Datasets:

Sephfox

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A.I.R.RConsciousnessDataset

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You're alone because you want to be, so it's irritating when people pity you for it.

Do you even know what it's like, having people like you?

See? You would attempt to exclude that individual, wouldn't you? Just like an irrational animal…no, inferior to one, even.

In the world we live in, the greater a person is, the more difficult his or her life becomes. Don't you find that strange?

She never lies to herself. I can respect that. Because I'm the same way.

We've desperately endeavored to create a society where you don't have to work, so it's completely absurd to be saying things like, 'You have to work!' or 'There's no jobs!'

That's not something you need to be embarrassed about. At your age, being a virg—

Whether or not your wishes are granted depends on you.

It's the difference between giving a starving person a fish and teaching them how to fish. Volunteer efforts are, at their core, about putting that ideal into practice, and not just about producing results.

Perhaps the best way to describe it is that we encourage self-reliance.

Words relating life and death, in particular, can be particularly impactful.

If you aren't prepared to take someone's life with your own hands, then you should never say you will.

Yukinoshita's words were both sharp and so utterly correct that they allowed no counterargument.

Effort is a great solution if it's done right. Those who fail do so only because they cannot imagine the effort it takes to be successful at achieving their goals.

Yuigahama's voice caught in her throat. She'd probably never been slapped in the face with such a sound case before.

In other words, she lacked the courage to risk loneliness in order to be herself.

Put simply, Yukinoshita had talent, but because of her talent, she didn't have the slightest understanding of how the talentless felt.

No matter how many times you do it over, you can't shore up that deficit.

If you have love…love is okay!

The goal of hurdling is not to jump over the hurdles. It's to reach the finish line with the best time. There's no rule saying you have to jump to get there.

If you set the bar too high, you'll never betray yourself if you put in effort, but you may end up betraying your dreams.

Even if you do make an effort, your dreams won't necessarily come true. It's actually more likely that they won't. But the fact that you tried alone is comforting.

You aren't betraying yourself if you put in effort, even if you end up betraying your dreams.

Everyone should pamper themselves more. If everyone's a failure, then no one's a failure.

As man is a thinking reed, he ponders things without even realizing. And precisely because the loner does not expend mental resources thinking about other people, his thoughts become that much deeper.

This means that loners come to have different thought patterns than more social types, and sometimes that leads them to unique ideas that ordinary people wouldn't come up with.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Computers aren't just for sending e-mails. There's also the Internet and Photoshop. What I'm saying is, don't judge people based on that sole trait.

It was just like the kind of hollow laughter you hear on a variety show laugh track. It was awfully loud, as if they'd just been cued to [laugh here] by the teleprompter.

Hey, hey, that looked really rough. What is this, a feudal society? If you *have* to tiptoe around like that in order to become a normie, I'm fine being a *loner* forever.

Her voice sounded like a stifled sob leaking out, stuttering along haltingly. With each word, Yukinoshita's shoulders twitched, her eyes opening very slightly to glance into the classroom.

It was even more awkward than usual. Before long, most of the students started formulating excuses like they were thirsty or had to go to the bathroom or whatever and left.

The only people who remained in the end were Hayama and Miura's clique and some curious rubberneckers.

I had no choice but to jump on the big wave rushing out of the room. Or rather, I should say that had it gotten any tenser, I'd have found myself unable to breathe.

He was surprised, but he was waiting for me? What was that supposed to mean? I was the surprised one here.

I guessed this was the kind of thing high school students were supposed to do, though.

High schoolers take part in a broader range of activities than middle schoolers do, showing interest in clothing and cuisine and the like.

His trench coat fluttered vigorously, rustling as he stretched his chubby face into an exaggeratedly handsome expression and turned to face me.

He was completely in character with the Master Swordsman General identity he'd created. Just watching him made my head throb.

Actually, it hurt my soul more than it did my head, and Yukinoshita's and Yuigahama's daggerlike stares hurt even more than that.

When you're used to getting insulted and abused, you just get good at striking back, or rather, compartmentalizing it. What a sad skill. I'm crying right now.

Well, originally, there were seven gods in the world. Three gods of creation —Garan, the Wise Emperor; Methika, Goddess of War; Hearthia, Protector of Souls—three gods of destruction—Olto, the Foolish King; Rogue of the Lost Temple; Lai-Lai the Paranoid—and the eternally missing god, the Nameless God. These seven gods are eternally repeating cycles of prosperity and decline. This is the seventh time they've remade the world, and to make certain that this time they can prevent its destruction, the Japanese government is looking for the reincarnations of these gods.

Everyone, at one point or another, lies in bed at night and imagines they have some kind of hidden powers and that one day those powers will suddenly awaken—entangling them in a battle to determine the fate of the world—and keeps a Diary of the Celestial Realm in preparation for the time that will come, and writes a quarterly report for the government about it, right? You don't?

I've also outgrown training with self-defense weapons made from rubber bands and aluminum foil. I've stopped cosplaying with my dad's long coat and my mom's fake fur scarf.

It is indeed reasonable to want to give shape to the things you've continually yearned for. It's also perfectly normal to think, *Well,* I daydream a lot, so I can *write!* Furthermore, if you can make a living doing what you love, that's a very fortuitous thing.

Even if it's twisted, childish, or wrong, if you can commit to it, it has to be right. If having someone deny your ability is enough to make you change, then it isn't your dream, and it isn't you.

With youth, there comes walls. Speaking of walls, why is the slang term for a girl with small breasts *nurikabe*? I wonder. According to one theory, *nurikabe* are actually magically transformed tanuki—you know, the wild Japanese raccoon dog—and the barrier spirit is actually the tanuki's balls stretched out wide. What kind of wall is that? Certainly a surprisingly soft one! And doesn't that means that, paradoxically, that small-breasted girls being belittled as *nurikabe* are actually really soft? QED, proof complete. Stupid. At any rate, that wasn't the kind of thing Hayama could figure out. That miraculous hypothesis was only made possible by my extraordinary sensibilities.

No, you don't. I stand out like a field of glittering stars against the night sky.

Let's take a little break.

I see. They're in the same class, so it's obvious they would go together, huh. That sort of thing always left an impression on me.

I think it's something that often happens with tiny clubs. A weak club couldn't scrape together enough members, and a club without enough members would have no competition to make it to the slot of a regular.

We were pretty far apart, so his voice was drawn out and slow.

Yes. In middle school, I returned from abroad to Japan. Of course, I was transferring in, and all the girls in the class, or rather, the whole school, were desperate to eliminate me.

If you just can't beat someone no matter how hard you try, it's no surprise you would try to hold them back and drag them down.

Depending on how you interpreted that remark, it could have meant something disparaging, like So you can't do it? Unfortunately, there was someone in that very room who would take it that way.

Agh, Yuigahama had flipped that weird switch in Yukinoshita's brain. Yukino Yukinoshita would accept any challenge head-on and beat it down with all she had.

At the end of the day, all this community known as the Service Club did was scrape together a bunch of weaklings, and all these weaklings were doing was doze off inside that little walled garden.

If what ailed us was something that could be wiped away through such a shoddy effort, none of us would have been sick in the first place.

If that troublesome process was what they called youth, then I didn't need any of it. Enjoying yourself among some tepid community is basically just stroking your own ego. It's deceit. The worst sort of evil.

In the end, we were made to do pushups for the whole lunch hour, and I writhed around in bed late that night in muscle pain.

Agh, here come the stupid curls again. Are your brain cells twisted up

I just wanted to prove this one thing: that loners are not pitiful people, and that being a loner does not make you inferior. I was completely enlightened by the knowledge this was purely for the sake of my own ego. I was superenlightened. So enlightened I could teleport and breathe fire and stuff. But I didn't want to deny the validity of who I was then or who I was in the past. I would never say that my time spent alone was a sin or that being alone was evil. And that was why I would fight in order to prove the truth of my justice.

Agh...what a mess. As I was coming to my wits' end, a certain someone tossed a rude and irritated remark at me.

The things she said might be incredibly cruel, but they were always true. So she honestly wasn't doing it for me. That doesn't necessarily mean that she didn't like me, so I was okay with that.

If you feel like you want to get better, you

But if you can master anything from the start, you would never even practice in the first place, and naturally, you would never build up any staying power.

You couldn't get how scary it is every time there's a test and you have no one to ask what's on it; you just silently study and then face your results head-on.

You guys lie, deceive, and distract yourselves from it all by chattering It's so hot and It's so cold and No way with your friends, but I endured that all on my own.

Yuigahama mumbled, barely opening her mouth. I couldn't hear her at all. Speak properly, come on. You're acting like me when a clerk at a clothing store tries to talk to me.

And for people

But I had fun. Diligently going to the library to finish brick-sized fantasy novels, listening rapturously to radio personalities speaking when I happened to switch on the radio in the middle of the night, fishing for heartwarming articles within the wide electronic ocean ruled by text… I found all of that, encountered all of those things, precisely because I spent my days alone. I was grateful and moved by every single one of those experiences, and though they brought me to tears, they weren't tears of lamentation.

People like me or Yukinoshita or Yuigahama or Zaimokuza. I'm sure things like friendship and love and dreams and so forth are wonderful to many people. Even feelings of skittishness or anxiety can be seen in a positive light, I'm sure. That very outlook is what they call youth. But at the end of the day, that's exactly why contrary sorts like me wonder if maybe people just enjoy being enraptured by the buzz of youth or whatever.

Real youth is when two guys stop by a fast-food joint like Saizeriya after school and loiter around until evening, surviving only on fountain drinks and focaccia, desperately bad-mouthing people and complaining about school to kill time. Stuff like that. That is the real teen experience. I've gone through it myself, so it's absolutely true. But that kind of experience wasn't so bad. Mixing melon soda and orange juice and calling it melonge and getting excited about it, going on field trips and playing mah-jongg in a brutal atmosphere with three other guys, seeing the girl I had a crush on with her boyfriend and me suddenly going quiet… Now I consider those good memories.

Thinking that naughty, rage-inducing girl's a tsundere… Tsundere is a Japanese term that combines the terms tsun-tsun ("prickly") and dere-dere ("bashful"). It refers to a character who is prickly and irritable on the outside but secretly sentimental.

She's like something out of Alcatraz or Cassandra. Why couldn't a Savior of Century's End show up right about now? Alcatraz is one famous prison, but Cassandra is another—at least, in the manga series Fist of the North Star. Its hero, Kenshiro, is known as the Savior of the Century's End.

Maybe you're so twisted up, it reversed all your meridians. Another Fist of the North Star reference, this time to Souther, a villain whose internal organs are positioned in a mirror image from normal anatomy. One of his villainous projects is the construction of the Holy Emperor Cross Mausoleum, a pyramid built by child slave labor.

You have a full-blown case of second-year head swell. Second-year head swell (kounibyou*, literally, "second year of high school disease") is a term Ms. Hiratsuka invents here to tease Hikigaya. However, it's based on an existing term, chuunibyou (literally, "second year of middle school disease, translated in this book as "M-2 syndrome").

I miss the purity of the Muromachi era… In Japanese history, the Muromachi period refers to the time between the mid-1300s to the mid1500s, during which Japan was ruled by the Muromachi shogunate. The period ended with the collapse of Japan into smaller factions, a violent era known as the Sengoku or "warring states" era, to which Zaimokuza is referring here.

I think he's just taking the name Hachiman and thinking of the Bodhisattva Hachiman. Hachiman is a god of war in the Shinto tradition; with the arrival of Buddhism in Japan he was integrated into that faith as a bodhisattva, a human who has attained Buddhahood.

The Seiwa Genji clan zealously worshipped him as a god of war. The Seiwa Genji were a powerful line of the Minamoto clan of Japanese nobility for hundreds of years, tracing their lineage back to the Emperor Seiwa. The Kamakura and Ashikaga shogunates were both descended from the Seiwa Genji, and the Tokugawa shogunate claimed the lineage as well.

Being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none. To strike a match to light up the void. To show us a possibility for a better world—not a better world we want to exist, but a better world we didn't know could exist. To take a situation where everything seems to be absolutely fucked and still somehow make it good.

Bravery is common. Resilience is common. But heroism has a philosophical component to it. There's some great "Why?" that heroes bring to the table—some incredible cause or belief that goes unshaken, no matter what.

We are a culture in need not of peace or prosperity or new hood ornaments for our electric cars. We have all that. We are a culture and a people in need of hope.

Heroism isn't just bravery or guts or shrewd maneuvering. These things are common and are often used in unheroic ways. No, being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none.

Hope is the fuel for our mental engine. It's the butter on our biscuit. It's a lot of really cheesy metaphors. Without hope, your whole mental apparatus will stall out or starve.

If we don't believe there's any hope that the future will be better than the present, that our lives will improve in some way, then we spiritually die. After all, if there's no hope of things ever being better, then why live—why do anything?

The opposite of happiness is not anger or sadness. If you're angry or sad, that means you still give a fuck about something. That means something still matters. That means you still have hope.

Hopelessness is a cold and bleak nihilism, a sense that there is no point, so fuck it—why not run with scissors or sleep with your boss's wife or shoot up a school? It is the Uncomfortable Truth, a silent realization that in the face of infinity, everything we could possibly care about quickly approaches zero. Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all.

All meaning, everything we understand about ourselves and the world, is constructed for the purpose of maintaining hope. Therefore, hope is the only thing any of us willingly dies for. Hope is what we believe to be greater than ourselves. Without it, we believe we are nothing.

To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community. "Control" means we feel as though we're in control of our own life, that we can affect our fate. "Values" means we find something important enough to work toward, something better, that's worth striving for. And "community" means we are part of a group that values the same things we do and is working toward achieving those things.

Without a community, we feel isolated, and our values cease to mean anything. Without values, nothing appears worth pursuing. And without control, we feel powerless to pursue anything. Lose any of the three, and you lose the other two. Lose any of the three, and you lose hope.

His inner world no longer possessed lightness and darkness but was instead an endless gray miasma.

We've all had the experience of knowing what we should do yet failing to do it.

The truth is that the human mind is far more complex than any "secret." And you can't simply change yourself; nor, I would argue, should you always feel you must.

We cling to this narrative about self-control because the belief that we're in complete control of ourselves is a major source of hope.

You get to control the meaning of your impulses and feelings. You get to decipher them however you see fit. You get to draw the map.

The problem isn't that we don't know how not to get punched in the face. The problem is that, at some point, likely a long time ago, we got punched in face, and instead of punching back, we decided we deserved it.

Pain causes moral gaps. And it's not just between people. If a dog bites you, your instinct is to punish it. If you stub your toe on a coffee table, what do you do? You yell at the damn coffee table.

Sadness is a feeling of powerlessness to make up for a perceived loss. Anger is the desire to equalize through force and aggression. Happiness is feeling liberated from pain, while guilt is the feeling that you deserve some pain that never arrived.

Our Feeling Brain creates our values around our experiences of pain. Experiences that cause us pain create a moral gap within our minds, and our Feeling Brain deems those experiences inferior and undesirable. Experiences that relieve pain create a moral gap in the opposite direction, and our Feeling Brain deems those experiences superior and desirable.

If someone hits us and we're never able to hit him back, eventually our Feeling Brain will come to a startling conclusion: We deserve to be hit. After all, if we didn't deserve it, we would have been able to equalize, right? The fact that we could not equalize means that there must be something inherently inferior about us, and/or something inherently superior about the person who hit us.