What am i supposed to think

“What am i supposed to think”

That is either a profoundly difficult question to answer, or… is so bewilderingly, cryptically rhetorical, that i can’t quite wrap my head around the implications of what it would mean as a purely rhetorical non-question question.

I’ve been fabricating and manufacturing “reasons” to stick around for a long time. I’m not sure when i lost the ability to believe my own fantastical self-assurance… but i just can’t seem to believe anything i would like to tell myself about things getting better, anymore. I try to tell myself something believable, in order to manufacture a surplus of motivation, to be inefficiently expended upon pursuit and implementation of solutions to my problems… but it’s like there’s this all-knowing “voice” (not an actual voice) that tells me “come on, you know better… that’s not going to work… and if you get your hopes up, you’ll only be crushed again, leading to further solidification of the notion that there is no hope.”

So i try not to hope, and i try to be “hyper-realistic,” because i’m tired of expecting the implausible and the inevitable resulting profound disappointment from having even my most realistic and minimal hopes dashed.

If you never hope, you can’t have hopes dashed. If you eliminate your expectations, or at least align them with what is most likely (due to learning how to do such a thing, in which most people seem very unskilled), you’ll rarely be disappointed. And by eliminating all the avoidable disappointment, you’ve effectively, significantly reduced the amount of suffering and misery in life. But that’s only one aspect of the “cure,” and even that approach has a constant personal maintenance requirement. It’s a solution that can only work for so long… so the idea is to use it when a solution could actually be available, and work like a madman to pull it off. If you can’t manifest the required changes before that realism and sans-expectation approach loses potency… you’ll fall into a despair most never see, that i don’t think is reversible. That’s when you realize that there is no “bottom.” You just keep falling and falling, maybe smashing through a few ledges on the way down, but it just keeps going until you finally die. Death is the bottom. People who claim to have “hit rock bottom,” don’t realize how lucky they are to have a rock to rest upon, which is strong enough to break their fall and not shatter on impact.

There are many reasons to “live.” But without “living,” there are few, if any, reasons to remain alive… and those reasons seem to lack potency and value, and don’t seem very compelling. Perhaps my only “reason” to remain alive without living, is because i am already alive, and i have to remain alive to feel or think or be or say or do anything at all. Maybe it’s that i tell myself “there’s more i can do.” But i that more and more difficult to believe, and less and less valuable, as time wears on, showing me only more and more of what i’d rather not see or feel.