I have lived most of my life inside a problem that very few people ever perceive, let alone try to solve. My entire relational pattern was built on trying to outsmart an unsolvable philosophical condition: the fundamental unknowability of the will and mind of another person. I tried to compensate for this impossibility with intelligence, vigilance, and recursive analysis — a “safety‑via‑omniscience” strategy that formed because my system never had baseline safety in childhood. I was trying to solve my lack of safety by trying to know the interior inaccessible world of another person.
Free will cannot be measured. Only behavior can. But behavior under observation is altered. Therefore will is fundamentally unknowable. This became the philosophical core around which my paranoia formed. I kept thinking, "if only I could know more, I could be safe."
Long before I had language for any of this, I grew up with a malformed boundary architecture. I didn’t have a shield against incoming projections, psychic energy, or micro‑transactions of other people’s emotional fields. I absorbed everything. My emotional permeability was total. I never developed the capacity to regulate my own state when I was energetically merged with another person. When I entered adulthood, especially in romantic contexts, this lack of containment combined with trauma, fear, and high intelligence. The result was a survival strategy aimed at solving something that is, by nature, unsolvable.
Most people do not see this paradox. They wave it away before ever engaging it. But for those who can perceive it, the problem becomes a trap.
Whenever I begin relating to someone at the deepest levels — especially a woman I care about — certain questions arise automatically:
And when my system is under charge, the narratives escalate:
Once the narratives activate, the emotional layer spikes:
The emotional layer amplifies whichever narrative carries the most charge. At that moment, I’m not thinking — I’m in feedback.
The moment uncertainty appears, my mind tries to reduce it. I start scanning:
Without intending to, I begin doing Bayesian updates on scraps of information. Every micro‑signal becomes a data point. This is where my childhood permeability makes the system dangerously reactive.
Then the higher cognition steps in and says: “Wait — I can’t know.”
This realization doesn’t stop the loop. It accelerates it.
Because:
This is the beginning of the blue screen.
At this stage, the structure becomes recursive:
The system begins cycling:
A → B → C → A → B → C, with charge increasing every pass.
This is unbounded computation. A self-reinforcing loop. This collision generates a kind of internal overheating: a biological drive insisting on certainty + an intellect demonstrating certainty is impossible. That is the engine of the madness. It is a loop I could not close, and because I knew it was real I was terrified of intimacy. My response to intimacy was: Who are you? What is inside you? What are you doing to me? I had no internal boundary. If someone got close, my psyche could not differentiate between their inner world, my inner world, and the field between us. I responded to it as a direct internal threat. My intelligence would then fill the unknown with high-resolution symbolic content. My system was not reacting to her, it was reacting to the concept of another consciousness whose true center cannot be accessed.
Eventually, my system reaches threshold:
This is what I call the recursive lockup: A psyche trying to compute an uncomputable problem.
This is the part almost no one understands, but I saw it clearly.
Even if I had:
It still wouldn’t solve the problem.
Because the problem is not lack of information. The problem is that another person’s inner world is fundamentally inaccessible. Telemetry collects behavior. Behavior is not will. Perfect observation destroys perfect knowledge — it distorts what it observes. Another person’s interior world cannot be extracted by increasing data. The limitation is structural, not psychological.
If I had near‑total access, a new uncertainty arises: “They are only performing because they know I am watching.”
And if I monitored everything except while I sleep: “What if something happens while I’m asleep?”
More data means more surface area for doubt to latch onto. Even perfect surveillance cannot reveal authentic will.
What I discovered is identical to a theological paradox. If a god sees everything, tracks everything, knows everything, and still wants free will, genuine love, and authentic choice, then even that god cannot know whether obedience is sincere, strategic, fearful, habitual, manipulative, or performative. Surveillance distorts behavior. Even an omniscient god cannot know the interior will of a free agent if love is to be given by will. This is the exact paradox my psyche attempted to resolve in relationships.
Every attempt to “check” creates the same paradox: does their behavior reflect their true will or their awareness that I am checking? This leads to infinite regress, interpretive paranoia, collapse of trust, addiction to monitoring, ontological insecurity, and total loss of relational architecture. Constant observation collapses life into surveillance. As such, I would lose my own life and become a non-stop surveillance system that would never be satisfied with what was observed. This is because More data → more surface area → more places for doubt to latch. But data is not will. Data is not intention. Data is not interiority. You can gather infinite external data and still know nothing about what’s happening internally. This limitation is not psychological — it is structural. It exists even for an omniscient being.
Eventually, I realized the only viable move: I cannot solve their interiority. I cannot know their mind. I cannot access their will. So I anchor in what I can control:
“My behavior is the part I control. Your behavior is your sovereignty. I don’t enter the guesswork of your interior.”
I act according to my integrity. I love the way I love. I show up the way I know is real for me. If that type of love is not what they want, they are free to leave.
Replace the question:
“Does her will truly match mine?”
with:
“Am I acting in a way that my own will can inhabit without contraction, regardless of what her will turns out to be?” (Am I expressing my own will authentically and fully, without being constrained, compromised, or “contracted” by the uncertainty or behavior of the other person, regardless of what they do?)
This dissolves the god trap. It stops the impossible project of omniscient inference and replaces it with autonomy, sovereignty, clarity, responsibility, and steadiness. I no longer need to solve their interiority; I only need to stand inside my own.
The mind and will of another person are not knowable, not because data is missing, but because intention is not an externally measurable phenomenon. Telemetry collects behavior. Behavior is not will. Another person’s interior world is a theorem, not a dataset. I can only ever know my integrity and their observable choices. Their inner world remains theirs — opaque, sovereign, and unreachable. Once I accepted that, relational paranoia lost its foundation. I exited the infinite regress by leaving the problem altogether. I no longer seek omniscience. I seek alignment in myself.
Note: My reactions weren’t irrational; they were the exact logical output of a system forced to solve an impossible problem under threat. The more perfectly I watched, the less I would ever know — because the act of watching created the performance I was trying to detect. If the problem I'm trying to solve is the unknowability of interior will, then the only possible strategy becomes total surveillance — and total surveillance consumes the surveillant. I then become a system whose entire life is redirected toward an impossible computation. Surveillance doesn't just destroy trust — it destroys the self doing the surveillance. I became the watcher instead of the one who gets to live.
The interior world of another person is fundamentally unknowable. And yet survival, attachment, and love require acting as if it’s knowable.
Then a truth emerges that cuts to the bone, felt as a visceral bloodletting of the heart. “There is nothing I want more in this life than to love you while feeling safe, secure, and at ease. Yet the structural reality is that I cannot achieve this. The only way forward is to know myself as the foundation of our union. I cannot know you in the oneness I truly long for, and neither can you know me in that way. For this unavoidable truth, I am profoundly sorry.”
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