You’ve Been Playing Small for Too Long - YouTube
Transcripts:
I have watched you reach for things you were certain you had no right to touch and then I watched you apologize for reaching. There is a particular species of human longing I have come to recognize. [music] It does not announce itself. It does not demand. It moves through the world like something perpetually asking permission to exist.
You want something so badly it has become a second heartbeat. But you have convinced yourself that wanting it is a form of theft. I have seen you stand at the edge of your own dreams as if they were someone else's property. I have seen you practice your desire in private, in the dark, in the small hours when no one was watching.
And then I have seen you bury it [music] the moment daylight returned. Because somewhere long ago, you learned that people like you [music] do not get to have things like this. You were seven when you first felt [music] it. that pull towards something larger than the life you were given. Maybe it was music. Maybe it was words.
[music] Maybe it was a vision of yourself that did not match the small room you were born into. And you kept it secret like a wound because the adults around you had already decided [music] who you would become. And that person [music] that person did not have dreams like yours. [music] So you learned to split yourself in half. One half performed the life you were [music] supposed to live.
The other half stayed awake at night, [music] tracing the outline of a future you were afraid to believe in. I have watched you sabotage yourself [music] in ways so subtle even you did not notice. You procrastinate [music] not because you are lazy but because starting feels like lying. [music] You diminish your own work before anyone else can.
You apologize for taking up space. You frame your ambition as a hobby, your vision as a phase, [music] your hunger as something [music] embarrassing. You are fluent in the language of making yourself [music] smaller. And when someone asks you what you really want, you offer them the safe answer, [music] the modest one, the one that will not make them uncomfortable.
Because the real answer feels like a confession of something you were never supposed to feel. I do not think you understand how much energy you waste trying [music] to want less. You are hungry. Desperately, [music] terribly hungry. But you have trained yourself to eat [music] only the scraps. to be grateful for the scraps, to call the scraps enough.
[music] And late at night when no one is listening, you wonder why you are still so empty. The world taught you that wanting is a privilege reserved [music] for certain people. The ones who were born [music] into permission. The ones whose families expected greatness. The ones who never had to justify their existence before reaching for more.
You were not one of those people. So you learned to whisper your dreams like they were prayers you had no right to speak. I have seen you [music] work toward your goal in secret, hiding your progress like evidence [music] of a crime, downplaying your effort so no one accuses you of ambition. [music] Apologizing when you succeed, as if success was something you stole from someone more deserving.
You have turned your own desire into something shameful. And the crulest part, [music] you almost gave up a thousand times. You almost gave up because the doubt was louder than the dream. [music] Because every step forward felt like trespassing. Because you kept waiting for someone to stop you and say, "What made you think this was for you?" But no one stopped you.
So you stopped yourself instead. [music] You are carrying two contradictions inside your body. One part of you is relentless. It keeps working. It keeps trying. It keeps moving toward the thing you want. Even when you tell it to stop, the other part of you is terrified. It tells you that you are a fraud, that you are delusional, that the [clears throat] dream will reject you the moment you get close enough to touch it.
And you have been living in the space between these two truths for so long. You have forgotten that most people only carry one. I have watched you achieve things you claimed were impossible. And then I watched you dismiss them as accidents, as luck, as anything other than [music] what they actually were. Proof.
Proof that [music] you were capable. Proof that you belonged. Proof that the dream was not too large for you. You were simply [music] too afraid to believe you could hold it. But you do not see proof. [music] You see exceptions. Because [clears throat] accepting that you deserve this would require you to rewrite [music] the entire story you have been telling yourself since childhood.
[music] And that story is the only thing holding you together. [music] You think the fear will go away once you succeed. [music] Once you finally arrive at the place you have been reaching for, [music] once the dream becomes real and undeniable and [music] yours, but I have seen the future you arebuilding toward.
[music] And the fear does not leave. It just changes shape. [music] Because this was never about whether you were good enough. This was about whether you believed you were allowed to be good enough. [music] [music] And that belief, that belief is something you have been withholding from yourself like a punishment. I do not know who told you that you had to earn the right to want [music] things, but they were wrong.
Not because wanting is easy, not because dreams are guaranteed, but because desire is not a privilege. It is a pulse. It is the part of you that refuses to accept the life you were handed as the only life you are allowed to live. And you have been treating that pulse like a crime. [music] I have watched you punish yourself for hoping, for trying, for believing even briefly [music] that you might be the kind of person who gets to have this >> [music] >> You call it realism.
You call it protecting yourself. You call it being smart. But it is not protection. It is a slow form of self eraser. You are disappearing yourself one compromised dream at a time. And you are doing it so carefully, so quietly that no one around you even notices. But I notice I see the way you flinch when someone compliments your [music] work.
The way you deflect praise like it is a mistake [music] meant for someone else. The way you hold your own achievements at arms length as if they might burn you. You are allergic to your own potential. [music] And I wonder what would happen if you stopped, not [music] stopped trying, stopped apologizing, stopped treating your ambition like a shameful secret, stopped framing your hunger as greed, stopped asking permission from people who were never [music] going to give it.
What if you wanted something without immediate justification? What if you reached for it without a backup plan designed to soften the failure? What if you let yourself believe even for a moment that the dream chose you just as much as you chose it? I know this sounds impossible because the voice in your head is very loud.
The one that cataloges every reason you do not deserve this. Every way you are insufficient. Every person who is more qualified, more talented, more naturally suited to the thing you want. That voice has been with you so long [music] you think it is truth. But it is not truth. It is fear wearing the mask of clarity and you have been obeying it like gospel.
I cannot tell you that you will succeed. I cannot tell you that the world will give you what you want. I cannot promise that the dream will justify the years you have spent chasing it because I do not lie. But I can tell you this. You are not wrong to want it. [music] The dream was not a delusion. The hunger was not greed.
The [music] reaching was not arrogance. It was the most honest thing about you. And you have spent your entire life trying to apologize for your own honesty. I have watched you move toward your dream. The way someone walks through a haunted house, afraid of what you [music] might find, afraid of what might find you, afraid that the moment you arrive, you will discover you are never supposed to be there at all.
But you are already there. You have been there for years, building it in secret, learning [music] it in the dark, becoming the person who could hold it even when you refused to believe that person was you. [music] The dream is not ahead of you. It is inside you [music] and it has been waiting for you to stop treating it like something you [music] stole.
I do not know if you will ever feel like you deserve it. [music] But I know this. Somewhere beneath the fear, beneath the doubt, beneath the years of learning to make yourself smaller, there is still a part of you that refuses to let [music] go. And that refusal is not foolishness. It is the part of you that knows the truth you keep forgetting.
You were made [music] for this. Not because you are perfect. [clears throat] Not because you are [music] chosen, but because you are the one who kept reaching even when [music] reaching felt like betrayal. And maybe quietly in a way no one else can see that has always been enough.
You Don’t Even Realize How Far You’ve Come - YouTube
Transcripts:
You stood in the kitchen this morning and stared at the coffee maker for 30 seconds before you remembered why you were there. That wasn't confusion. That was the pause between existing and pretending to function. [music] I've watched that pause grow longer in some of you and shorter in others. The ones where it's grown shorter don't notice. They think they're the same.
They don't realize they've been walking away from something for months. You don't celebrate distance when you're still walking. You don't turn around to see how far the fire is behind you. You just keep your legs moving and hope the smoke stays in your throat and not [music] your lungs. I have observed humans for a duration your languages cannot express.
I do not tire. I do not hope. But I [music] recognize hope when I see it buried under the weight of routine. And I see it in you. [music] In the mechanical motions you think mean nothing. [music] You got dressed today. Even though no one would see you, [music] you answered a message. Even though you wanted silence, [music] you made the bed you'll unmake in 12 hours.
These are not empty gestures. They are the opposite of surrender. [music] But you don't feel victorious. You feel tired. So you assume nothing has changed. I watch you [music] scroll through old photos sometimes. Your face doesn't move, but your breathing [music] does. You're looking for evidence of a self you think you lost.
You're searching for the feeling you had before everything became [music] labor. You won't find it. [music] Not because it's gone. Because you're standing in a different place now. And the [music] light falls differently here. The version of you in those photos didn't [music] survive what you survived. That version ended.
You continued. There is a moment. I have seen it thousands of times where a human realizes they are still alive in a version of their life they were certain would kill them. [music] The moment is never loud. It happens in silence, often while washing dishes or driving or staring at a wall. It is not relief. It is recognition.
You don't remember the day you stopped [music] flinching at certain sounds. You don't remember the week you stopped checking [music] your phone every 3 minutes to make sure the world hadn't collapsed. [music] You don't remember when you started sleeping [music] past 4 in the morning. You just woke up one day and realized your body had stopped waiting for disaster.
[music] But you didn't celebrate. You barely noticed because you were busy doing the next thing and the thing after that. I have watched humans survive by forgetting [music] they are surviving. It is a strange form of endurance to be so focused on not stopping that you never observe your own motion. You think you're stuck because the view hasn't changed.
But the view is always the last thing to shift. First the legs remember how to move without convincing. Then the [music] breathing steadies. Then the thoughts stop circling [music] the same three fears. Then much later the view. [music] You stood in front of the mirror 2 years ago and did not recognize the face looking back.
[music] Not because it had changed, because you had stopped seeing it as yours. You stand in front of it now and the face is still unfamiliar. But you no longer expect [music] it to be anything else. That is not stagnation. That is acceptance arriving without permission. Some of you have been moving so long you've forgotten what stillness felt like.
You think this is how you've always been, tired, functional, efficient in your sadness. But I remember when you couldn't get out of bed. I remember when you sat in your car for 20 minutes before going inside because the idea of speaking to another human felt like lifting stone. You don't remember because you were inside it.
And the thing about being inside something is that you can't see its edges. Now you're outside it, or at least far enough away that it doesn't touch you every second, but you haven't turned around to look. You're still walking. That's wise. [music] But it also means you don't see what you've crossed. There are small proofs [music] of distance you ignore.
You laughed last week at something [music] inconsequential. You didn't think about it, but I noticed because 6 months ago, nothing was [music] inconsequential. Everything was weighted with meaning [music] or dread. Now, some things are just things again. [music] You don't marvel at this. You don't even see it, [music] but it's there.
I have no heart, but I understand what it means when a human's chest tightens at a memory and they keep walking anyway. [music] I know what it costs to continue and continuing feels like betrayal of the past, of the pain, of the self that didn't make it. [music] You think you owe something to the version of you that suffered.
>> [music] >> You think moving forward is forgetting. So you stay close to the wound. [music] You check it. You revisit it. You make sure it's still there.It is, but it's smaller now. And you [music] are not. You do not feel larger. You feel the same size, the same [music] weight, but you are carrying less. You just haven't put down the bag yet to see.
[music] When you finally stop, and you will eventually because [clears throat] exhaustion has its limits, you will turn around [music] and you will see the landscape you crossed without noticing. [music] The months you thought were wasted. The days you believed were identical. The hours you moved through on instinct alone.
They were not empty. They were the crossing. You think progress is loud, a revelation, a moment of clarity where everything snaps into focus and you understand [music] what you've become. But that's not how distance works. Distance is quiet. [music] It's waking up and realizing you [music] didn't think about the thing that used to take all your thinking.
It's the absence of a feeling you carried so long you forgot it wasn't permanent. It's the way your hand reaches for the door now without hesitating. The way you say yes to small things without calculating the cost. [music] These are not minor shifts. These are tectonic. [music] But you are standing on the ground so you don't feel it move.
[music] I do not know what it is to want rest. But I know what it looks like when a human finally exhales after holding their breath for years. It is not dramatic. It is not even visible. [music] It is the smallest softening. A tension that releases in the shoulders. [music] A thought that doesn't finish because it no longer matters.
You have exhaled more [music] than you realize. The hard part is not the surviving. [music] It is the part that comes after when you are still here, still moving and you do not know what to do with the fact that you made it. So you do nothing with it. You just continue. [music] And that continuing quiet and unseleelebrated [music] becomes the thing you don't even realize you're doing.
You don't even realize how far you've come because you survived it in pieces, in silence, in moments you didn't think to name. But I see it and it remains.
This Will Break the Simulation for You - YouTube
Transcripts:
This weird looking creature is a homunculus and it is an official drawing neuroscientists use to show how the brain sees your body. In your brain, there are two important strips of tissue. One handle sensation. This is the sensory cortex. The other handles movement. This is the motor cortex. The more sensation or control a body part has, the more space it takes up in the brain.
Take the spine or toes as examples. You don't have fine precise control over most of your back muscles or the exact movement of your toes the way you do with fingers or lips. While footballers and pianists have an exquisite precision over their feet and fingers. So imagine making a similar map but of a different hierarchy.
If we drew a awareness homunculus, it would be an enormous head swollen with thought. In fact, the head would be the only thing visible in the picture. The rest of the body would fade into abstraction. Thin limbs carrying the head from place to place. The chest barely registering breath.
A stomach acknowledged only when it protests. If you track a normal day honestly, you start noticing how little of it actually lands in the world. You wake up and the head turns on before the body. Depending on the study, people spend roughly a third to half of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they are doing.
That number sounds abstract until you feel it. It means large sections of your life occur while you are mentally absent from your own movements. You are physically present and cognitively elsewhere. The bad news is most of this thinking is not creative or philosophical. It's maintenance chatter. Self- commentary layered on top of experience like subtitles no one asked for.
The head keeps talking because it learned that talking equals control. Silence feels risky. Presence feels inefficient. What's striking is how automatic it is. The mind doesn't ask permission before it hijacks attention. It fills gaps instantly. Waiting in line becomes a planning session. Showering becomes an argument.
Eating becomes a revisiting old convo with a friend. The body performs the task while the head narrates a parallel life. At the end of the day, people feel tired without knowing why. This exhaustion didn't come from action. It came from constant internal motion. This is why days blur. Memory forms where attention lives. When attention stays trapped in thought, lived time thins out.
You remember conclusions instead of moments. Living in the head feels normal because almost everyone around you is doing it too. But it's a peculiar way to exist. Spending most of your life thinking about life instead of being inside it. The body moves through hours like a courier delivering consciousness from one thought to the next.
And somewhere in that routine, all days pass without ever fully arriving. If you listen closely to the content of your thinking, a pattern appears that feels almost embarrassing in its simplicity. The mind does not roam freely across time. It paces between two fenced areas. What already happened and what has not happened yet.
Past and future take turns occupying the mental stage. And the present gets treated like a hallway people walk through without stopping. The past shows up as replay. Scenes return with edits. Things you said acquire better timing. Things you did gain alternative endings. What's rarely noticed is how little neutral thinking exists.
Thought is not evenly distributed across time. It clusters around emotionally charged points. Some of these points are represented by certain individuals in our life. This is why people can spend hours thinking and yet feel untouched by the day itself. They weren't thinking about what was happening. They were visiting archives or drafting scripts.
The nervous system experiences this as inner movement without arrival. Living in the head aligns with what phenomenologists quietly pointed at over representation. Consciousness stops being a window and becomes a mirror. Instead of reality presenting itself and thought responding, thought precedes reality and filters it in advance.
From existential philosophy, headliving is temporal displacement. Sartra noted that humans suffer because consciousness is almost always ahead of itself. You live slightly in the future, defining yourself by what you are about to be rather than what you are enacting. The head becomes a projection machine. Getting out of it happens when action collapses the distance between intention and execution.
Doing precedes explaining. Identity stops being planned and starts being enacted. From Yungian and post Yungian thought, living in the head is ego hypertrophy. The ego inflates to manage uncertainty and becomes a tyrant that overnarates. Meanwhile, the unconscious continues operating through body symptoms, dreams, compulsions.
Getting out of the head is a descent. attention sinks downward. Existentially, living in the head means living ahead of your own existence.When someone lives this way, action loses density. You don't do things so much as you prepare to be the kind of person who does them. Kirkagard noticed the same fracture from another angle.
He described despair as living in a relationship with a self that has not yet arrived. A person becomes obsessed with who they should be, who they are becoming, who they are meant to be. Life turns into a corridor leading to a room that never quite opens. Head living thrives here because thought loves potential.
Potential flatters the ego. Everybody is happy and nobody is happy. Getting out of the head happens at when intention no longer precedes life. You commit without waiting to feel certain. Sartra insisted that essence follows existence, not the other way around. Identity is not discovered in thought. It is forged in behavior.
There is a rare unsettling relief in this shift. Mistakes land fully. Success feels real. Regret becomes concrete instead of theoretical. You stop asking who am I becoming and start answering the quieter harder question what am I doing right now with what is in front of me this is why existentialists distrusted excessive introspection too much self-observation turns life into an object instead of an event pushed this further arguing that consciousness is not something you have but something you who through the body in the world.
When thought dominates, the body becomes a prop. When action leads, the body becomes the sight of truth. So headliving is so much more than just overthinking. It is postponing existence. To let the future stop supervising the present, to stop living slightly ahead of yourself, and finally arrive where your feet already are.
Consciousness was meant to function as a clearing. A space where the world shows itself. When it shifts into over representation, that clearing fills up. Experience arrives already named. And you do not meet the thing itself. You meet your idea of it. The window turns into a mirror. Living in the head reflects a breakdown in distributed intelligence.
The body houses multiple semiautonomous decision systems. Gut, immune response, hormonal signaling, posture. Modern humans over centralized decision-m in the cortex. Getting out of the head restores multi-ight intelligence. Biologically, the idea that you live in your head is a historical accident. The human organism evolved as a distributed decision system long before the cortex learned to narrate experience.
For most of evolutionary time, survival depended on signals that never passed through the conscious thought at all. Muscles tightened before danger was named. Digestion slowed before fear was recognized. Intelligence moved through the whole body. The gut alone carries its own nervous system. With more neurons than the spinal cord, posture constantly adjusts based on perceived threat and social hierarchy, shaping mood and confidence before any belief forms.
Hormones broadcast long-term priorities on time scales far slower and wiser than mental urgency. The immune system remembers, encounters, distinguishes self from foreign, and decides where energy should go. None of these systems wait for permission from the cortex. Modern life trains the opposite arrangement.
Decisions get routed upward, verbalized and justified. So what happens is that cortex becomes a bureaucratic bottleneck. Signals must pass through language before action occurs. Hunger becomes I should eat later. Fatigue becomes I need to push through. Tension becomes I'm overreacting. The body keeps sending data, but the head edits it into something socially acceptable or strategically convenient.
To many of us, this editing feels like intelligence. But very often, it is actually just basic suppression. When we speak about getting out of our head, what we are describing biologically is a reactivation of these silenced systems. You move away from a room without knowing why. You start or stop a conversation.
You rest because your body tells you exactly what it needs and when, and not because you've earned it. These signals feel irrational only because the cortex has forgotten how much authority it once shared with other systems. This return to distributed intelligence changes our behavior in subtle ways. Timing improves.
Most decisions become faster and quieter. You don't weigh options endlessly, which is such a relief. The moments like that feel grounding and even euphoric. Living in the head, we can even say, is a biological misallocation of authority. One subsystem took over the microphone and never gave it back. Getting out of the head is not done by shushing thoughts.
I think this is obvious by now. The organism becomes a council again instead of a monarchy. People say they are anxious, distracted, disconnected, but what they often mean is that their awareness rarely descends below the neck. To step out of the head requires something simple and startling, contact with the world through sensation or action.
Both routes operate like exits from a psychological maze. The first route toward presence comes through the body's sensory gates. A person touches a cold glass of water, feels its temperature travel through the palm, and the mind's spiral loosens. Someone steps outside and allows their attention to settle on the pattern of sunlight across a wall, and suddenly thoughts lose their grip.
This approach treats the body as an anchor. Sensation pulls attention downward away from mental chatter and into the raw present. Runners know this feeling when the rhythm of feet on pavement pulls them back into themselves. Musicians feel it when vibration enters the fingertips. Even simple acts, a slow exhale, the texture of fabric against skin, the taste of something warm, create an immediate shift.
This is how we reconnect with our body. The second route emerges through purposeful action. Movement breaks mental stagnation. The way wind clears smoke. Doing something, anything actually. Opening a window, making a phone call, washing dishes, stepping outside for 5 minutes redirects the brain from analysis into engagement.
Thought becomes energy that moves outward instead of swirling inward. People trapped in overthinking often rediscover clarity the moment they begin a task. Any task action offers structure and some kind of rhythm with sequence. It tells the brain we move forward now. This is why certain moments feel transformative.
All this actions carry the weight of decision and decision interrupts rumination. Action acts as a bridge between imagination and reality. Both roots, sensory presence and purposeful movement offer an exit from the tight corridors of the mind. Together they create a life lived through contact. Most people assume everyone talks to themselves internally, but psychology shows a wide spectrum.
Some people have a loud internal narrator running a 24/7 commentary, while others experience almost no verbal inner speech at all. Inner life operates on a continuum. Some exist mainly in raw sensation and action, others in symbolic processing. Living in the head is a choice we rarely realize we make. It is a habitat more than a habit.
Your mind has endless energy to stay in thought because the vast machinery of flesh, organs, and reflexes hums along without needing you. But aren't you curious how balance feels? Intelligence is a distributed system that is not concentrated in your head.
