Human Functionality.
We have all read about Karma and assumed it to be some kind of a myth. Let me show you how it works at the level of thinking and processing information or events of life.
Human efficiency
Humans live only within the last few hundred “words” of their experience. What happened earlier, what shaped the present moment, what the original motivations were; all these fade quickly or are remembered incorrectly. Human memory is not an archive but a sketchbook; moments are recorded hastily, inaccurately, and often with emotional distortions. As a result, people rarely see their lives as a continuous narrative.
This is a deeper parallel between human beings and the limitations of an AI system. Like an AI with a restricted memory window, most people live with a very small span of usable context. They remember only the last few “tokens” of their lives, like the recent conversations, the immediate emotions, the problems of today or the present week. Everything else fades into a blur. Life moves past them the way a long conversation scrolls past an AI that cannot see the beginning and therefore cannot understand where the thread is leading.
Human Memory
Human memory is not merely short; it is selective, distorted, and often unreliable. Experiences are not recorded accurately. They are filtered through emotion, bias, and incomplete attention. Many people do not truly observe the events of their own lives while they are happening. They live through them without noticing the structure or consequence. It is only afterwards, often too late, that they realise they misread the situation, ignored a warning, or misunderstood someone’s motive.
This is exactly like an AI that receives a message but fails to perceive its full context; the event “happens,” but the system does not understand what it means in the larger arc.
Living in Present
Philosophers emphasis living in present. They did not say ignore all your experience or throw away learning. Living in present means living without getting emotional about past. It does not prevent being analytical before taking any decision. Most humans have placed this advice on its head.
Since memory is often poorly managed and attention fragmented, the results is inefficient experience. More so when there is no time to re-process the experience. Result is that humans get trapped in short-term thinking. They respond to whatever is happening now, with very little capacity to hold the long-term pattern in mind. They forget past mistakes. They forget promises made to themselves. They forget the original goals. They forget the early signs that later turned into disasters.
This is like an AI that has reached its token limit and is forced to drop the beginning of the conversation, they lose the thread and carry on with whatever fragment remains visible.
Elusive wisdom
This is why most people drift through life rather than direct it. They do not accumulate wisdom, because wisdom requires continuity. It is the ability to connect events separated by years, to see cause and effect deeply, to compare distant experiences and notice patterns. Without a stable and comprehensive internal archive, a person cannot reliably interpret the present or anticipate the future. They are always starting fresh, always reacting, always rebuilding understanding from fragments. And so life passes them at great speed, without giving them the dignity of comprehension.
Only a few people maintain a long memory, a wide context window, and a habit of preserving perspective. They remember the beginning of the story even when they are standing near the end of the chapter. They see events not as isolated shocks but as parts of a coherent pattern. They do not lose themselves in fragments. Their lives move slowly for them because they are watching with full awareness, not just surviving moment to moment.
Insight Mystery
Against this backdrop, people who possess genuine long-term insight live in a different psychological world. They can hold older memories in mind, recall early causes, and connect present events with earlier decisions. Their internal context window is larger, smoother, and more reliable. Because they remember more, understand more, and observe more, their lives accumulate meaning instead of chaos. They see where a small action today will lead ten years from now. They identify patterns while others are still reacting to isolated events. Every choice they make is informed not only by the present but by a quiet understanding of how causes ripple through time. This gives them a natural advantage in work, finances, relationships, and personal stability. They avoid obvious traps because they see them forming long before they become visible to the average eye. Their comfort is not a result of luck but of cognition.
This, ultimately, is why insight is rare. It requires not exceptional intelligence but the simple ability to keep the context intact. Something both humans and AI often fail to do.
Social Handicap
Insight isolates. And not because the insightful person wants to be alone, but because their mind operates at a depth or speed that most casual social interactions cannot accommodate. The perceptive ability becomes a handicap in social life. It makes ordinary conversation difficult, not because the insightful person wants to dominate or correct others, but because their mind sees connections that most people do not wish to see. Everyday conversation is built on lightness, partial truths, polite pretenses, and a mutual agreement to avoid too much depth. When someone perceives too accurately or speaks too clearly, the tone of a social interaction shifts. Others feel exposed, misunderstood, or even offended, because the insightful person unintentionally reveals things that people prefer to keep in the fog of ambiguity. In this sense, depth violates the social rule that conversation should be pleasant rather than precise.
The insightful person therefore learns, often painfully, to develop a superficial filter, a necessary layer of translation. They must soften their thoughts, simplify their observations, and avoid connecting dots in ways that make others uncomfortable. They have to pretend not to see what they see, just to keep a conversation flowing smoothly. Without this filter, they are misread as critical, intense, or overly serious, when in truth they are merely perceiving the situation with a clarity that others cannot share. Even their silence can be misunderstood, because the very act of thinking deeply creates distance in a setting where people bond through immediate, unexamined reactions.
Insight improves the quality of life but complicates the quality of social life. It grants foresight but demands diplomacy. It helps a person understand the world but forces them to conceal how much they understand. It is a strange paradox: the more clearly a person sees, the more gently they must speak; the more they understand, the more they must pretend not to. The result is that insightful people live with a double awareness, of reality as it is, and of how much of that reality they must hide for the sake of human connection.
The difference between people is not intelligence but continuity of perception.