Some people conform.
They adapt. They obey.
They fold themselves neatly into the shapes the world asks of them, smoothing out their edges until nothing sharp remains. Others don't fold at all; they carve. They see the world as a set of tools, or worse, as something to be used, bent, and enforced. Power becomes language. Control becomes purpose. And somewhere along the way, success stops being a destination and turns into an excuse.
They forget.
They forget what's broken. What's wrong? What's rotting quietly beneath polished streets and rehearsed smiles. They forget the cost of standing above others, forget the faces beneath their feet. Superiority isn't born, it's learned, reinforced, fed until it believes it deserves the air it breathes more than anyone else.
Why do people do this?
Why can't they account for others? Why can't they see past themselves, past the mirror they keep polishing until the world disappears behind their reflection? Why is it easier to pursue prejudice than understanding, easier to spread hate than sit with discomfort? Why do they build bias into systems, into instincts that judge a soul by the way it looks, the way it dresses, the way it exists? Why segregate, divide, label, and discard?
Why just why?
That question follows me everywhere. It hums in my chest, low and constant, like a song I never asked to learn but can't stop hearing.
I saw him on the street.
A homeless man, hunched beneath the weight of winter. The air was thin and frigid, sharp enough to hurt when you breathed it in. His hands trembled as he begged not loudly, not desperately, just enough to be noticed. Just enough to hope.
No one looked at him.
They walked past as if he were part of the pavement. As if his hunger was invisible. As if a fellow human being wasn't starving a few steps away from warmth and excess. Eyes forward. Shoulders stiff. Lives are too important to be interrupted by suffering.
As if he meant nothing.
As if he were already gone.
That's when it hit me, the world doesn't always kill you with violence. Sometimes it starves you with indifference.
People talk about beauty as if it's rare, as if it has to be chased. But it's everywhere. It's just buried beneath noise, beneath ambition, beneath the need to win. Beauty exists in quiet empathy, in shared silence, in the simple act of seeing someone and deciding they matter. But seeing requires effort. Caring requires vulnerability. And the world hates anything it can't control.
I hate that I see it.
I hate that I can't unsee it.
Every smile feels rehearsed. Every system feels rigged. Every promise feels hollow, like it was made to be broken from the start. People consume and consume attention, power, people until there's nothing left but an echo. And when something finally collapses, they ask how it happened, as if they weren't there, as if they didn't feed it.
Sometimes I think the world would rather be numb than kind.
So I started pulling away.
Not because I don't care, but because I care too much. Because feeling everything in a place like this feels like drowning slowly, beautifully, painfully. Isolation isn't loneliness to me. It's clarity. It's the only place my thoughts don't get interrupted by lies dressed as truths.
In my isolation, I imagine a different world.
One where power doesn't require cruelty. Where strength isn't measured by how many people you stand above. A world where no one is invisible, where no one has to beg to be acknowledged. A world that doesn't punish softness or mistake empathy for weakness.
I know it sounds impossible.
Maybe it is.
But if the world can be this broken by choice, then somewhere quietly it can be rebuilt by one too.
And until then, I'll keep watching. I'll keep questioning. I'll keep holding onto the fragments everyone else is so eager to forget.
Because someone has to remember.
Because someone has to care.