2025-03-30

I saw this YouTube video earlier, which is about something that have been glossing over my head. The video touches on romantic attraction towards fictional characters but at its core, it delves into the human psyche and our need for external validation. Or to put it more specific, how the self will always require an intersubjective experience.

I do not know the entire hard philosophy regarding this but I assume it is somewhere along the line of epistemology, ontology, and phenomenology. Near at the end of the video, Daryl talks about "Tulpas" which can be roughly defined and likened to "imaginary friends." The point is, there is an online culture surrounding a form of self-delusion also called "reality shifting" that involves intense visualizing, which is to a point, a self-induced hallucination and dissociation that we can describe as a deliberate and intense form of daydreaming.

How is this connected to our need for validation? Well for one, these online communities are seeking a form of reality that they desire, which is, according to them, can be imagined by the mind, allowing them to daydream at will and walk around this world as a conscious being. It is, as if an inverse of lucid dreaming. Tulpas somehow function as a conceptual person in a person's psyche who has its own personality and appearance. Tulpas are deliberately imagined, molded, and "created" by the person in their own mind. They act as the "voice of reason" of even just another person in someone's body sharing the same brain.

In the video, it seemed like these methods are a reaction to either extreme isolation due to social ineptitude or ostracization. They become the response to desire to live in a world that they chose instead of living in a world that doesn't choose them. It deeply caught my attention because somehow, I agree that there might be, in some instances, "different persons" living inside me. But they are not created for a means to escape. They sprung into existence by experiencing the struggles that I have come to address and overcome. They were the result of accepting the challenges of life and proceed to take the right and virtuous path without shortcuts.

Now, I think I must step back because I wouldn't want this to become a "I am different from them because I've dedicated my self-improvements for intellectual pursuit" bullshit. From the previous paragraph, I felt the need to differentiate myself from other people whose intention to "create another person inside their head" is to escape a world that they believe has forsaken them. It could be a defense mechanism or a trauma response, which are also consequences of their life experiences. I must be careful with my cognitive biases.

Well, then perhaps, my interest is rooted on recognizing a similarity in method of how I am trying to improve myself. I know I need this disembodied voice that has always been at the back of my head all along. I have always believed that everyone should have a version of this to help themselves work through a form of suffering that they are going through. But I did feel a melancholic sense of pity upon knowing that such things exist because I know I understand and I cannot blame them for looking for alternative ways of living in this world.