THE CONSCIOUS PEOPLE

There's a peculiar suffering that comes with awareness, a kind of exile that happens not when you leave the world, but when you begin to truly see it. You sit down to watch a movie everyone loves, and within minutes, you're analyzing the manipulation tactics, the propaganda, the tired formulas. You're at a party, and instead of enjoying the moment, you're observing the social performance, the masks, the desperate need for validation in every conversation. You used to enjoy these things. You remember when a movie was just a movie, when small talk was comfortable, when you could lose yourself in the moment without your mind dissecting every layer of what was really happening. But something changed. You woke up, and now you can't go back to sleep. Today, we're exploring one of the most painful consequences of consciousness, the loss of simple pleasures. This isn't about being cynical or superior. This is about the genuine grief that comes when awareness strips away the capacity for innocent enjoyment. 

Alan Watts once observed that the price of consciousness is the loss of unconscious. And with that loss comes something most people never talk about. You can't enjoy things the way you used to. Think about a child watching a magic show. Their eyes light up with wonder. They believe in the magic completely. Now think about you watching that same show. You see the sleight of hand. You recognize the misdirection. You appreciate the skill perhaps but the magic is gone. This is what happens to conscious people with almost everything in life. You can't watch the news without seeing the agenda behind every story. You can't scroll social media without recognizing the performance, the carefully curated highlights, the desperate need for external validation. You can't attend social gatherings without feeling the weight of all the unspoken truths, the polite lies, the surface level connections that everyone pretends are meaningful. The veil has been lifted and you're left standing in a world where everyone else still sees magic while you only see the mechanics. This creates a profound loneliness. Not the loneliness of being physically alone, but the loneliness of being awake in a world that's sleeping.

You're surrounded by people, yet you feel completely isolated because you're experiencing a different reality than everyone around you. They're immersed in the movie. You're watching both the movie and the audience watching the movie.

They're dancing. You're observing the dance and wondering why everyone agreed to pretend this matters. And here's what makes this particularly painful. You can't explain this to people without sounding arrogant or depressed. If you try to share what you see, you become the problem.

You're the one ruining the fun. You're too negative, too critical, too intense. So you learn to stay quiet, to nod along, to perform enjoyment while feeling nothing but a hollow awareness of the performance itself.

Watts spoke often about the nature of the game we're all playing. He suggested that life is a grand play and we're all actors who've forgotten we're acting. The tragedy of consciousness is that you remember you're in a play

while everyone else remains blissfully immersed in their role. You see the stage, the props, the scripts, everyone's following, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. 

Let's be specific about what you've lost. You've lost the ability to watch television without seeing the programming. Every commercial is transparent manipulation. Every show follows predictable formulas designed to keep you passive and consuming. You've lost the ability to participate in casual conversations without hearing the subtext, the insecurities, the ego defending itself in every statement.

You've lost the ability to celebrate holidays without recognizing the commercial machinery driving it all. You've lost the ability to feel genuine excitement about achievements that society tells you matter because you've seen through the arbitrary nature of these measurements. You've lost the ability to believe in the stories everyone else believes in, the story that working hard guarantees success, the story that following the rules leads to happiness. The story that romantic love solves loneliness. The story that buying things fills the void. The story that status and recognition provide lasting fulfillment. These narratives that keep most people motivated have become transparent to you, and without them, you're left wondering what the point of any of it is. This is where many conscious people get stuck. They oscillate between two painful positions. Either they force themselves to participate in things they no longer find meaningful, wearing a mask of enthusiasm while

dying inside, or they withdraw completely, becoming isolated and bitter, unable to connect with anyone because no one else seems to see what they see. 

Both positions are exhausting. Both positions are forms of suffering. But here's what Watt's understood that most people miss. The problem isn't that you've become conscious. The problem is that you're using your consciousness as a weapon against life instead of as a tool for deeper participation. You're standing at a distance, analyzing and judging rather than recognizing that your awareness itself is part of the play. When you watch a movie and you can only see the manipulation tactic, you're not actually being more conscious. You're being less present. You've traded one form of unconsciousness, naive immersion for another form of unconsciousness, constant mental commentary. Real consciousness isn't about standing outside of life and analyzing it. It's about being so fully present that you see both the play and the playfulness simultaneously. Consider this, a master musician can hear all the technical elements of a song, every note, every chord progression, every production choice, and still be moved by the music. They haven't lost the capacity for enjoyment by gaining knowledge. They've deepened it. The difference between them and you is that they're not using their awareness to distance themselves from the experience.

They're using it to enter more fully into it. This is the key distinction. Conscious people who suffer have made awareness into a barrier. They've turned seeing into a reason not to participate. They've confused understanding the game with refusing to play it. But as Alan would say, the deepest wisdom is playing the game with full knowledge.