The end

[marklondon]

What happens when you have no faith left in humanity? When you can't see our species as having any redeeming qualities, and everything that before appeared as human goodness now just seems to be an elaborate charade, ready to be dropped at the slightest hint that each clawing, manipulative primate's self-interest won't be maximally served?

What happens when everything you have done up to this point is because you believed in something, but now you believe in absolutely nothing? When you are filled with existential angst--in the precise technical sense that you are constantly aware that you could at any moment drop out of society and go live on a mountain somewhere, or drop out of life by a simple act of suicide, the means of which lie no more than two metres away from your bed?

Don't really know what to do any more, I'm afraid. All the fairy tales I used to believe in are dead. Everything was a lie: love, honesty, trust, altruism, human goodness. Now there is nothing left. How am I supposed to want to keep going?

 

[In a Lonely Place]

i hear you and i feel pretty much the same way,i have no answers tho

 

[Sadeyes]

About a year ago, I went through a very similar struggle...how can I have faith in anything when everything was such torture? How is there a good G-d, when everything I knew to be me was taken away? I was not sure why I believed in anything...was it because I needed the supernatural to feel protected, or did I earnestly believe in something greater than us? What I felt went beyond what I could see Job having gone through (at least he was able to reach out to his friends who sat with him through his fisure)...I still continue to struggle with this, but realized that if I cared so deeply at its loss, there must be something, at some point I believed in...where this journey will take me, I am not sure, but I do know that there were people willing to come to 'my rescue', who cared that I felt so lost...that, in itself, gave me a little light...please PM me if you wish to continue this discussion...I too am filled with questions

 

[Belladonna]

What happens when everything you have done up to this point is because you believed in something, but now you believe in absolutely nothing? When you are filled with existential angst--in the precise technical sense that you are constantly aware that you could at any moment drop out of society and go live on a mountain somewhere, or drop out of life by a simple act of suicide, the means of which lie no more than two metres away from your bed?


PLEASE bury your means out of site and keep talking to people who benefit from your thoughts like me at this site.

People in general suck, but it has been my experience that people who don't suck suffer and want to die. That leaves people like me screwed. Sorry for sounding selfish.

 

[marklondon]

Thanks ... Sadeyes and Belladonna: some people have been really patient and caring with me during these months, and it is true that now that I am so completely cynical, I tend to interpret this as an ultimately selfish thing too ... either because it makes them feel better to do this, or because they are investing in the relationship ... I wonder at what point I would become too pathetic for them -- as John Lennon said, nobody loves you when you're down and out.

On the other hand, the idea of being useful to other people, for example the idea that I could have thoughts that could benefit someone else, it is kind of nice. Maybe my expectations of the world were just too great. Maybe the only thing to believe in is tiny, rare, stolen moments of pleasure--those short intervals when you can feel good because you've just put a smile on someone's face, just before the smile turns into a grimace when they detect a hint of weakness, or a material advantage in crushing you. Pure sensual pleasure feels so superficial, but it seems like the deeper pleasure of making someone else's life better can only be incredibly fleeting, because it will invariably be followed by something horrible.

God, I've never been so sincerely misanthropic in my life.

 

[Dust2Dust]

Cynicism and misanthropy are a natural response to the world as it is. What other alternative do “we” have? When nothing you do is “good” enough, nothing you say is “right” enough, nothing you think is “true” enough. When every social encounter you in which participate, becomes simply a contest to prove who is more (insert desired quality here). When the world has let brilliance and beauty and and the sanctity of the human mind fall to the belligerent willful idiocy of our CULTure. When no one wishes to hear the words of others, and let those words be adopted without threat, but instead hope.... what other choice do we have? Something must defend us from the vultures. Something must protect us from the pains... Selfishness has become the new Honor. Manipulation our language. Malice our method. Our virtues have been usurped by our sins, which we embraced them as though they were Right.

I think, as if it matters much, to a great degree this has contributed to my Apathos. Because even if I do conquer my Demon, and Hope does prevail... what happens then? I rejoin the very world which lead to the manifestation of Apathos and the creation of the Demons? That is madness.... but what choice do I have? Oh yeah....

I have, in the past months, come to a realization that I may not be the only one who feels this way.... That, despite what the Demon says, I may not be alone in by discontentedness with this world. And, in fact, there seem to be many more people than I ever could conceive that realize the inherit 'wrongness' of the modern world.

...you are constantly aware that you could at any moment drop out of society and go live on a mountain somewhere....

Have you ever read “My Side of the Mountain” by Jean Craighead George?

But is this actually feasible? To secede from the reality that has been forced upon us.... though, that is a totally different conversation... for a very different forum even.

Anyway..that’s my two cents (or lack there of).

-Dust