I never went to sleep. I must have somehow built up reserves from all the nights—or should I say days—of a mere ten to twelve hours of consciousness. I may ward off the hours, but my hatred and feelings of helplessness toward it all, continue to seep into my skin. I can feel it there, spoiling, infecting like a disgusting pus from a festering wound. It’s not going to end until I’m dead and gone. Pity.
I will say with little doubt that my struggling was worthless; I see nothing coming of the brief two minute interview that was more laughable than serious. I was nothing but a bundle of overexposed nerves, tapping a foot against the leg of the chair I was sitting in, in an altogether vain attempt to hide the shaking of my rebellious limbs. Even the cruelest of conversations with myself could not calm me. Anger boiling in my gut only made the shaking turn to shivers as I waited for doom. I’d have preferred the noose; I wouldn’t have been half so nervous.
Over, done with. Like all things human. Just more worthlessness and stupidity to add to it all, more lines for me to draw in chalk as I tally up the never-ending list of cons that living comes burdened with. I don’t know why I try.
I went to a health food store, and found more joy in sorting through the strange food than I’ve felt in awhile. I was struck by how pathetic that was, that something so positively inconsequential could make me smile. But it all has ulterior motives, strings attached, especially the smiles. Torture comes in many forms, some glaringly obvious, but easily ignored by outsiders who would traitorously deny me one of the few pleasures I still have left, that I can still call my own. We reach the danger zone, and all I want to do is laugh. They think they know me. They think that there are bones in this body that care and still are capable of compassion. I’ve never considered those ‘heroes” emotions to be ones that came preprogramed; completely learned in my opinion, and therefore nothing but another construct of this place and its cancerous people. I bleed malice these days. All the sleep in the world won’t take the dark circles of weariness from beneath my eyes. It’s been over for so long already.
I play my games for no audience but myself. It’s so blatantly narcissistic. Wait until night, which doesn’t take long anymore. I wake at 6:00 in the evening sometimes. Then it starts: the enduring. Wait, wait, wait. Night falls and I wait some more, for everyone to drift off to sleep, on a plane not connected to this one. It’s the only way my paranoia will leave me even partially; if I have reason to believe I am somehow less observed.
Nights staring at a computer screen. Nothing causes a reaction anymore. It’s all so useless now. Depravity doesn’t mean a goddamned thing, as its cage is the same that holds sway over everything: all in the eye of the beholder. To me, the only thing that is depraved or perverse is the fact that people get up in the morning believing they’re making a difference, or that the little useless shit they do all day somehow piles up on a list that is going to be reviewed after they breathe that lovely death rattle. I revel in the knowledge that it has always been over but they are merely to blind to see it, too vain, too determined, too scared.
I keep finding bits of gold in my self loathing. I find it too in those moments where my own uselessness and unimportance smile malignantly back at me. Yes, I know this. Yes, I accept it. And doesn’t that just make your skin crawl? It angers the darker side of myself, that on my best days I embrace my own worthlessness as though it were the entire point of my existence. I don’t fight it anymore. It is the one enemy besides breathing that I have finally yielded to. I see now that my dreams were pointless, that planning beyond this is nothing but masturbation. Pining after something you can’t have, waiting for it, planning for it, only to have it torn away like everything else by the harsh winds of reality. It is useless to hope, and I wish to stop doing it. The future will be as bleak as the present; no amount of money or creature comforts are going to shift what already has come to pass.
It will not change the world. Nor will I. But more importantly…it will never change me.
I am already set in stone.
In lieu of being able to contribute something more useful, I’ll just ask, have you ever read ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by Albert Camus? It’s an essay about whether or not life is worth living in a universe without meaning. It might appeal to you; particularly that ‘there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn’.
No, I’ve never read it, though I know of it. I do believe that even the most horrible of lives can be lived through, but to me, it’s only human frailty that makes such things ‘necessary’. It’s the belief that living through it all is somehow more rewarding or more heroic. But I don’t think so. It’s just denial, blind faith in thinking there will be something better, or that just accepting your lot can allow for a liveable life. It’s just a petty disguise for the fear of death. If you live it should be out of boredom, then ended when it gets overly suffocating and dull. Not a very optimistic outlook, but I’m still here; must mean something.
Or I’m just afraid of death…wouldn’t that be ironic?
I think ultimately faith is the only act by which we can be reconciled–to life or death. A faith in the future or a faith in eternal rest. Of course most people never need that reconciliation. We can never possibly learn enough to be confident of anything; nothing can ever be known for certain, and even if it could, what help would it be? ‘Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most / must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, / The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.’ It’s not uncommon for the most confident people to be also the most ignorant. I do believe that it is noble to endure, and to hope, not because I wish to delude myself about the reality of existence, but because I demand that my existence should delude reality. The only salve for nihilism is faith, an artist’s faith, who can see his creation before he even puts his brush to the canvas.
What’s the most outrageous thing you’ve ever done? The most dangerous? Did you ever start a fight? Raise a child? Give up your possessions and live in the woods? Could we really stand there at the end and tell ourselves that we tried everything? That we struggled enough? Or is it that it was never given to us to take those steps? Are we really unable to step outside and turn left instead of right? Who made that rule? Who decided that we should want to give up before we’ve tried everything? I feel like I could never make that decision before I’d gone mad with the struggle, before I’d grasped at every straw, no matter how absurd. Why should I be forced to bow out before then? But I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I can hardly put words to it anymore. Bothering to try when it feels like the wound of an unanswered question is always going to be open inside. I am sorry if the interview(s) discouraged you in some way. I’m flat out broke and no longer have a choice but to go through the uncomfortable situations. Either go through it, or kill myself. The stagnation was intollerable. It’s not about being happy, it’s about what you’re willing to bear and what worth it has to you, for how ever long you choose.
Well, I guess you can tell now. My input is officially useless. I honestly don’t know what to say. I have no right to say anything at all.
I’m the same as you: I’m not expecting life beyond death. I was raised Christian and sometimes feel trapped between two worlds, unable to live and unwilling to die. I wonder sometimes if the absence of the meaning and fulfillment promised to me as a child have made the world as I see it today—empty and absurd—unpalatable. I’m frequently repulsed by the ignorant, selfish and mercenary nature of mankind and the absurd society that we’ve built around ourselves, and I’m determined to only interact with it on my own terms. Though I expect nothing for it, I still feel a feverish desire to validate my existence somehow, to make it ‘worthwhile’. Maybe that’s a holdover from religion too, who knows. I think in many people the search for meaning is just a neurosis, a reaction the brain has against the lonely and servile existence that so many people lead.
You mention apathy, but where did it begin? Presumably you didn’t always feel this way. Given the requisite wishes, what would you change? Yourself? The world around you? Anything? What do you think would have to be different in order improve your outlook, or do you really feel as though nothing could change your mind? It’s interesting that we’re split on this one issue, because I identify with a lot of what you say. You say that you think I ’strive for life’, and it’s actually a thought that I spend a lot of time agonising over. I would say that I ’strive to strive’. I sometimes feel like the impetus other people seem to have has been cut out of me. I find it difficult to care about or become attached to anything. I do know how it feels to try to shape something from nothing.
I had a Christian upbringing as well. I have to say that you’re likely right about that; it seems that all those promises of heaven and redemption have permanently jaded me to everything that I now see is reality. I once saw the world was once shining and brilliant because there was the idea of something better, and of a twisted justice after everything had been said and done. I sometimes think that this existence of serving to perpetuate something greater, is ingrained in people like wolves being in a pack. We’re naturally inclined—no matter how much we bitch otherwise—as it makes the struggle of surviving that much simpler. But like the wolves…sometimes there are ones that are either shunned, or choose to exist in a solitary manner. Those instincts are still there, however, and sometimes they do go crawling back because they need that feeling of comradery, even if it is alway boiling with tension beneath the cool exterior. A lot of people blindly accept this place because they know nothing else. If you choose to see above the clouds, it’s much more ugly, and you always know that all those things you were taught are still right below your feet, and that can lead to bitter feelings, to say the least. Sometimes dreams are so alluring you’ll accept lies just to feel as though they are the reality. I like to think that I dream of dreams, of being back in that mentality where this bothered me more on a subconscious level that wasn’t quite so tangible. It was easy to ignore then.
Apathy begins when you learn there is no trust, or at least, that was how it began for me. If I were to change myself, the only thing that could be done is to make me as delusional as the rest of them; I would pick to change the world instead, because I care nothing for them, and I would do anything (including dying) to not become one of them again. But if I could have my true wish, it would be to see us all gone. I hate humanity, the way we rebuild civilizations when we know they are nothing but guilded cages. We like power, and even in places where it is not openly groped for, it’s always somewhere to be found. They lie about the animals they are, claiming superiority and power because they can’t face their own shortcomings. We’re just as bad as anything else, but the stupidity of it all is that even with our intelligence we can’t accept it and embrace it. We want the underdog to win. We all want a chance, and we don’t all get one. Nature isn’t fair, so we cheat it by fucking then birthing as many of us as we possibly can. Safety in numbers. It angers me that we have so much potential yet squander it with ideas about ’saving everyone’ or promoting ‘justice’. There is no fairness, there is no justice. You can kill the sinner, but that doesn’t make him sorry. And why should he be? He was doing what pleased him, which is exactly what each of us should be doing instead of standing around wondering if it is ‘right’, ‘wrong’, or ‘appropriate’. I still to this day can not fully understand why the unfairness is so hard for everyone to accept. Perhaps because I have a deathwish? Even if I was the underdog, the weaker one, it wouldn’t matter. It’s much like the thoughts I often have about being killed by a predator. Where others would hate it for taking their life from them, I would admire it for having more strength than I possessed, more willpower.
Either way, even if you’re striving to strive, that is something. If there is a will, there is much that can be accomplished, even when things get to the point where they feel incredibly beyond impossible. I would also have to agree that people seem to naturally push forward, that many have a very strong need to live. It’s funny that you said it seems to be cut out of you; I’ve felt that as well, like I was born without something everyone else just had without trying. I look at them driving to work and wonder if it takes effort for them to breathe like it does for me. I know it doesn’t, because I was one of them, or at least, I covered up the bits that weren’t quite normal, enough that it wasn’t openly an issue. And I hate them for that, the effortlessness of it. I hate fighting constantly, never getting the slightest break, which is I guess why I often consider just not trying. I feel like I fight for something that I don’t want or care about the majority of the time. Why fight a war you don’t want to participate in? That is what keeps me up late at night.
Yes, but faith in eternal rest has a difference—we’re programed not to want it, to avoid it at all costs. We’re supposed to hate death. To have faith in it is to turn away from life in a sense, as it is the end of all things we treasure. The only time anyone seems to seek death is when they are in pain, real or imagined, because they believe it will be a sort of salvation. But much of the time they rarely understand the implications; many believe in afterlife, I don’t. Dead is dead to me, nothing more. But with every negative, it must be dressed up. It has to have hope, because if it didn’t they would not be able to accept it. Either way though, there is a sliver of hope to it, whether it’s taking away pain, or traveling to another existence assumed to be more grand. One just happens to be much less…appealing to most.
It’s only when you’ve lost faith in every last thing that any of it truly comes to mean something. You see what is worth it and what isn’t. I’ll never be a true nihilist; I always have beliefs and a very watered-down, sick morality (‘moral’ has nothing to do with it, but I think you get my point). They may be bleak, but they are there. They aren’t hope, not really, but if I twisted them around they certainly could be. There seems to always be hope attached to everything, but I do think it is unnecessary in many ways. To me hope suggests that one needs something more, and that thought gets me angry at times. I believe that simply existing should be enough; every other living thing just does it, so why must we question it, need something extra to make it liveable? Why should we be different or more ‘deserving’?
No amount of trying will ever mean we’ve tried everything. I do think we impose limits on ourselves; I know that I feel like I’ve gone as far as I am able, but I also acknowledge that that isn’t entirely correct. In reality all I’ve done is go as far as I am willing to go. There’s always more, but I just don’t want it, I guess. I’ve done a lot of things (blatantly stupid things), simply because someone told me they couldn’t be done. I suppose I was proving it to myself because I didn’t even believe it much of the time, and the thought that the harm that could result from trying was something I was willing to deal with. Someone once told me that human beings couldn’t exist without other people, without some sort of friendship/companionship. I spent three years without friends to prove that wrong. Extreme? Nothing is extreme to me. I’d try it just to have the satisfaction of surprising myself and showing someone else their own ignorance about the human tolerance for things, even if they never live to see it.
Some people strive for life, others falter along the way. I would guess that you are one of the former. There’s nothing wrong with wanting something, with searching or pursuing something better. But sometimes you reach the point where even that ceases to matter. Apathy toward life itself. When there is no desire, it’s hard to make it from nothing. You can’t force yourself to feel something, not like you can force a body to break. But then, maybe I’m just imposing more limits on something that has none.