Why Nothing lasts—We are all kids missing our balloons

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Oh no, my balloon. I lost my balloon.

[00:00:06]>> The ego is the system that runs your sense of self. It is made out of thought patterns, emotions, and behavioral loops, and the stories that try to hold it all together. Left unchecked, it creates endless existential searching, chronic disconnection, and the persistent sense that something is wrong. The goal of my videos is clarity.

[00:00:23]to see your identity and its contradictions for what they are named precisely to finally understand what it is that we're all running away from.

[00:00:33]You know, when a child loses their balloon, it is like the first time in their life that they're confronted with impermanence. And maybe you have lost the balloon before and you remember how much it hurts to lose something that was dear to you. I know that my best friend once lost like an ice cream cone and I was very very young and I remember his screams and cries as if the entire world just yeah collapsed in in on itself and it's pretty silly as an adult because of course like can buy another one and you're going to find that there's more loss in life than just a balloon or an ice cream cone. But what does it actually say? Well, it says that things don't last. And when kids cry about this, it's deeper. You might say, even met with the physical realization that things don't last. And it's not really about the object at all. It's not that the balloon is the most important thing in the universe. Although for for the kid in the moment, it might be, but it's the understanding, this intuitive sense that, oh, I can have things and then I can lose lose things. And this is a brutal realization to make. And we make it from a very young age.

[00:01:51]Now, how much have you learned that whatever you gain, you're going to lose?

[00:01:56]And how good is your relationship with loss? Because I know for myself, it was a very standard mode of perception that whenever I felt good, I wanted to contain the moment. Like I wanted to trap it and always be in the state of contentment and happiness.

[00:02:14]And I did not like that time removes everything and that everything moves towards entropy and yeah just disintegrates it all. And I thought it was cruel, unfair that you can build up all this yeah well-being and wealth and friendships and children and then just and it's all gone and nobody cares.

[00:02:40]There's no cosmic entity there to bring it back to you.

[00:02:46]You just are standing in the rubble of it all. And this is where this need for some spiritual narrative, philosophical narrative and metaphysical narrative gets born because hey, why do I have to endure this stuff? Why do I have to suffer through all of this? Now, the idea for many is then that you have to become detached, right? You you do not need to attach yourself towards things because if you attach yourself towards things then you might lose them and therefore attachment is bad. And what this often does for most people is that it dampens their aliveness. It makes them feel less authentic. It makes them less exploratory, less bl play playful and just less joyous because they are not letting themselves be vulnerable enough to enjoy the present moment experience. This is very common for people who are depressed. they start to feel a bit happy again and just like uh-uh I'm not going to allow myself this positive emotion. It's dangerous. And then they push it away and then you're wondering why you're still depressed.

[00:03:46]The relationship to the fact that everything changes is so crucial for all psychological and spiritual development because it is within this relationship that you accept or reject the nature of reality and the nature of yourself. And it is just a very sober look and a very objective look that everything grows and dies. And whatever part of your mind resists this is by definition a delusion. It's absolutely nonsensical to believe that death can somehow be avoided. That you not actually have to go through all of the pain that is coming in your way. And there the existential fear comes in because the the the sense of self wants to maintain its structure. And maybe you believe that because you're a biological organism, the sense of existential fear must be there that it's like natural to be scared of the future or natural to be scared of death. And to a certain extent, of course, like if you pull a gun onto my head right now, you're going to make me very scared. It's a very natural reaction. But on the other hand, I'm completely fine with ceasing tomorrow. Like I I I really really appreciate my life. Okay, don't get me wrong. I really love my life. I really don't want to I don't want to die. But I understand it's part of natural process of all things to wither away and die.

[00:05:23]And I've also mourned and cried about the death of people that are even still alive. It kind of just uh happened uh through like long meditation sessions where the sense of impermanence becomes so pervasive and so omnipresent and then the emotions attached to it. They yeah they they kind of pre-processed a lot of the grief and there are probably a lot of stuff that you haven't grieved that are affecting you that you're not aware of that long meditation sessions of psychedelics make very obvious because they disintegrate whatever solid structure the ego has built around itself and then suddenly it finds like a crevice underneath where there's a lot of sadness. There's a lot of sadness about impermanence, the the fact that things don't last. And only within the sadness, you can be in a healthy relationship with just how reality is like. Because if you do not accept the fact that everything changes, you are rejecting one of the most foundational things. And it's that everything is movement.

[00:06:35]movement is all that you see all the time. So how can you pretend that solidity is possible in some yeah ultimate sense it's not possible.

[00:06:47]Now for me this sense of impermanence I noticed becoming a very strong um like having a very strong aversion to it when I was around probably 13 years old or 14 years old and I kind of recognized that I really just exist in these very short frames of experience like not even seconds long and then before I can actually notice it's already gone. And I noticed this also because my my memory revealed itself to me as obviously an illusion and that I cannot actually remember the past. Like whatever I remember about the past is a reconstruction of the events but it's a very measly construction at that. Like if you compare your own experience right now like how rich it is in yeah qualia and sensations and compare it to like a memory of an event it's not even 1%. It is complete illusion.

[00:07:44]So in this I realized that I'm really just existing in the present. And at the start it's very much depressed me. I I felt like I saw reality now for how how it truly is. And it's very sad because even if I have nice experience experiences in my life then what are they all good for? Like what is the point? It's just going to pass through me and then I don't even remember that it happened. And then I came into this mindset that if I cannot actually make things permanent, then it's all meaningless and pointless. And I think there's also where a lot of nihilism comes in. It's in the lack of acceptance for impermanence. And this idea that if things don't last, they cannot mean much. But if you are truly engaged with your own life, you understand this is absolutely false. It is precisely because things don't last that they mean much. It's the other way around.

[00:08:43]Everything becomes precious through scarcity. Everything becomes valuable because there isn't an infinite amount of it. So all individuated selves, all forms of experience are meaningful and unique because they are Yeah. once once in a lifetime, right? like every day you're going to have is the only time you're going to have that day. And if you're doing always similar things, it's kind of blurring together and you're coming in in some sort of routine that can give you the illusion of permanence.

[00:09:21]But then often what it requires is yeah, a significant loss, right? you suddenly lose a balloon and then oh yeah it was actually not permanent and I actually convinced myself that it was and there is where the process of coming into direct connection with this impermanence is freeing because if you fully accept the fact that nothing ever lasts then you become all movement and never cling to any experience in particular.

[00:09:59]This is also the solution for addiction and this need to be somewhere else than where you are because also these tendencies are being seen as completely yeah not just unnecessary but they are literally destroying you in the long term. It works both ways. So if you want to contain an experience and make it last forever or if you don't want to be what you are right now, like you don't want to be in pain, let me run away from that pain. Both of these only work if you believe that you can own an experience or reject an experience. But if you truly exist just in these frames, in this yeah microscond of a present moment, then the moment reveals itself as unavoidable or yeah, inevitable. And if you truly let go into this then is that you actually are this frame of experience and you cannot be anything but what you are in the present moment experience. And the beauty within this realization is that you can find yourself in all moments of experience from the moment you have been born from the moment to your death from the moment you had the balloon to the moment when you lost it. So in a way nothing is ever lost because you have always the center of yourself. There's this part of you that is never lost because it is the ability to experience anything at all.

[00:11:38]Experiencing anything at all means that you have been given the ability to lose and gain forever in all sort of flavors in all sort of ways. There's nothing that you can actually lose because what is so ironic is that change never changes. And if you are the change and you are the movement, then you are foundationally undestructible.

[00:12:09]There's nothing that can remove the ability for things to appear. If the laws of universe make it so that you exist, then existence is something that cannot be lost. So the impermanence gives you the ability to experience at all and the ability to experience at all is a gift and the the impermanence within it is also the mercy because you do not ever have to be stuck in anything. you can always move away and do something else. In this way, the universe is reinventing itself in so many different shapes and and sizes. And whenever you lose something, you will always have place for something new to emerge.

[00:13:10]>> Be good. Now, what do we say?

[00:13:13]Hooray for Spiderman.