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Most of us keep distance through protocols. We're good neighbors only because we keep distance. At large companies everyone maintains this ritualized distance.

At startups you have the potential for more intimacy but more than likely it's a cesspool of suppressed negative emotions. If it feels 'right', it feels like a 'family'... and happy families are so hard to form...

Recognizing that your family relationship is shit (most families are) is the first step to finding a real family sense. If you're stuck thinking your family relationships had no issues you end up aspiring to a past image thus rebirthing old neurosis'

E.g. the girl who goes through terrible boyfriend after boyfriend while her friends can obviously see that's she is going after the same type over and over again.

Realizing that what you're looking for isn't an experience you've actually experienced gives you the 'beginner's mind' to recognize what it is when it occurs.

How do you know you've felt love for example? How do you know you've never felt love? How can you be sure? (You can't)

This Infinite Question Mark (God) is what keeps our eyes filled with wonder rather than shadow.

The optimist goes "Love is real, it's all around us." is just as unbelievable as the pessimist who goes "There's no such things as love." Both are absolute stances towards something that by definition cannot be absolute.

Depression is a feeling that you'll experience your life in circles. That nothing 'new' can every come into your life. Cutting yourself introduces something 'new', a new negative experience. As does creating something new.

The tortured depressed artist is tortured because their stuck in their own minds going in circles. Getting insanely better at a thing because they're stuck. Normal people would have moved on. But they're obsessed.

They think that by drawing THE perfect donut THIS time, they'll have drawn the Donut of God and so reach just once, the feeling of perfect love.