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What makes you drop your stories? Death? Children? War? What makes you "get serious". Think being angry at someone at work for stealing your work and then realizing their mother and entire family just died in a freak accident. That "dropping" of anger is "getting serious"

Even something that felt really real in that moment like being angry about your entire future career being sabotaged is realized to be a mask and dropped.

It's eventually picked up though. In our minds while we still see the spirit in a lifelong devotion to perfecting something menial we admit that we can't tell the difference. "I" would bore myself to literal death.

Indeed "I" does thrash wildly away from boredom the same way a cat avoids water. It is an intense dislike of the feeling of dying even if you know you're not literally dying.

What brings you closer to reality? Where you see subtleties no one had seen before. Mostly we're not aware of them. Everyday feels the same to us despite how everything is always changing massively.

E.g. our atoms relative to the sun and relative to the center of the galaxy are whisking away at incredible speeds through the universe yet we feel relatively static.

As aspects of reality, we are closest to reality when we're LEAST trying to BE. There's a natural tempo to Wu Wei. Too fast and you rush the tempo trying to be more than reality. Reality feels boring. Too slow and reality feels anxious.

people who "think fast" will feel bored by reality and try all sorts of things to spice things up. people who "think slow" see reality as threatening and try to seal themselves away from or learn from it in an "understand and respect thy enemy"