[Griff]

Originally Posted by Flint

Once upon a time, when I was at the lowest point of my life, and was so desperate and hopeless that my loneliness outweighed my desire for privacy--a rare occasion--so I decided to do something I never do--I opened up and shared several years worth of extremely painful and humiliating personal experiences, just opened up the floodgates.

So many of the people of the Cellar were so supportive. People shared their perspective and similar experiences and helped me to feel that I was part of a community--something I didn't have at that time in my real life.

However, there was one person that took my vulnerability as an opportunity to make an off-the-cuff, extremely demeaning and personally hurtful comment directed at me. It stuck with me. I thought about it a lot because it played into my total lack of self-worth. I stopped coming to the Cellar--it was the place that a very hurtful thing happened to me, and I didn't have any more capacity to be hurt. I literally thought about coming back to the Cellar but made a conscious decision not to.

So, I was not part of a community anymore. Years passed, I tried coming back to the Cellar, on occasion, but never really re-integrated. Along the way I made some dick moves and made people mad. I take responsibility for that part. But I also felt like nobody remembered who I was or valued me as a person anymore, because so much time had passed.

Originally Posted by Undertoad

It turns out all of humanity is just a bunch of apes, and our ape behavioral instincts are deeply fucking us up.

Our DNA tells us how to behave, because for some 100,000 years, life was brutal and the only behavior that was passed on was those of successful humans.

Humans succeeded by gathering into tribes. It was those humans who lived and reproduced their DNA.

We believe we need the tribe in order to survive. So, we need the validation of the tribe.

Then, we need to protect the tribe from weakness, and determine roles and ranking. In order to do that, we will provoke battles. Bitter fights will occur. Recasting of the tribe will happen.

But all that doesn't exactly map out in modern civilization. Here, and everywhere in life, we are weirdly doing all this without even realizing it. We don't really need to any more, it's not helpful and it seems to often prevent us from moving forward and finding truths. But it's built-in...

We really need the space aliens to come so we can be one tribe against the universe. Of course that prolly won't work out in the long run.

Thanks for the sanity fellas.