Medium does seem more about self expression, than conversation. I like scrolling through and finding people with interesting world views. You are young, with a pretty insightful view of life, so just offering up some insights from someone with more miles on the odometer.

As I've told my daughter over the years, my generation is going to blow up the world and yours will have to put it back together.

I grew up on a farm and avoided school as much as possible. Reading has always been my hobby, so I fall in the self educated category.

I started reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintence a few years after it came out, but it spiraled off into what seemed like significant physiological issues and I didn't finish it. The effort was sincere, but when my intuition says something is going off the tracks, I tend to drop it. I have enough of my own rabbit holes to deal with.

Frankly I find a lot of Western philosophy to be a bit too nit-picky. What I connected with were what is now described as New Age, but was an effort to bring Eastern concepts to a Western audience. The two sides playing off each other and the consequent tensions, fluctuations and balance. The sort of reality I experienced in nature and implicitly, culture.

While Western philsophy is more focused on the ideal. Finding the Truth, the Theory of Everything. The ends towards which the means is pointing. The Singularity. Armageddon. God. Aspirations.

Even the one real acknowledgement in Western philosophy, the thesis and the antithesis, is really about finding the synthesis, the point where they come together.

Consider your point; "the only "true" infinity is the lack of anything at all."

Actually the nothing would be the absolute. The flatline between the ups and downs. The equilibrium of the vacuum. Absolute zero.

Infinity, on the other hand, is everything. It's just that when everything goes to infinity, the details fade out. Like Mount Everest, relative to the distance to Alpha Centari.

So the parameters of our reality are between everything canceling out and everything fading out.

Now Western philosophy is very object oriented, from the individual, to the atom. While Eastern philosophy is very context oriented.

The cultures even see time differently. The Western view is the future is in front of us and the past is behind us, because we see ourselves as entities moving through our context, thus toward the future and away from the past.

The Eastern view is the past is in front and the future is behind, because the past and what is in front are known, while the future and what is behind are unknown. Which accords with the reality that we are physical observers in this energy field and see events after they occur, then the energy transitions to other events, going past us.

The fact is there is this dichotomy of the node and the network, the organism and the ecosystem, the individual and the community.

While the node is a function of the forms coalescing inward, towards a gravitational center, the network extends out to infinity.

The trick is to incorporate both. When we think of goals, what is really at work is the desire, not so much the objects of desire. What would goals be, if we were not driven to attain them?

So the question then, is calibrating and balancing our desires, such as between short term appetites and long term projections. We might only life in the moment, like all life, but what rises us up is the ability to see beyond the present and plan. Yet because there is only this physical state, what drives it are the feedback loops between the energy driving it and the forms giving it structure. So we cycle between seeking forms and transcending those forms we have. So if our larger goals are not immediate, we need to supplement them with the more immediate ones and balance the two. Growth is cycles of expansion and consolidation, like rings of a tree.

We are singular like the trunk of a tree is between the branches and the roots, as we are a network within and live in this network of others. Or like we are in the present, with our roots in the past and our branches out into the future.