Tag: isolation
Isolation, reclusion, hikikomori.
On defeatism
r/Pessimism, u/defectivedisabled
Defeatism is just a term society use to gaslight people into conforming with social expectations. You could very well be considered a defeatist in a capitalist society by embracing minimalism. There is no such thing as a defeatist in absolute terms. This term solely exist to shame and guilt trap people to fall in line with what is expected of them. It is also a relativistic term that requires a specific setting for the term to have a meaning. You might be considered a defeatist in capitalistic society by giving up on the rat race and becoming a minimalist. But on the other hand, you are an “optimist” within the minimalist community.
There is no such thing as “give up”. Even embracing nothingness requires effort. Activities that induces a sense of liberation such as meditation actually requires putting effort to work. Therefore, it is nothing but gaslighting to say one is a defeatist when one decide to go on a path of liberation rather than participate in the rat race. The word defeatism is designed to keep people trapped in a cycle of endless suffering. It is done by holding onto the idea that there is some kind of reward waiting for them at the end when they eventually “win” at whatever they are doing.
Andrew McIntosh – The Point of Pointlessness (Ineffectual Whinging)
[…] that whole insane “get up and go” mentality, starting with the obscenity of the work ethic, squirming as it did like soft stool out of the arsehole of Christianity, condemning us to mindless labour and activity simply for its own sake. Work for its own sake – what kind of fucking numpty thought that was a good idea? Read the full page
Be critical of those who paint vice in nostalgic light, or you’ll normalize confinement, and call it home.
Andrew McIntosh – On Leaving Scenes (Ineffectual Whinging)
But that’s the thing: with scenes, it’s the ideals first, not the people. People become mere faculties for the ideals, which is bizarre because all ideals only come from people. But scenes thus tend to act as if the ideals they live by and promote are like divine commandments handed down from on high. Read the full page
The loner is the one who withdraws his presence so as not to distress or bother others, to let them live their illusion, because truth brings nothing but pain. The lover who steps aside to let the other live, the Oblomov who doesn’t even try to make things work because he knows they can’t. How absurd it would be for time to fall in love with a girl, or for death to write her a love poem. Continue reading
Anonymous 04/23/18 (Mon) 13:55:38 No.174245, obscure imageboard
[…]
>>174236
Secrets are all too easy to deal with. Skeletons in the closet are easy to hide. It’s when your entire being itself is a secret, that’s when interacting with people becomes complex and difficult, painful even.
I’ve noticed that so much of genuine social interaction rests on sharing experiences. Technical discussion is a kin to small talk and fails to bridge a gap between people and form a connection. It’s about seeing a reflection of yourself in your environment, seeing that a shared reality exists between you and another being, that’s what truly quenches loneliness.
The usual normalfag advice of “just be yourself” seems so appropriate now. It’s possibly all they’ve ever known.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Luciano had become so used to being alone and living cocooned in his hermitage that seeing a psychologist would have been unthinkable: you cannot conceive of solving a problem if the problem is all you have. It’s easier to lie down inside your own noise and sing something stupid over it when possible. And so, some days, for Luciano it could almost feel like happiness, even with a hint of pride, in the awareness that no one was trying to make him feel better except himself.
Le vite potenziali (“Potential Lives”) – Francesco Targhetta
Exclusion from the sphere of labor equates to social insignificance.
Umberto Galimberti at a conference
Anonymous 06/09/15 (Tue) 22:18:58 No.2771, hikkichan.com (dead)
Another aspect of escapism is that it is an addiction.
Like junkies, we need ever higher doses and at one point there simply isn’t enough left, so we end up looking at the same shit over and over again desperately trying to remember how it was like when we first saw it, but by then it no longer satisfies.
[…]
Boredom is the real problem of men; humans can bear next to anything when they are distracted, and most of our activities are steered towards that goal.
Zachary Wheeler – Treatment of schizoid personality: an analytic psychotherapy handbook
There is even a debate as to the legitimacy of schizoid personality as a diagnosis (Slavik, Sperry, & Carlson, 1992). Fairbairn was amongst the first to note that schizoid states are present to some degree in all people, and span a continuum from normal to severe and debilitating (Fairbairn, 1940). Recent authors assert the normalcy of temperamental introversion (Cain, 2012), the biases of object relations theory toward the primacy of relationship (Modell, 1993; Storr, 1988), the creative and regenerative functions of reclusive behaviors (Storr, 1988), and the gains and pleasures of seclusion (Rufus, 2003) as counterarguments to pathologizing schizoid-like behavior. Continue reading
If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
r/IAmA, u/BetterAlone
I am a guy with “covert” Schizoid Personality Disorder. That is, I don’t give a damn about people and prefer to stay alone and self-sufficient but I fake extroversion to get by.
[…]
Problem is, I also like to accomplish stuff (entirely for my own sense of internal satisfaction) and I need other people to do that. So I fake extroversion and interest in other people even if I don’t give a fuck. This actually exacerbates my pre-existing sense of existential isolation, since it shows how easily people can be handled.
I have been defined as “bubbly” and “charismatic”. Absurd.
[…]
[deleted user]
deep down I actually feel a desperate need for love and friendship
Hahaha…oh, no you don’t, you only think you do. You’ll eventually just be disappointed/bored by it if you do find it, and discard it like every other social function you have encountered. I’m sure you have already tossed potential friendships away simply because you became uninterested after a few days/weeks, so you know what I mean.
What I think that people like us are actually feeling, is the hollowness of our egocentric fantasies which we wrap our minds in. Our ideal level of emotional interaction is so completely removed from reality that it is literally unobtainable. I think that intellectually we realize this, so it causes some angst, if only because we think that we will likely never be able to fulfill our fantasy.
There’s no RL, only AFK.
Excerpts of interviews to Thomas Ligotti
Three interviews. Read the full page
Oh, you humor me today Calling me out to play With your telescope eyes, metal teeth I can’t be seen with you, you freak
Go cry, go run away Let your short legs carry you away With your big dress and your dirty hair Your pen’s waiting for you Just get far, far away from me I don’t want your disease
Please don’t make me cry Please don’t make me cry I’m just like you I know you know I’m just like you So leave me alone
Dear Matthew why can’t you see You’re just not near enough like me With your telescope eyes, metal teeth I can’t be seen with you
Eisley – Telescope Eyes
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Madness is simply pain.
Vittorino Andreoli
Despair is madness. Madness, the perception of the impossibility of living: being there, but as if not being there. Despair as an experience of madness is incompatible with life. It sees death, plans death, and kills the self and the other. Despair is a form of madness possible for man, for all men; it is, in fact, a human perspective, tied to his need to be with others, to the fact that he cannot live alone, because human life is not solitude but sharing, belonging, attachment.
Vittorino Andreoli, Il lato oscuro (“The Dark Side”) (2002)
– You live in the uncertainty of freedom, we live in the eternal confinement. But what can be seen once the barriers of the ego are destroyed, isn’t the same for both sides?
A Shumi at the Shumi village, Final Fantasy VIII (in the marvelous Italian version, re-translated to English by me)
Original English version:
Fishermans Horizon – A tribute
Music and pictures for the nostalgia of that place. Read the full page
Don’t say I’m out of touch with this rampant chaos – your reality. I know well what lies beyond my sleeping refuge: the nightmare I built my own world to escape.
Evanescence – Imaginary
It is very common for schizoid individuals to present for treatment in their 30s and 40s, at a time when the possibility of a relationship is growing more tenuous and that of companionship seems to be getting more and more distant. Read the full page
And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found. «This is it… this is where I belong…»
The Conscience of a Hacker – The Mentor
Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.
Emil Cioran – Anathemas and Admirations
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves.
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.
Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person – of any person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.
The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
I’m forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
– I’m so happy to meet you, Kaspar. Tell me, what was it like in that dark cellar of yours?
– Better than outside!
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Two useful lessons, of course: loneliness, isolation, exclusion on the one hand, then the continued distrust of the other caused by the loneliness, the isolation and the exclusion. And this as a child already…
My mother gave me away. I lay on a fishing cutter with a woman in Holland, in Rotterdam, for one year. My mother visited me every three or four weeks there. I don’t think that she cared much for me then. This changed, however, later. I was one year old, we went to Vienna, but the distrust even continued when I was brought to my grandfather who really loved me, in contrast to my mother. Then the walks with him, all these figures, male figures; in my later books, this is always my grandfather on my mother’s side. But beside my grandfather, again and again, you are alone. You can only develop alone, you will always be alone, the consciousness that a leopard can’t change its spots. Everything else is deception, doubt. It doesn’t change… During the school days, completely alone. You have a neighbor at school and you are alone. You talk to people, you are alone. You have views, strange ones, your own, you are always alone. And if you write a book, or as I write books, then you are even more alone…
It is impossible to make oneself heard. Solitude and loneliness become increased loneliness, isolation. Finally, you change the scenes more and more quickly. One puts his trust in bigger and bigger cities, the small town is not sufficient anymore, not Vienna, not even London. You have to go to another country, you try to go here and there, foreign languages, is it Brussels? Or maybe Rome? And there you go. And you are always alone with yourself and your increasingly dreadful work.
Thomas Bernhard – “Three Days”, documentary
Dark party bars, shiny Cadillac cars And the people on subways and trains Looking gray in the rain, as they stand disarrayed Oh, but people look well in the dark
And if you close the door The night could last forever Leave the sunshine out And say hello to never
All the people are dancing And they’re having such fun I wish it could happen to me
Cause if you close the door I’d never have to see the day again
The Velvet Underground – After Hours
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
We asked the woman if there was one thing she wanted more than anything else in life. She looked at us, puzzled. Then, in a half voice, she said: “To sleep. Three days in a row.” “Nothing else?” we asked. She nodded. “To die,” she replied; and she wasn’t joking.
Fazzoletti di terra (“Patches of Earth”), a documentary by Giuseppe Taffarel about two elderly farmers from Val di Brenta.
Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable – Stig Dagerman
I lack faith, so I can never be happy. A happy person would not fear his life was a meaningless drift toward a certain death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth where I can attract a god’s notice. Nor am I graced with the skeptic’s well-concealed rage, the rationality’s barren mind, the atheist’s burning innocence. So who am I to cast stones at those who believe in what I doubt? Much less at those who worship doubt as if it weren’t shrouded in a darkness all its own? The stone would only come back to strike me. For there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable. Continue reading
Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.
Nikola Tesla, interviewed by Orrin E. Dunlap Jr.
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
Emil Cioran – On the Heights of Despair
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
Arthur Schopenhauer – Parerga and Paralipomena
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.
St. Syncletica
Là the biòsas.
Epicurus
Stay aloof / live secluded.