Thymes Arrow

It started with replaying the video game Spore, a game I was obsessed with as a child but recently returned to. During the space stage, there’s a mechanic involving terraforming and colonizing other planets.

And it got me thinking:

Could humanity one day actually possess technology like this?

I became less casually intrigued by the idea and more completely consumed by it. I don’t have any formal science background, and I was never particularly good at school, but when something captures my interest, I research it obsessively.

One of the biggest influences on this idea ended up being the University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2 project. I fell down a deep rabbit hole researching closed ecological systems, artificial environments, gravity, ecosystem balance, and long-term sustainability in space.

Somewhere along the way, combined with a weird fascination I’ve always had with gyroscopes and rotational mechanics, I started conceptualizing something I now call:

“Gyrosphere 2.”

The idea is essentially a rotating, self-sustaining artificial biosphere designed not just as a space habitat, but as a living ecological system.

Instead of treating nature as something secondary to human survival, the entire structure is built around preserving and stabilizing ecosystems themselves.

The rotating rings would theoretically help generate artificial gravity, regulate environmental systems, stabilize atmospheric circulation, and potentially even act as massive kinetic energy storage systems. The central biosphere would contain multiple interacting biomes functioning as a miniature artificial world.

It’s still a rough concept and mostly just notebook sketches and systems ideas right now, but honestly, exploring it has made me think a lot about what space colonization should actually mean.

Not escaping Earth.

But learning how to carefully carry Earth with us.

Depression has a way of igniting one’s passions at times.

I have always hated the way people talk about death with the phrase “they had so much potential.”

I understand people mean well when they say it. But something about it has always felt almost insulting to me.

As if the tragedy is not that a real human being died, but that they did not get to produce enough before they were gone.

As if human lives are mourned like unfinished projects.

Failed experiments.

Wasted opportunity.

“What a waste.”

I hate that phrase.

Because why is a life only considered tragic in relation to what it could have become?

Why is the future treated as more important than the person who already existed before death?

They were already someone.

They already:

felt things deeply,

noticed small details,

had favorite songs,

formed memories,

loved people,

feared things,

looked at the sky,

existed as a complete internal world no one else would ever fully understand.

That alone should be enough to make a death tragic.

Not their lost career.

Not their unrealized success.

Not the hypothetical person they never got the chance to become.

I think people focus on “potential” because it is easier for the human mind to process than confronting the reality that consciousness itself was lost. That an entire internal universe suddenly no longer exists.

But I do not want people to mourn me for what I could have been.

I think one of the worst parts about anxiety is that people immediately try to solve it instead of understanding it.

I do not want to be told to breathe.

I already know how to breathe.

I do not want to be told “it’s all in your head.”

I know where anxiety comes from. I know about grounding techniques and counting backwards and regulating nervous systems and all of that. But sometimes hearing those things feels less like comfort and more like being quietly pushed away.

What I actually want is for someone to sit in the feeling with me for a second and say:

“Yeah. That is scary.”

“I understand why that affects you.”

“That makes sense.”

Not because I want my fears confirmed, but because I want to feel understood as a person instead of treated like a problem to fix.

If I say I am scared about politics or war or the state of the world, I do not want fake certainty. The world is frightening sometimes. Pretending otherwise just makes me feel more alone inside my own head.

And somehow nothing makes me feel smaller faster than hearing:

“Everybody feels like that.”

“You’re not the only one suffering.”

I understand people mean well when they say it. I understand they are trying to make me feel less isolated. But instead it makes me feel emotionally flattened into a crowd. Like my feelings stopped being mine and became something generic the second I expressed them.

I think a lot of anxious people are misunderstood this way.

People think validation feeds anxiety when usually it does the opposite. Being understood calms people down far more than being dismissed with positivity ever will.

I do not think most of us are afraid of being “crazy” or abnormal.

I think one of the things I struggle with most is not people not caring — but people caring in a way that feels too simple for what I’m actually feeling.

Things like:

“It’s all going to be okay.”

“Just try to think positive.”

“Don’t overthink it.”

I know those are meant to help. I really do.

But sometimes they land in a way that makes me feel like I’m not being understood at all.

Because it’s not that I don’t want reassurance. It’s that reassurance alone doesn’t match what’s happening internally. It feels like there’s a gap between what I’m expressing and what is being responded to.

And when that happens, I don’t feel comforted — I feel a little more distant.

Like the actual shape of what I’m feeling has been flattened into something easier to respond to.

I think that’s why I resonate so much with characters like Diane in BoJack Horseman. Because she doesn’t just want comfort — she wants accuracy. She wants someone to actually recognize the complexity of what she’s saying instead of smoothing it over.

And I think I understand that deeply.

It’s not that positivity is wrong. It’s that sometimes it skips over the part where someone is actually trying to be understood.

And when you already feel like your internal world is complicated or hard to explain, being met with something simple can accidentally feel like:

“what I’m experiencing doesn’t fully matter as it is.”

I don’t think most people mean it that way.

But I think that’s why it sticks.

Because what I usually need in those moments isn’t someone fixing my emotions.

It’s someone recognizing that they have depth in the first place.

A question I keep coming back to: