blog.djstead.net

I know that sounds incredibly melodramatic - but it’s the truth. If you haven’t heard the story before; allow me to explain: In May 2012, myself and another friend went to visit our mutual uni friend who now lives in Vietnam. 2 weeks of sun and adventure in the (for me at least) hitherto unexplored East. And it was all going well for the first 5 days; sure the flight was long and the weather was even hotter than I had planned for - but on the Sunday morning we arrived, I was on the G&T by about half 9 in the morning, and we spent the whole day recuperating around the pool. The next few days let us explore Ho Chi Minh further - including a memorable trip to the War Museum {if it wasn’t for what follows, I would still be having nightmares about the not nearly infamous enough ‘Agent Orange’ used by the Americans during the Vietnam War}. And then a few days later we decided to embark on a bike ride in the middle of the country, near Đà Nẵng. And so it was, that

For the first 28 years of my live (well the latter half of those years at any rate) I had life figured out. By challenging everything I knew about the world, philosophically speaking, I came to establish my own Ultimate Philosophy , which views the universe from a central, internal-to-me, point of access and reasons that only I can share my unique view of my world. Now this brings two things: An irrefutable underlying logic to the world that removes me from the widespread perceived notion of an absolute shared existence with other humans. Loneliness. Once you accept that your existence can never be fully shared - ultimately your own universe will collapse in on itself - you logically assume that attempting to share your existience with anyone save your is illogical. For 28 years I have held this view - the only logically possible one when you truly think about it - and became resigned to the fact that I will spend my existence in a smug-to-others, self-controlled bub