In Which I Get Very Philosophical

Do you ever say "No one cares" or "What are you talking about? Everyone  loves (chocolate/bacon/cheesecake/other food here)"? Or something of that sort?
I do. All the time. I'll probably do it within this post accidentally. (I almost just typed "everyone does," but then I caught myself).
Most people do.
Of course, there are exceptions to everyone liking bacon, and no one caring. In fact, whenever I say that, usually there are people who care quite a lot.
But the point is: why do we do that? Don't we move past that stage at some point in our childhood? I am of course referring to the stage where we are the only "real" thing in the universe. "I can't see them, so they can't see me." The stage where we only write stories in which the main character is ourselves. Now don't get me wrong. I quite often have stories in which my main characters are similar to me. But at least now I (we) try to distance ourselves from them. We give them different names, for one thing. We invent characters for them to be friends with that don't actually exist. But at the same time, they are our mirrors, to a point. Fun house mirrors, that distort us enough that we can ignore the fact that we're looking at ourselves. I am, of course, referring only to myself, and using "we" because I'm the only real person in the universe. Sorry. You are all fake. :)

But maybe you identify with what I'm saying.

But enough about characters. I don't want to talk about them. I want to talk about people.

Quote: "Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."

I know you guys are real. And you know I'm real (well, I hope you do). Theoretically. But saying statements like those at the beginning is proof that we don't. Not really. This is why we're surprised by people's actions. We forget to imagine them as complex human beings like ourselves, instead of simple robots following simple programs. That should really be a theme in Clockwork, actually. Robots would make a good metaphor for something like that. (I hate when I get good ideas like that that require enormous amounts of editing to integrate).

So what if I propose this:

The goal of the individual is to, over the course of life, come to understand others as independent like-beings, as opposed extensions of the self, and to love them anyway.

Why do we get mad when people don't give us/let us do what we want? Is it because we can't understand why that person doesn't want us to have it? They are us, after all.

This post is going in a very different direction than what I originally intended.

Do we get angry only when we are confronted with the fact that someone is not us?

I was watching Furturama, and Bender got a sex-change to be a FemBot in order to win gold medals. A celebrity robot fell in love with him/her, and kept saying how he/she "understood the male mind." Did he love him/her so much because he was a mind he could understand in a female body? Do we really only love ourselves (at first, anyway)?

So is learning to unconditionally love someone different from you a sign of maturation? Or is it perfectly fine to love someone who happens to be rather similar to yourself? I happen to lean toward the second, but maybe the first is true as well. That's why I'm asking.

My, I'm being philosophical today. I even tackled "the meaning of life." Worship me in all of my glory, for I am the only True Being in this universe, and you are all reflections of Me. So love Me, for how can you not? You are of Me. MUHAHAHAHAHA. That sounded like an attack on Christianity. Sorry if I offended anyone. I didn't mean for it to be that way. Yet I don't erase it. Why? Because maybe I did mean it. It's hard to know.

Oh, and what if someone hates themselves? What then? Does hating the world really just mean you hate yourself?

I mean, this is the main reason my mom gets mad at me. I refuse to "be her" in a given situation, and so get in trouble. So when we talk about whether or not we want a clone, and I say "no, I don't want a clone," maybe I do want a clone. But then again, if there was another me, we'd have to compete for copyrights, and who has to do what, and role in society/family, and romance (because we'd naturally fall in love with the same person, since we'd be the same person)...so maybe I don't want a clone. **such a quandry**

I'm going to go to bed now, like I should have awhile ago.