All grammatical inconsistencies aside, having employed his poetic license to the fullest, Chuck Schuldiner’s famous line above is very apt. The problem lies not in being friendly with other humans, for one can be friendly and carefree with all and sundry, it lies in trusting and expecting more of someone than is theirs to give. But who can really fathom the depths of another’s mind? What is that other human thinking of you, at any given time? Is it not an exercise in egoism to imagine that all these thoughts are of a complimentary nature?
Proceeding from that, the realistic assumption to make is that these thoughts are neutral, in the vein of ‘He’s a decent fellow’ and so on. But what if the glass is always perceived as being half empty? What then? Should one spend an eternity believing that one’s fellow humans are thinking nothing but the worst of one, at any point in time?
I suppose if you lean either way, it’s bound to end in some sort of morass, either the quagmire that defines the true homeland of the paranoiac, or the roseate illusion that only a blind optimist can see. The best route here is the one of the middle road, the well travelled path, as it were. Simply not caring what others think is always a good option too. So do apathy and indifference reign supreme in the mind of the realist then? I suppose that if they did, there would be no way to tie this post the title, so we’ll let it go at that.