I waste so much time and energy stuck in this loop of despair:
1. Something reminds me of something I feel might make my life worth living.
2. I’m confronted with the reality that those things are beyond my capacity.
3. I feel miserable, and question why I’m not ending my life if it’s not worth living.
4. I remember that I am cripplingly terrified of death.
5. I ponder whether it might be possible to overcome such fears, and if so whether it would be best to do so.
6. I conclude that although it would probably be best for my personal experience if I ceased to exist, it would likely be terrible for my family.
7. I reason that since I have an inherent aversion to suicide, and my suicide seems likely to increase the amount of misery in the world, I probably shouldn’t do it (yet).
8. I try to think of ways to better handle my misery and go on with my day.
There’s this weird state of mind where a part of me is kind of endlessly looking for a justification to convince the rest of me to end it. I don’t want to die. I really don’t. I still look both ways when crossing the road, and I worry about getting ill. And I don’t want to multiply my misery by passing it on to my family.
So I don’t want to kill myself, and I probably shouldn’t kill myself, morally speaking.
But I also don’t know how to live without any positive motivation. My life is not for anything. There’s no goal. There’s nothing that I can tell myself “this is worth suffering for”. I’m never going to have a family of my own, or a partner, or even a close friend. I’m not going to have a meaningful career, or even a pet I care about. I’m not going to make great art, or cure a disease. I’m not going to fight in a war, or devote myself to a religion. My life will be empty and nothingness, until I die.
It’s a weird, unnatural state, to be this disconnected from everything. And a part of my mind constantly rebels. It wants to hope, to dream, and believe that things can be better. And when reality denies that, it wants out. It’s like an animal trapped in a cage, in a cold, sterile, empty cell. And anything would be better than that, even if it’s death.
I don’t want to die. But I also don’t want to live like this. And I also can’t see any other kind of life for me. So I’m kind of stuck in this loop. This isn’t hell – it could be far worse. But it’s also not really living. It’s life with all the meaning stripped out. All of the pain and suffering, none of the fun stuff. Imagine Groundhog Day without the romantic subplot or the happy ending.
And I’m sure I’ll be back in a few days to post more or less the same thing for the hundredth time, once I’ve forgotten what I’ve said.
2 comments
Reconciling “god” and the possibility of an afterlife, for me, seems to take priority. Dealing with all the random teachings of religion, and the fear of punishment after death would make a decision easier. Of course that’s easier said than done, but that’s all I can seem to come up with as I ponder the same. Anyways.
I agree that dealing with fear of punishment simplifies the decision. But I think for me it’s that I have an instinctive fear of death, regardless of whether any punishment awaits. I fear the annihilation of the self on some primal level. This brain just really doesn’t want to die, even if that would be for the best all round, and even though it knows on some level that death is inevitable.
I don’t know if there’s any clarity to be found in religion. For me it mostly seems like a construction of man, rather than a revelation of deeper reality. Entirely possible that this world was created, and perhaps our consciousnesses could continue in some form beyond death (though it’s hard to comprehend how.) But I don’t see how we could ever know, one way or the other. Possibly I would be inclined to believe if an angel came and spoke to me directly, but just as likely I would be having a schizophrenic episode. We’re all just throwing darts in the dark when it comes to guessing the ultimate nature of reality. What more could you expect of apes that like to tell stories?