@crowley
you come face to face with the fact that life isn’t always rosy. you learn that the things you used to say “that’ll never happen to me” about can one day come knocking on your door. you realize that even the life you trust the most can fall apart in an instant, and sometimes you might have to start from zero. and the most critical point: at the end of the day, when everyone disperses and goes back to their own lives, the only thing a person is left with is themselves. instead of waiting for a savior, you learn how to pull yourself together on your own.
studies showing people who knowingly take sugar pills still get real symptom relief. told them upfront "this is a placebo, it has no active ingredients" and it still worked for pain, anxiety, depression symptoms. shouldn't make sense. entire point of placebo was that people thought they were getting real medicine. turns out the ritual of taking something and the expectation of improvement is enough even when you know it's fake. some doctors now prescribing "open label placebos" where they're completely honest about it. patients agree to try it knowing full well there's nothing in the pill. works anyway for certain conditions. brain is doing something we don't fully understand. the act of treatment itself triggers physiological changes regardless of whether the treatment is "real." mind-body connection is stronger than we thought. pharmaceutical companies probably hate this research. imagine explaining to investors that honesty about pills doing nothing works almost as well as the actual drug
quantum particles existing in multiple states until you measure them. schrödinger's cat and all that. the weird part isn't that we don't understand it. the weird part is it consistently works in experiments. particles genuinely seem to be in two places at once until observed.physicists have mostly accepted this and moved on to building quantum computers with it. philosophers still arguing about what it means for reality. probably will be forever.my favorite interpretation is "shut up and calculate" which is basically physicists saying the math works so stop asking why. very satisfying for practical purposes, deeply unsatisfying for understanding what's actually happening.
