April 20, 2025. Fear of being Averaged and Irrelevant.

It's been raining for over past couple of days. So I kinda felt that there's something about the steady rhythm of raindrops that quiets the usual noise of my thoughts. 

In these moments of stillness, different questions surface, not about code or systems or scaling, but about purpose and legacy. 

One question kept circling back: What if all of this comes to nothing?

Not because the ideas aren't sound or the vision isn't worthy, but because of something much more fundamental: the fragility of being human. 

What if I get sick? 

What if some random accident or misfortune derails everything? 

What if all these quantum possibilities I've written about collapse not into breakthrough but into irrelevance?

There's a quiet apprehension that settles within me sometimes, not from a burning desire for fame or exceptionalism, but from a deep awareness of my perceived capabilities and the fragility of the path toward realizing them. It whispers, "You have this potential, these visions, these things you could contribute," immediately followed by the chilling understanding of how easily it could all be undermined. A single illness, a turn of bad luck, could dismantle the carefully constructed bridge leading to those possibilities.

This isn't about ego or standing out. It's not about being the center of the universe or having my name remembered. It's about the weight of potential. About having capabilities and visions that feel important, that might contribute something meaningful, and the fear that circumstances beyond my control could prevent those contributions from ever materializing.

Remember when I wrote about the death of individuality? How our uniqueness gets averaged out by algorithms, standardized systems, and the pressure to conform? There's an inverse to that fear: not that we'll lose our individuality, but that our individual potential will remain unrealized. That the unique configuration of insights, experiences, and capabilities we possess will never find expression.

I don't know what psychologists call this fear of being ordinary or irrelevant. But in a world obsessed with extraordinary success, where social media presents a parade of achievements, I think it's easy to feel that being average equals failure. 

But who defined average as something to be feared, and relevance as a state of perpetual, visible contribution? Perhaps the radical truth is that this fear itself is a construct of a system obsessed with output, with quantifiable impact, with a linear progression that life rarely actually follows.

I think about those quantum particles I'm always referencing. They exist in states of superposition, full of possibility, until observed. But what if there's no observer? What if the wave function never collapses into reality? In physics, unobserved potential still exists, still matters in the grand scheme of things. But in a human life, potential without manifestation feels like a page left blank, a story left untold.

To be honest when I hit the wall with MIKE-AI, I experienced a small version of this fear. All those months of work, all that learning and building and refining, all that potential suddenly constrained by practical realities. It wasn't that the work didn't matter or that the knowledge gained wasn't valuable. But there was a gap between what could have been and what was possible given the constraints.

Now I wonder about the larger version of that gap. Not just for a single project, but for all the projects yet to come, all the systems yet to be reimagined, all the contributions yet to be made. What if the ultimate constraint isn't funding or computing power, but time? What if my body gives out before my ideas do?

I've been reading about great innovators who died young. Alan Turing was just 41. Nikola Tesla lived longer but spent his later years in increasing isolation and financial difficulty. Even Steve Jobs, with all his resources and influence, couldn't outrun cancer at 56. These people weren't afraid of being average; they were extraordinary by any measure. But they left work unfinished, potential unrealized.

History is replete with stories of brilliant minds whose potential remained largely unfulfilled not due to lack of talent or drive, but because illness struck at a critical juncture, or a series of unfortunate events created insurmountable obstacles. These aren't tales of failure in the conventional sense, but of potential waylaid by the inherent unpredictability of existence.

This isn't a morbid fascination with mortality. It's a recognition of constraints beyond our control. We talk about market constraints, financial constraints, technical constraints. 

But in my opinion the most fundamental constraint is our own finite existence. 

The ultimate wall isn't capital or technology; it's the limited time we have to make our contribution.

There's something about being a solo founder in a tier 3 city that makes this fear more acute. Without a team to carry forward your vision, without an ecosystem to support and extend your work, your impact is more directly tied to your personal capacity and presence. 

If I fall ill or face some other limitation, there's no team to pick up the torch. The vision might just... stop.

Yet some people show remarkable resilience. The adaptability developed through managing health issues can translate into valuable skills, like creative problem-solving and resilience.

Then i start thinking what if we reimagine the universe not as a well-oiled machine where every gear (you, with your potential) has a predetermined, essential function, but as a wildly unpredictable, beautiful, and often brutal emergent phenomenon? In this view, the disruption of plans by sickness isn't an unfortunate deviation; it's simply another facet of existence, a reminder of the biological impermanence that underlies all our striving.

It reminds me of that thought experiment about quantum immortality. The idea that consciousness might only persist along branches of reality where it survives. From the perspective of that consciousness, it never experiences death. But from the perspective of others, of the world, branches end. 

Potential collapses not into achievement but into absence.

I don't fear death itself. 

What I fear is leaving work unfinished, systems unimproved, problems unsolved. 

I fear that the unique configuration of experiences and insights that allow me to see systems differently might never fully express itself in tangible contributions.

But here's the paradox: this fear, like most fears, can either paralyze or propel. It can make you withdraw, protect yourself, minimize risk in hopes of maximizing time. 

Or it can create urgency, clarity, focus a recognition that since time is finite, it must be directed toward what matters most.

What if the most radical act isn't desperately clinging to unblemished potential and uninterrupted relevance, but embracing the messiness? 

What if true freedom lies in acknowledging that you are, and always will be, vulnerable to forces beyond your control?

 Your capabilities aren't diminished by this vulnerability; they're simply contextualized by it.

I think about something I wrote earlier about forgiveness. 

How forgiving yourself for imperfection is essential to building anything meaningful. Perhaps there's a similar principle here. Perhaps we need to forgive ourselves for our finite nature, for the inevitability that no matter how long we live or how much we accomplish, there will always be work left unfinished, potential left unrealized.

What if being at peace with our limited impact isn't resignation but wisdom? What if acknowledging that we can't do everything isn't defeat but clarity?

When I consider the innovators and thinkers who inspire me, what matters isn't that they completed everything they set out to do. What matters is that they moved their particular field forward. 

They took what they were given, contributed what they could, and trusted that others would continue the work. 

They accepted being a link in a chain rather than insisting on being the whole chain.

Tesla didn't live to see how his work on alternating current would transform the world. Einstein didn't live to see the confirmation of gravitational waves. Turing didn't live to see the computing revolution his work helped launch. But their contributions mattered, not despite their limitations but within them.

Perhaps the antidote to this fear isn't striving harder for immortality through achievement. Perhaps it's embracing the finite nature of our contribution while still making it as meaningful as possible within those constraints.

I'm reminded of my post on herd behavior and how we often follow without questioning. The conventional path minimizes certain risks: financial instability, social disapproval. But it maximizes others: the risk of looking back and wondering what might have been if you'd pursued what mattered most to you, the risk of leaving your unique potential unexpressed.

And for the fear of irrelevance i believe is based on the assumption that significance comes from external markers: career milestones, public recognition, measurable impact. But relevance is deeply personal. It can be found in supporting a friend, pursuing a hobby, contributing to your community in small ways. 

Maybe i don't need to be extraordinary to matter. Perhaps with a clearer understanding that this tension isn't something to be resolved but something to be lived within.

I'll continue exploring how technology can enhance human capability rather than diminish it. I'll continue questioning systems that could be better, imagining alternatives that might serve humanity more fully. Not because I'll necessarily complete this work, but because this is the contribution I'm positioned to make right now, with the capabilities and limitations I currently possess.

Your potential isn't a fragile object to be shielded from the world; it's a dynamic force that interacts with chaos. Its true nature is revealed not just in what it achieves, but in how it persists, transforms, or finds new avenues of expression when the predictable path dissolves.

And perhaps our contributions, like quantum particles, don't just exist in the individual moments when they're observed and recognized. 

Perhaps they exist in superposition across time, influencing outcomes we'll never witness, collapsing into realities we'll never see.

At last i think none of us are ever truly averaged out or irrelevant. 

Maybe the wave function of our impact extends far beyond what we can observe from our limited vantage point.

As the rain is easing now, and with it, strangely, so is the weight of this fear. 

Not because I've solved the problem of finite impact, but because I've acknowledged it as the fundamental condition of being human.

We build what we can. 

We contribute what we can. 

We trust that it matters, even when we can't see how or where or to what extent. 

And in the end, perhaps that trust, that willingness to continue despite uncertainty, is itself the most relevant contribution we can make.