I wake up everyday with different feelings about hope. It depends on how well I brush my teeth, how much water I use on my face, and not pulling out a bunch of stranded hairs. More accurately, my hopes rise up when I don't get haunted by an alternate reality, a philosophical collapse, and a freedom awakening that my identity and thrive is the "one true pair."
But everyday I walk on earth, I get more and more despicable. I smile intentionally, but for every millisecond I wonder am I a robotic mind trying to figure out what real desperation feels like or am I a robot thinking that I have a human understanding through tokenizing desperation itself. Some readers at this point might guess that I have an existential burnout, which in my defense, I just wish it was that easy to describe.
Intellectual Exploration
I'm taking topology for my last semester of college. With my eyes half-opened half-closed during the lecture, I found a new way to describe my patterns for passion. I've been losing the excitement for many subjects (or have they ever existed?), and in topological terms, you can say I'm approaching the limit point in my neighborhood of passions.
Feeling like Chidi Anagonye, The Good Place
I've been traveling to many places that are more beautiful than my hometown (especially Istanbul and Prague). I didn't see a pile of stacked trash on the street, dead animals, or the suffocation when I hear the noise moving through air. Yet, parts of me cry out among bunch of stranger faces. I feel warmth yet my body is still shivering.
I feel inexplicable to say something natural to mind yet it's like a tiger walking out of its territorial land. My mind traveled miles/kilometers1 when I first read To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee in 8th grade. Then, it came back to a bunch of racist comments toward my foreign English teacher in middle school, who just happened to be non-white.
I also scored level 55 playing Township the summer before high school. No, I didn't read Plato or Aristotle at that moment, but Township almost got me to become a democratic capitalist. I want everyone in town to do whatever they want, democratically, obviously, and believe that to exploit is to explore. Then, dictatorship propaganda got me; however, I won myself back. But almost everyone told me to stay in the same cage, and it hurts to say I had to sail the boat alone, finding a new intellectual land2.
More than ever?
Fast forward many years, many things still don't make sense to me. I show up to things very often, but I also pull Amelia Earhart the same amount of time.
I entered 2026 with no new goals, because many past goals of 2025 are still carrying me to this year. I have many bulleted lists welcoming 2026 unfinished. Maybe they will go on forever. While my ancestors were busy fighting starvation and diseases, I'm taking up a different approach to life: fighting the hunger of the mind and figuring out how to unclog the intangible garbage.
In 2024, I tried to count how many times I cried. 2025 came and I wanted to count my moral ambiguity instead. However, I did learn that the earth couldn't withhold its own weight without gravity (I knew this fact before, but I took a physics class so shout out to Martin Veillette). Yet, a busy college student in a random town of America thinks they can save the world from falling out of its orbit.
Not many persons want to travel miles physically yet their minds are stuck in the same coordinates. I don't need a software update to my soul, to become more productive, or to jump from ladder to ladder. I can actually crawl if I want to. Characteristic performance is a shared fiction.
Last but not least...
Another thing from Topology, a set is closed iff its complement is open, and vice versa. Trivially, a set can be both closed and open3, which reduces to an empty set ∅ and topological space X. An empty mind is capable of holding infinitely many points. An infinite topological mind can be empty itself. Choose your battle.