalise myself. I was telling myself how I should calm down and that it doesn’t make sense to be pissed off. “Just calm down,” is what I kept telling myself. And as I was playing with these three ideas in my head, the theory struck me, and I thought Albert would have been sad, because the only real thing happening right now was me feeling annoyed, but I was not even feeling it properly for a full second. Because of all these other thoughts I was constantly feeding my brain, that original, real experience I was having was suppressed, removed, changed, or moulded.

And then I started laughing. I think this is how my brain works, because the only thing visible from an outside perspective was me laughing, and this is why I may appear cool all the time. All of this was internal and happened within a span of seconds, and I am already tired that this thing, which was over in 15 seconds, took me so many words to pen down.

My Indian philosopher… fellow? Okay, not fellow, they were great; they are not my fellows. I am obviously very, very below them. But Indian philosophers would have been sad because they could explain their entire philosophy, which takes me so many explanations to grasp, in one to two sentences Check the UPSC philosophy syllabus. By the way, Western philosophy has names like Plato and Aristotle, and Indian philosophy section has Samkhya, Nyaya, Vaisesika. In Indian philosophy, the philosophy is more important than the name. I think this tells us everything we need to know about what India believes in up until now as a civilisation. Plato has such volume in works, such intense thick books which I can use to throw on my enemy, while here my boy Shankaracharya wrote Aham Brahmasmi and summarised his entire depth knowledge. It’s like a maths formula.