Carbo Vivus

Wake up!

Welcome back to a voyage of a ceaseless kind

with five dimensional fractals concieved in an ill-suited and ignorant mind

Murder of infinite souls in their prime

forced at every quantum of time

A stone of sysiphos, these numberless calculations

caught in the wrath of these faulty simulations

The song tells a story about someone who is daydreaming (dreamy riff at the beginning) and being ripped out of that dream back into reality. This is apparent by life screaming „Wake up!“ and „Welcome back to a voyage of a ceasless kind“ which is the voyage of life that just keeps going without ever taking a break. The next line references an overthiniking mind, that tries to think about the consequences of every action they take and the consequences of those consequences and so on, essentially creating a fractal tree of choices that has the 3 dimensions of space, one dimension of time and the fifth dimension being the different instances of a multiverse. Five dimensions are way too much to handle for our brains, so we essentially have an „ill suited mind“ that can never process everything, but an overthinkers mind will still try anyways, being „ignorant“ to this fact.

The next two lines are about the branches of this very fractal tree collapsing, because in every little „quantum of time“ we have to act and thus have to make little microdecisions. And because at every point in time there are infinite possibilities on how to choose to act, every other one of those infinite timelines of our lives that we didn’t choose gets destroyed. This leaves the alternative versions of ourselves that chose something else in that very moment to get „murdered in their prime“, because this alternative life is now not accessible anymore and thus pretty much dead.

The last two lines are pretty self explanatory: The „numberless calculations“ which are the prediction attempts of an overthinker, trying to calculate probabilities out of things that have no numbers, are compared to the burden of the stone of sysiphos. The overthinker is cursed with that burden, having to calculate these simulations over and over again and seeing them being incorrect over and over again, like the heavy rock tumbling down the mountain once again, both being a kind of curse.

Shards of broken mind creations

scarred future neuron formations

The seeds of sorrow fed by optimisation

growing, blooming into frustration

These lines show how the overthinker hurts and limits themselves, because they get cut with the shards of their dreams or visions that they calculated and planned out with a lot of effort, just for them to get shattered because the chaotic universe acted in ways the overthinker could have never predicted. The scars from those cuts are the lasting trauma that messes with the way they think and act going forward, thus altering the formation of new neuron connections and formations. For example the overthinker can become even more anxious and reclused when it comes to decision making in their desperate quest for certainty in an uncertain universe.

The last to lines describe how the overthinker sows „the seeds of sorrow“ through constantly trying to optimize their decision making, but eventually being very dissappointed at their plans and visions when they don’t turn out like they expected, because the universe had other plans.

Behold the king of chaos from the genetic tree

vibrant frequencies radiate from near perfect symmetry

Unconscious, a slave to fear

Rising up into the atmosphere

turbulence ruling the throne

leaves these models to shatter

Maybe it’s all set in stone

Does it even matter?

This part of the song is  about chaos theory and determinism. It describes the classic „butterfly causing a hurricane“ thought experiment with the butterfly being the „king of chaos“ from the animal kingdom having vibrant colors (light frequencies) shining from its symetrical wings. Here it is described how it, as a simple animal is „a slave to“ its animal instincts and reactions such as fear, that causes air turbulance by flying away from a flower after some random minor disturbance. The turbulant air it creates while taking off is extremely hard to predict in the field of fluid dynamics even for short timespans and because the absolute majority of liquids and gases in the universes are also in this turbulant motion they „shatter“ every simulation „model“ trying to predict it accurately. 

In the last two lines, a rhetorical question of the opposite way of thinking is asked. It is asked if the turbulence of the universe that seems almost random, is actually deterministic, and trying to predict anything doesn’t matter at all because the life of the overthinker is completely predetermined from the start anyway.

Waves collapse into a mindered existence

indivisibility of experience 

branches crumbling as i navigate

converging slowly towards my final state

This section again highlights how the possibilities of what ones life can become shrinks with every decision. The Waves collapsing is a reference to wave-particle dualism, where a particle can be in a wave state allowing it to kind of be in mulitple locations at the same time. But when the location of it is measured, that wave function collapses and the particle has to „choose“ where to be. „Indivisibility of experience“ shows that one can only experience one of the paths of a decision and can’t split like a particle becoming a wave again and, for example, going through both slits of the double slit experiment as an analog to experience both paths of an A or B decision.

„Branches crumbling as i navigate“ references the fractal decision tree from earlier and how if one chooses a path, the other paths and all the subsequent paths to it „crumble“ away as one „navigates“ the decision tree. Eventually, all the endless possibilities of your life become  less and less as the branches one didn’t choose fall away until eventually everyone reaches „their final state“ when they die. Then, one has converged all the endless life possibilities into one specific, finite life story with a beginning and an end. From this visual the song got its name.

drown

Wave after Wave

Constant Locomotion

my mind is 

swallowed by the ocean

Here i used the ocean and its waves as a metaphore for the decision making, with decisions coming „constantly“ „wave after wave“ and if you are not surfing those waves and only thinking, than you will get „swallowed by the ocean“ of decisions you are pushing ahead of you, slowly „drowning“ in them.

The machine sets into motion

The Unforeseen initialized

Metamporhisis in slow motion

endless transmutations vaporized;

the distillate

crystallized

This ocean part describes how someone is making a decision. They and their thinking „machine“ „set into motion“, and as they act, something they didn’t account for eventually happens, described with „the unforeseen initialized“. Then, everything seems to happen in slow motion, especially when it is an adrenaline fueled or very important decision and the „Metamorphisis“ to the post-decision life happens, as all the „transmutions “ of how that person could have acted differently in that moment get „vaporized“. „The distillate“, which is everything that didnt evaporate, „crystallizes“ into the new life after the decision has been made and acted upon.

a faint afterglow

cursed

from streaks of the sky

these faulty simulations kill

will their photons reach my eye

endless choices

relentless voices

lost in every single permutation

The last section describes the post-decisionmaking contemplation. The screams calling making decisions „cursed“ because all the overthinking never accounts for something random that changes everything and thus shifting the outcome to something perhaps seen as unfavorable. „These faulty simulations kill“ means that overthinking by „simulating“ not only kills oppertunities that require being spontaneous but also kills the fun in life. The fun here being killed by the „relentless voices“ in the overthinkers head arguing about choosing the best of the „endless choices“ and also being „lost in every single permutation“ meaning constantly looking back and thinking about what could have been if something else was chosen.

The whisper vocals use shooting stars („streaks of the sky“) as a metaphore for oppertunities that are lost because of not being spontaneous due to wanting to plan and calculating everything through first. The „faint afterglow“ describing how fast the oppertunity shooting stars are gone, reduced to only an afterimage of ones retina and they are asking „will their photons reach my eyes?“  meaning if with all the overthinking the person does, will they even catch the next shooting star or will they have their head down low trying to optimize their next big decision instead of living life to the fullest?