Tag: schizoidness
Schizoid personality: YouTube videos and comments
There is an evolutionary purpose, but it is in the past, not the future. In tribal days your culture would have only a couple hundred people in it, so one schizoid, who sees the culture from the outside can change it. Nowadays we have a global culture, and those who would change it are labeled “disordered”. In the past the reclusive schizoid would be the shaman or the wise hermit, now we’re just seen as crazy recluses. Read the full page
Links about the concept of Wahnstimmung. Here, too, beyond the context of schizophrenia, in the sense of a state of dissociation and free-floating anxiety. Continue reading
About the “hard problem” of consciousness. Read the full page
Clinical psychology info on schizoid personality disorder
Technical clinical psychology info on SzPD. Read the full page
https://www.reddit.com/r/Schizoid/comments/1n739i1/comment/nc4w1c2/[🡕]
r/Schizoid, u/White_Wolf_11
To subject someone to a romantic relationship with me would be immoral.
Takes on the SzPD + AvPD diagnosis
https://www.reddit.com/r/Schizoid/comments/1mquasr/comorbid_avpd/[🡕]
r/Schizoid, u/UtahJohnnyMontana
My completely amateur take is that schizoid is avoidance squared. It is avoidance of avoidance. It is uncomfortable feeling all those things that cause avoidance. Why avoid the things that cause uncomfortable feelings when you can avoid feeling anything at all? And then the veil comes down and you are schizoid. It seems like this happens early for some, late for others, and sometimes not at all, but if you look back far enough, there was usually a time when a schizoid was a pretty sensitive and avoidant looking person.
u/PjeseQ
Didn’t pursue official diagnosis, but it’s quite probable that I used to be avoidant in my teens vs schizoid now. As far as I can remember, avoidant traits were much worse to deal with. It’s much easier to be just indifferent towards interpersonal contact rather than anxious about it.
There is also this conspiracy theory circling around that a burned out AvPD turns into SPD eventually. I think it might be true to some extent.
How sad it is to be ill… knowing so much about your own illness and yet being unable to do anything about it.
I don’t want to play the game of life
The most frustrating part is that there doesn’t really seem to be a real solution for this problem because every piece of advice people usually give is like, self-contained within the parameters of life if that makes sense, like every piece of advice people give still involves having to participate in life. Read the full page
Jetta – An autistic kid talks about the universe and the end of time
Chris: If you could share one message with the whole entire world, what would you say?
Jetta: The universe is about the end.
Chris: Why do you want people to know that?
Jetta: Because someday it will end in our face. Read the full page
r/Schizoid, u/Alarmed_Painting_240
need to wipe, destroy, and start over.
That sort of opposition to being or becoming anything, especially in a social or self-image way, seems to me almost the essential schizoid trait. Sometimes it starts early, sometimes it develops slowly over time. Online or real life contacts, they might end up with similar fates. The moment we decide that it’s not who we are. But it’s not like we know what else we’d be. Not that, I suppose. Or strong associations with negative stuff occurs, like a bad smell.
It can be kind of interesting to see this opposition in so many ways looking back. Not always in obvious ways. It’s not like schizoids only find themselves to be empty or (desiring) nothing, it can be just as well the active undoing of whatever is forming. To start existing even in the most superfluous ways, becomes terrible, boring or just too fake.
SzPD – Playing life in hard mode
Reply to “Why is being schizoid bad?”:
r/Schizoid, u/melonpathy
I think being schizoid is like playing life in hard mode. You don’t belong but you have to play along. It’s tiresome to have to just observe human life, not being able to really participate, it’s like being forced to watch someone eat a delicious looking cake and not getting to taste it, ever. And despite not maybe always feeling like it, schizoids are human too. Humans are hard-wired to be social animals, it is in our genetics. Whether you enjoy socializing or not, it is good for your cognitive and even physical health.
And emotions are what motivates all action, whether you realize it or not. That’s the very purpose why we evolved to have emotions, to motivate us so we would survive. Avolition and anhedonia are destructive, they are a disturbance in the human drive to do things that are important, basically they hinder your ability to lead a good life. You also need motivation to do stuff like graduate and hold a job, which are needed for getting money, without which you cannot get insurances or anything else. Schizoids have the lowest life success rate of all personality disorders.
But of course some are more high functioning than others, basically some people here have the disorder and some have the personality type, I think. You have a personality disorder only when it causes suffering for you. If someone doesn’t mind their schizoid traits and they are able to function fairly well then it’s not a personality disorder but a personality style, and I’m speaking of the former here.
r/Schizoid, u/Concrete_Grapes
Schizoids are somewhat in a unique place as far as personality disorders go. We are inward facing, self-validating, self-reliant (on thinking through things, not always financially or housing), etc.
So, we frame the world, usually, as if everyone else is or should be this as well. To us, this is ’the norm’—and we literally cannot gain something good, or new, from interactions. We don’t need to interact with someone to validate an experience, or ’move on’ from some emotional attachment or slight.
However, normal people do not exist like this at all. Ever. Not even a little. Not for even a handful of minutes a year.
They are always outward facing in searching for validation. They feel they have no value, unless it’s measured by, or against someone else. Their emotions literally exist only as a function of social validation, or as an attachment to others. If they are mad, they are mad at someone. If they’re sad, they need to process it with others, and reference stability and coping mechanism off the ’other’… they cannot do this on their own.
That’s why virtually everyone that goes to therapy, goes to deal with their emotions, and the severe control emotions have over their actions.
That’s why a schizoid often gets nothing from most therapists, it’s not emotions for us, we’re stuck internally, conscious, and intellectualizing emotions away if they do happen, or forcing them to appear when we lack them. Hyper-aware of this, usually.
Other. People. Never. Do.
So they’re reaching out to process and connect—they’re unfulfilled, or some door isn’t closed, and they feel an internal emotional sense that they ’must’—some how, reference off you to complete the task.
To you, that’s nonsense.
I mean, I’m saying it in an extreme way, and one can argue it’s not always like this—and it’s not.
But go read what ’mindfulness’ is—the thing where people struggle to do it even a few minutes a day, after months of trying, on purpose, and tell me—if, to you, that sounds like horse shit, because it’s describing a state you’re in 99 percent of the time as default.
That’s what I mean.
God handed me the fruits of his creation, then took my taste.
Reddit, u/Illustrious-Back-944 talking about anhedonia
I’m perfectly crafted to not be able to live.
Do you think schizoid can be “fixed”?
u/Fun_Researcher4035, r/Schizoid Continue reading
u/Kunigunde9467, r/Pessimism Continue reading
Have you ever had a crushingly agonizing crush?
r/Schizoid, u/iwalkinthemoonlight Continue reading
SMBC – This life is a prison
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
The schizoid dude. Continue reading
Two diametrically opposed things, pushed to their extremes, end up looking very much alike.
An obese person who eats until he explodes and an anorexic who fasts until he implodes, both die.
Bright light that blinds you to nothing is the same as absolute darkness.
Who would’ve thought, that after nihilism, there was a further involuntary step to take. In nullism, everything is different, and even more ridiculous when seen from the outside.
Virtual reality and augmented reality have always been so much behind in the technological development. Today we are still so far behind that it’s downright ridiculous, albeit understandable: shit is hard to build. Continue reading
On responsibility as the solution
It were the old family men of the pre-nihilistic-era, that believed in a future, and that told their children their morals, their hopes, their beliefs. Read the full page
Of all the foolish human chirping, the worst happens during meals, where the noise rises and nothingness becomes fertile. After hours of vile horror, everyone goes home knowing absolutely nothing more than before: on the contrary, with renewed idiocy.
RL is cringe.
Brief and simple guidelines to navigate the mental health system
The human being is by nature incoherent and inconsistent. Read the full page
Acceptance is the hardest thing. Because everyone around you is trying to change you.
I feel incredible release. From the things of life, from meds, from all the bullshit.
Some of that discouragement for me (ed. in advocating) comes from seeing this world lacking in a plethora of metacognitive skills. Even the institutions themselves that discuss mental health – papers, researchers, those that present themselves as being scientifically minded, unbiased, and focus entirely on a description of the nature of certain things regarding mental health and neurodivergency – are constantly lacking so much metacognition that the very papers, the very pieces of research I read make that very apparent. And the people doing such work in the therapeutic world and otherwise don’t have any idea it’s happening. They don’t even know. So much so that I’ve seen forms of therapy that are attempting to instill metacognition in many of those that suffer with psychosis and many of those that are considered schizo-spectrum… When metacognition is the reason those people are sometimes crippled, mentally crippled by the world that they inhabit. But still, they try to produce more of it, only in a direction that would make them more functional, more available, more compliant to a society that they already oftentimes perceive as being run by mad men, and supported by cowardice, fear, death, fear of worthlessness, fear of invalidation. And in name of those things, the banality of evil grows and grows and grows.
Schizoid Angst – Schizoid Ramble: Emptiness and Advocacy
Back then you’d say, “humans,” as if they were something distant. And sure, we are too, unfortunately, and fully aware of it, we stayed apart, because not even between us can that self-delusion arise, the one needed for the deception of meaning to occur. And so, like prime numbers, like in that book, our ways took part. Mine isn’t really a “way”, it’s waiting for death with as little collateral damage as possible, which never actually happens – not even that, and so come the alchemies in the blood and the desperate wails.
People have the -v option enabled by default.
And it’s insane for how long they need to explain something to someone else, and this someone else can even end up understanding nothing whatsoever. We’re talking 1 minute vs. 30 minutes.
These faces… Everyone is a nuisance.
Oh god. I’ve woke up in my shoes.
Derek Muller went to visit Chernobyl… Read the full page
My personality with the pills from The Matrix
Memez are fun. Read the full page
This life is a prison.
There are not many more truthful thoughts than this. You’re a prisoner of your brain and your chemicals, even before being a prisoner of the society. And you only care about this when it’s a problem, of course, otherwise who cares, you just ride the wave.
JAI @jaivcalla – I have to fucking say this
Completely different ontological plane of existence compared to People™.
Related: University of Utah Neuroscience Initiative – The Unfixed Brain[🡕]
Long after It was too late To find back All meaningful The glow long gone The spark faded (and smothered)
And though I saw The others Advance and vanish into the distance…
I chose to stay behind To wander astray To remain unfound To merge with these dark thoughts As I saw and felt this existence As mere reflection In slow time
Shape of Despair – Reflection in Slow Time
For people with social anxiety disorder, everyday social interactions cause irrational anxiety, fear, self-consciousness, and embarrassment.
From Wikipedia.
The irony. Thinking is bad. Having a consciousness is bad. You have to be dumb and live the illusion.
r/Pessimism, u/Madular
Also a lot of people will tell you to just fake it/force it and it will became real, which is bs. The only real thing that can help is to find what you are good at, and what you enjoy and follow that path.
But finding what you are good/enjoy is another challenge in of itself.
Madame – The illusion of love, and the worst fear: anhedonia
2021/03/24, Sopra le righe
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Sometimes the thought is closer to the truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought. Continue reading
They make it sound as if women give you who knows what… It’s something that lasts five minutes. Among other things: the pleasure does not last long, the effort is big, and the position is ridiculous.
Vittorio Feltri, on multiple occasions, on TV and on radio
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Luigi Anepeta, psychoanalyst, at LIDI (Italian League for the Protection of Introverts’ Rights)’s official forum
https://lidi.forumfree.it/?t=51672617&st=30#entry625292054[🡕]
The percentage of introverts varies depending on the statistics: in the absence of a clear definition of what it means to be introverted, estimates range from 5% to 25% – the latter figure being supported by American researchers. The 5-7% estimate proposed in my book “Timido, docile, ardente…” wasn’t based on formal studies, but rather on my own observations in elementary schools, where the introverted child – easily recognizable at a glance – tends to be, on average, 1 in every 15 to 20 students. Today, I would be inclined to widen that range to 5-10%.
That introversion has a genetic basis – whose positive or negative developments depend on environmental influences – seems to me beyond doubt, given not only the behavioral traits observable early on, but especially the inner experiences (empathy, sense of justice, aesthetic sensitivity, etc.): these – both the traits and the experiences – are consequences of neoteny, which is, in absolute terms, the most defining feature of introversion.
Genetics is an extremely complex science and susceptible to ideological “aberrations”. With regard to introversion, what seems certain is that there is no single introversion gene, but rather a constellation of genes – dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands – present in the parental genetic makeup and “extracted” as a result of their combination. In parents, these genes may be evident as personality traits or masked by the dominance of extroverted genes. Once extracted and variously combined, they give rise to the introverted mode of being.
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.
Anonymous 02/09/18 (Fri) 20:03:16 No.3716, obscure imageboard
[…]
But try to look at it with full honesty, without bias: the closer you look at yourself and the actual course of your life, the more you realize the objective fact: you were the Rain Man retard. And all your imaginary lives are delusional fantasies.
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
Picky eaters, they grow up to be depressives and sexual anorexics, you know.
Pazuzu in The Exorcist (TV series), episode 4 season 1
The true, only problem, is not having the aptitude for suicide.
Someone on the internet, around 2016
The Society of Deviants – Piero Cipriano
The schizoid is rigid in his decisions […] Read the full page
Approaching form Approaching a deeper meaning
My fragments lay scattered Buried deep Never awaken
Still dreaming of life
Shape Of Despair – The Distant Dream of Life
It would have been so different Without this burden This sense of nothingness The lifelong defeat That took us here To a distance unreachable To a grey indifference Into these vast Monotony fields
Shape of Despair – Monotony Fields
I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.
Michel Houellebecq – Submission
About the movie “Melancholia” – Florin Flueras
All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is. Read the full page
The Crazy Woman Next Door – Conversation with Alda Merini
Unfortunately, the soul, which by the way is what then writes and survives […], is the part that flies over matter and is the one that’s the most attentive and the most painful: namely, seeing the deterioration of the body, this soul distress itself, it… above all, it loses its way. Continue reading
To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: “Pussy.” Whereas I answered “The smell of old people’s houses.” The question was “What do you really like the most in life?” I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.
The Great Beauty
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
I told him, at that time already, that my “not living” was dissolving the fear of dying… Read the full page
– No, no, you’ll have a thousand nights like this one. You won’t remember this. Everything will be forgotten.
– Everything?
– Everything.
– Why’s that?
– It’s sort of a natural… A law of nature.
– A rule?
– Yeah.
“Oslo, August 31st”
I realized something today. I’m a non-person, Sarah. You shouldn’t be here. I’m not here. You may see me, but I’m hollow.
Detachment
People think that life is something else, but that’s not true, life is not your coin collection, it only is by illusion, once you have a wife by your side. What about after? Afterwards, everything around you is as if it didn’t exist and never existed, it has less value than a turd. Continue reading
Doug Stanhope – The sad reality of sex
Doug Stanhope – 2010, live in Kansas City
Full show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwkoItmdQj4[🡕]
And the radiation tells you things that are true and at the same time absurd, cold, and above all rough. Read the full page
We humans actually like to die. Because it is the only thing that gives meaning to our life, and that puts an end to that painful feeling of perceiving our existence (as well as – but that’s obvious – to physical and psychological suffering). But at the same time, death reminds us of emptiness and nonsense. And so, this strange paradox is created, and between the two paths, most choose to distract themselves.
I noticed that it is not possible to go back. I could not step down from the throne nor undo what hitherto slipped before my eyes and was now as written in stone. I attached the utmost importance to the truth, and unconsciously found myself writing a cruel pact with it. The sensations tasted different. The features of reality were clear and cold. Corroded by a gray light, the walls showed the wrinkles of time. It is not raining. But the sun still hides behind the bare buildings. That sun that hides its true essence with all that light. So much light for so much darkness. Continue reading
Nothing happened this month. Nothing relevant, really. I wonder what’s relevant right now, though. Continue reading
Everyone was staying confined to those narrow mental spaces. And I, like them; I only knew that small world. And everything was goddamn gorgeous. There was passion, challenge, dialogues, workaholism, and satisfaction. Continue reading
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.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Obligation of worn-out dialogue to the bitter end It’s invoked by those who retreat, dodged by those who advance Everyone is self-sufficient, yet the numbers don’t add up
PGR – Cronache di guerra II (“War Chronicles II”)
No Love, No Hate, No Faith, No Memory
Mayhem – Ordo ad Chao
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
There were only two or three of us in Rome who considered climbing not just a hobby, but a job: to set off, to become obsessed with a wall of rock, to feel, before every attempt, the Route looming above you in an oppressive way, to feel anxiety rising uncontrollably, to fall asleep with the Route in your head, to alternate periods of nervous insomnia with periods of morbid drowsiness, to wake up with the Route still in your head, to deprive yourself of something, and to suffer, even if that something, or that suffering, is not necessarily connected to performance. It’s just that it’s written in the laws of the universe that to obtain, you must suffer, even if suffering does not necessarily mean you will obtain anything. So, you seek suffering, because it pricks you, awakens you, activates you, and at times breaks that opaque glass that almost always stands between you and reality; it makes you feel, at least sometimes, that you’re alive, and sometimes feeling alive is more important than feeling good. Serenity can be sacrificed in honor of life itself, if only to avoid falling back into that horrible nirvanic anesthesia.
Alessandro “Jolly” Lamberti – Jollypower
You know, Kyon… have you ever realized just how insignificant your existence on this planet really is? […] It happened to me. And I’ll never forget it. Back when I was in the sixth grade, my whole family went out to go watch a baseball game at the stadium. I didn’t really care about baseball, but I was surprised by what I saw when we got there. Everywhere I looked, I saw people. On the other side of the stadium, the people looked so small, like little moving grains of rice. It was so crowded. I thought that everyone in Japan had to be packed in there.
So I turned to my dad and asked him, “Do you know how many people are here right now”? He said since the stadium was full, probably fifty thousand. After the game, the street was filled with people and I was really shocked to see that, too. To me, it seemed like there was a ton of people there. But then, I realized it could only be a tiny fraction of all the people in Japan. When I got home, I pulled out my calculator. In social studies, I’d learned that the population of Japan was a hundred some odd million. So I divided that by fifty thousand. The answer was one two-thousandth. That shocked me even more. I was only one little person in that big crowded stadium filled with people, and believe me, there were so many people there, but it was just a handful of the entire population.
Up till then, I always thought that I was, I don’t know, kind of a special person. It was fun to be with my family. I had fun with my classmates. And the school that I was going to, it had just about the most interesting people anywhere. But that night, I realized it wasn’t true. All the stuff we did during class that I thought was so fun and cool, was probably happening just like that in classes in other schools all over Japan. There was nothing special about my school at all. When I realized that, it suddenly felt like the whole world around me started to fade into a dull gray void. Brushing my teeth and going to sleep at night, waking up and eating breakfast in the morning, that stuff happened all over the place. They were everyday things that everybody was doing. When I thought about it like that, everything became boring. If there’s really that many people in the world, then there had to be someone who wasn’t ordinary. There had to be someone who was living an interesting life. There just had to be. But why wasn’t I that person? So, that’s how I felt till I finished elementary school.
And then I had another realization. I realized fun things wouldn’t come my way just by waiting for them. I thought when I got into junior high, it was time for me to make a change. I’d let the world know I wasn’t a girl who was happy sitting around waiting. And I’ve done my best to become that person. But in the end, nothing happened. More time went by and before I knew it, I was in high school. I thought that something would change.
Haruhi in “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”
Excerpts of interviews to Thomas Ligotti
Three interviews. Read the full page
Are you lost or incomplete? Do you feel like a puzzle, you can’t find your missing piece? Tell me, how do you feel? Well, I feel like they’re talking in a language I don’t speak And they’re talking it to me
Coldplay – Talk
Arisen in vain to a life, Bleeding inner to suffer with time. Endlessly lost and still searching For something; someday…
Obsession & deceit
To burn a mark for a lifetime.
Boundaries to brake,
Reached from the edge of time.
To rebuild the past
For something that will everlast.
Just searching for to find itself
In still-motion.
[…]
Serve the frail mind, Escape through the lifetime To glance for your dismal youth.
Get closer, Closer to your own faith.
Shape of Despair – Still-Motion
I used to feel… I used to sense what were Inside of me To feel waves of difference Waves which brought me to live I enjoyed this life in me Breathing and feeling Burning and suffocating Didn’t curse the hour Which gave birth to me Didn’t curse another life When bearing death inside
Now all things I do bear Are all gone and free This, myself… Now fleeing around death Cursing the hour And another life… Which whom I used to care Now… Watching myself My own life Fading to afar… Listening these voices And trying to tell them That I will soon be gone
Shape of Despair – Curse Life
When you’re all alone in the lands of forever, Lay under the Milky Way, On and on, it’s getting too late out, I’m not in love this time this night.
Can’t help it if I space in a daze, My eyes tune out the other way, I may switch off and go in a daydream, In this head my thoughts are deep, Sometimes I can’t even speak, Would someone be and not pretend? I’m off again in my world
Avril Lavigne and Clifton Magness – My World
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)
Carmelo Bene – Four Moments on the Whole Nothing – 3°: Eros
Poor, poor… Poor lovers! Read the full page
You say the drinking is better than a woman And you say the thinking takes too much time Well God save your children should you have them For, to you, there’s nothing if there’s no wine
Bôa – Drinking
Nothing left to feel nor to understand.
I did not want to live my life. Nor did I even want to live for my death…
Shape of Despair – …To Live for My Death…
– You’re a… you’re a bit of a thinker, aren’t you?
– I don’t know.
– Well, you are.
Lost and Delirious – Mary and the gardener
No to the solution when you are the problem
Cripple Bastards – Morte da tossico (“Death of the Addict”)
For living on in others, in memories and dreams Is not enough You want everything Another world Where the birds always sing
The Cure – Where the Birds Always Sing
There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.
Patrick Bateman in American Psycho
Anyway, I can try anything, it’s the same circle leading to nowhere, and I’m tired now. Anyway, I’ve lost my face, my dignity, my look, everything is gone and I’m tired now. Don’t be scared: I’ve found a good job and I go to work every day on my old bicycle you loved.
I am piling up some unread books under my bed and I really think I’ll never read again. No concentration, just a white disorder everywhere around me, you know… I’m so tired now. Don’t worry: I often go to dinners and parties with some old friends who care for me, take me back home, and stay.
Monochrome floors, monochrome walls; only absence near me, nothing but silence around me. Monochrome flat, monochrome life; only absence near me, nothing but silence around me.
Sometimes I search an event or something to remind me, but I’ve really got nothing in mind. Sometimes I open the windows, I listen people walking in the down street; there is life out there.
Yann Tiersen – Monochrome (ft. Dominique A)
– I can read people’s minds. In my lifetime I have read the pasts, presents, and futures of thousands upon thousands of men and women.
[…]
And each mind that I peered into was stuffed with the same single object of obsession. That selfish and atavistic desire to pass on one’s seed… it was enough to make me sick. Every living thing on this planet exists to mindlessly pass on their DNA. We’re designed that way. And that’s why there is war.
But you… you are different… You’re the same as us. We have no past, no future. We live in the moment. That’s our only purpose.
Humans weren’t designed to bring each other happiness. From the moment we’re thrown into this world, we’re fated to bring each other nothing but pain and misery.
Psycho Mantis’ dying words in “Metal Gear Solid” (PSX)
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
More than a source of mental pain, today depression is a way of life. Read the full page
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
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.” Read the full page
Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.
Michel Houellebecq – Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte)
Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself. Read the full page
In the beginning of time, there was darkness. While I lay resting in my mother’s womb, I soon became a part of the light world; young in body, evil at heart. With little love around, I became aware of death. I should have been executed early in life for the crimes my mind commits daily.
Resurrection – Disembodies; then sampled by “Delta 9” in “Mortified”, and used in “Tricky Madness 2” by Krinkels
As the taxi took me through the city to the station, I felt as though I’d been dropped onto another planet, a cruel and hostile place. Inclined by character to silence and reflection, I’d always been repulsed by noise and uproar, by any manifestation of the excessive merriment that so often borders on violence. I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it.
The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
Angels of the Universe – Einar Már Guðmundsson
No, this grave is not deep enough to accomodate the feelings of us all. Read the full page
In the context of obsessive experiences, depression intervenes […] driven by a push for change that leads the subject to feel the need to address their unfulfilled needs. However, these needs have taken on an anarchic and transgressive drive and are intensely guilt-ridden. Continue reading
And you are not me The lengths that I will go to The distance in your eyes Oh no I’ve said too much I set it up
[…]
Trying to keep up with you
And I don’t know if I can do it
R.E.M – Losing My Religion
I’m not interested in solving the ills of society. I don’t want to save the world. I don’t even want to save me… I think most talk is so boring; I mean: save this, do that, do this… I think we’re all so boring saying everything we don’t even wanna save ourselves, we’re so boring talking about it. There’s nothing left to save, we’re so fucking boring. Let it die, I say. Let there be a new beginning. It’s awful. Goodnight.
Charles Bukowski – Let There Be A New Beginning
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
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
I feel good, I feel bad, I don’t know what to do I don’t study, I don’t work, I don’t watch TV I don’t go to the movies, I don’t play sports
CCCP – Io sto bene (I Feel Good)
So how are you, then If I may ask, what are you up to in that modernity that just seems real?
Le cose che pensano (The Things That Think) – Pasquale Panella for Lucio Battisti
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on. Read the full page
All around me are familiar faces worn out places, worn out faces Bright and early for their daily races going nowhere, going nowhere Their tears are filling up their glasses no expression, no expression Hide my head, I want to drown my sorrow no tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take When people run in circles it’s a very very mad world
Children waiting for the day they feel good happy birthday, happy birthday Made to feel the way that every child should sit and listen, sit and listen Went to school and I was very nervous no one knew me, no one knew me Hello teacher, tell me what’s my lesson look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take When people run in circles it’s a very very mad world
[…]
Tears For Fears – Mad World
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
And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
Parker had trained himself to be totally celibate, channelling all his sexual energies into pursuits of the mind […] Read the full page
How in the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
Charles Bukowski – Factotum
The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.
Bruce Lee – Tao of Jeet Kune Do (posthumous)
– 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
When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
“For [Elohim] doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened…”
No sooner are they open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come sooner or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present. By freeing himself from succession, he has devoured the possible and rendered the future superfluous. “I cannot meet you in your future,” he says to the others. “We do not have a single moment in common.” Because for him the whole of the future is already here.
When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords a certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
I know what you must be saying to yourselves. If that’s the way she feels about it why doesn’t she just end it all? Oh, no. Not me. I’m in no hurry for that final disappointment. For I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you, when that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath, I’ll be saying to myself:
Is that all there is, is that all there is If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing Let’s break out the booze and have a ball If that’s all there is
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller – Is That All There Is?
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
My independence, which is my strength, entails solitude, which is my weakness.
P.P. Pasolini – Il Caos (“Chaos”), in “Tempo Illustrato”
Flowers for Algernon (novel) – Daniel Keyes
Why am I always looking at life through a window? Read the full page
– I haven’t recovered. I never will. Never…
[…]
– Don’t say that. Calm down. What are you afraid of?
– The streets, the factories, the colors, the people… everything!
[…]
– There’s something terrible about reality and i don’t know what it is. No one will tell me. Even you don’t help me, Corrado.
Giuliana in “Red Desert” (“Il deserto rosso”)
The Fire Within (Le feu follet / Fuoco fatuo) – Louis Malle
– You still have feelings of anxiety? Continue reading
The schizoid individual (and this applies still more to the schizophrenic) does not bask in the warmth of a loving self-regard. Self-scrutiny is quite improperly regarded as a form of narcissism. Neither the schizoid nor the schizophrenic is narcissistic in this sense. As a schizophrenic put it, she was scorched under the glare of a black sun. The schizoid individual exists under the black sun, the evil eye, of his own scrutiny. The glare of his awareness kills his spontaneity, his freshness; it destroys all joy. Everything withers under it. And yet he remains, although profoundly not narcissistic, compulsively preoccupied with the sustained observation of his own mental and/or bodily processes. In Federn’s language, cathects his ego-as-object with mortido (ed. the death drive).
A very similar point was made in different terms when it was said earlier that the schizoid individual depersonalizes his relationship with himself. That is to say, he turns the living spontaneity of his being into something dead and lifeless by inspecting it.
R. D. Laing – The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness
For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Do normies suffer?
In other words, you might say that I still have no understanding of what makes human beings tick. My apprehension on discovering that my concept of happiness seemed to be completely at variance with that of everyone else was so great as to make me toss sleeplessly and groan night after night in my bed. It drove me indeed to the brink of lunacy. I wonder if I have actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I. I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him.
I simply don’t understand. I have not the remotest clue what the nature or extent of my neighbor’s woes can be. Practical troubles, griefs that can be assuaged if only there is enough to eat—these may be the most intense of all burning hells, horrible enough to blast to smithereens my ten misfortunes, but that is precisely what I don’t understand: if my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine? Am I wrong in thinking that these people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced of the normality of their way of life that they have never once doubted themselves? If that is the case, their sufferings should be easy to bear: they are the common lot of human beings and perhaps the best one can hope for. I don’t know… If you’ve slept soundly at night the morning is exhilarating, I suppose. What kind of dreams do they have? What do they think about when they walk along the street? Money? Hardly—it couldn’t only be that. I seem to have heard the theory advanced that human beings live in order to eat, but I’ve never heard anyone say that they lived in order to make money. No. And yet, in some instances… No, I don’t even know that… The more I think of it, the less I understand. All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it?—I don’t know.
No Longer Human / A Shameful Life – Osamu Dazai
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. Read the full page
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
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
Albert Schweitzer (unconfirmed)
Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud
Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness. Read the full page
Short Stories for a Year – The Wheelbarrow – Luigi Pirandello
When there’s someone around, I never look at her, but I feel that she’s looking at me, she’s looking at me without taking her eyes off me for a moment. I’d like to make her understand in private that it’s nothing, that she should relax, that I couldn’t allow myself to perform this brief act in front of others, that for her it’s of no importance, but for me it’s everything. I perform it every day at the right moment in utmost secrecy and with frightful joy because, trembling, I experience the delight of a divine, conscious madness that for an instant frees me and allows me to get even with everything. Read the full page
Anyone who isn’t born with the necessary wings will never grow them afterwards. Anyone who can’t drop instinctively and at the right second like lead on prey will never learn, and there’ll be no point in his watching others who can, as he’ll never be able to imitate them. One dies in the precise state in which one is born, our hands mere organs made for catching instinctively or letting what one has fall through one’s fingers.
Italo Svevo – A Life
Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy—ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!
Friedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil
For this reason I enter into solitude – so as not to drink out of everyone’s cisterns. Amid the many I live like the many and don’t think as I; after some time I always feel then as if they wanted to ban me from myself and rob my soul – and I turn angry toward everyone and fear everyone. Then I need the desert to turn good again.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Dawn – 491
Men laugh at eccentrics like that, but women recognize them immediately. Pure, chaste women love them, out of sympathy; corrupt women seek out their friendship in order to purge themselves of spoilage.
Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov
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
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
In these last days I’ve been much better (in a way however, that anyone who’s fine, falling into this “better”, would assume to be dead) […]
Giacomo Leopardi to Pietro Giordani, Recanati, August 8th 1817
https://dnamistakes.webcomic.ws/comics/pl/1603551[🡕]
O Julie, what a fatal present from heaven is a sensible soul! He who has received it must expect to know nothing but pain and suffering in this world. Lowly plaything of the air and seasons, his destiny will be regulated by sun or fog, fair or overcast weather, and he will be satisfied or sad at the whim of the winds. Victim of prejudice, he will find in absurd maxims an invincible obstacle to the just wishes of his heart. Men will punish him for having upright sentiments on every subject, and for judging by what is genuine rather than by what is conventional. Alone he would suffice to his own misery, by giving himself over indiscreetly to the divine attractions of honesty and beauty, whereas the weighty chains of necessity attach him to ignominy. He will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is a man: his heart and his reason will be endlessly at war, and unbounded desires will set in store for him eternal deprivation.
Julie or the New Heloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – Oratio de hominis dignitate (“Oration on the Dignity of Man”)
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.