Tag: social alienation
The Suffering of the Everyday Banalities of Life
r/Pessimism, u/forestofdoom2022 Continue reading
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.
Have you ever had a crushingly agonizing crush?
r/Schizoid, u/iwalkinthemoonlight Continue reading
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.
[1:52] for me, I don’t know, looks like I’m the only one thinking this but the saturation and the numbers of things they drive me insane the fact that we’re 8 billion, that there’s so much music you wouldn’t get through it in 7 lifetimes, etc. I don’t know, I think about it every day yeah, that’s why I’m sick lol but I do think about it every day like, nihilism resides in the numbers, you don’t even need to do philosophy
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
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.
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
They carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. Read the full page
In case you miss the Internet. Continue reading
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.
Majority always wins.
My personality with the pills from The Matrix
Memez are fun. Read the full page
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[🡕]
Umberto Galimberti – Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you don’t praise or exalt “the individual”, you are pessimistic, of course, right?… … Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isn’t he? Those who say “pessimism”… I’m like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
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
These are the kind of people who live on the edge of life, so to speak, who are thrown into uncharted waters by their melancholy, and somehow manage to find the surface right before they are lost to the high tides. Anyone who has gone through debilitating bouts of depression knows what the feeling is like: you stand at the cliff of a mountain and gaze right into the abyss, whose gravitas is irresistible. During those times, it really helps to have something; anything at all to grab onto – your job, your spouse, a family member, a promise made to someone, even a pet. As the years pass, however, you start to lose those things, everything feels old, repetitive, and it is not the case for melancholics to be friendly or even easy to be around to keep relationships. This results in the loss of personal meaning, and the fundamental truth of life hits the hardest when personal meaning is non-existent, for there is no cosmic one. The abyss pulls you in; you wade into the cold, uncharted waters, lost in its deep oblivion. This, to me, is suicide par excellence, and only a very contemplative few get to carry it out.
Selim Güre – The Occult of the Unborn
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.
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
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.
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
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
All right, look, man, I’m cashing in. I’m done. I’m 40 shit years old, I got nothing, I got nobody. And I don’t want anything, I don’t want anybody; and that’s the worst part: when the want goes. That’s… that’s bad. I mean, like, suffering is one thing, or “not having” is one thing… But when you just don’t care anymore?
You know, I’ve gone soft in the last three pussies I’ve been in. You get to a point where you go “Maybe it’s time to just put a period at the end of my… whatever this was.”
Louie, S02E09 – Eddie (Doug Stanhope)
2000 – Dialogue with The Dreamer
We have been in a mental crisis since 2000. 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
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
«It is society that’s sick,» Zeno said, you know.
Ineptitude is almost being ashamed to find yourself face to face with another idiot like you, afflicted by the human condition, plunged in the shit of our days, and who got to pretend that everything is fine.
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”)
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
Civilization has no appeal to me. The Eastern Peoples seem to live their lives more sensibly. Because they don’t have such distant goals as us, the white brotherhood. The East is… «If you are moving, then you are on the right path.» While for us, the path doesn’t matter – only reaching the goal. I want to go to the East, because there I will feel well. I’ll be able to enter the Present time.
The point is – to stop thinking. These days, we have too much information about everything. Internet, TV, radio… You can find out what goes on in the States at any given point.
For me drugs aren’t a specific substance: they’re anything that you’re addicted to. When you lose what you’ve been addicted to, you have to accept something different. I’ve accepted that all these “gods” we have, they’re all teachers. There is one god – they all serve him! Like in Hinduism: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva – they are one god, who creates in three different ways.
I think we are on this planet for too short a time to waste it. And so, I live every day. From beginning to end, I experience it. I try to do everything I possibly can, take every kind of drug I could, to…
WIth opiates you have the sense that you are wasting your life. Sleeping. Then you say to yourself: «I’m sleeping!» So you get up, and try to do other things, other drugs; I do all sort of drugs, but I remain active. That’s why I won’t quit until I find a steady girlfriend: otherwise I’ll die of boredom. But I don’t have a sense of security, stability, that I could have a lasting relationship, with a future. A junkie pays more attention to himself. All of us are little “Narcissi”, blooming here in this canal. Everything is always uncertain, you are always alone, so you say to yourself: «What’s the point?!» If you had a wife, kids, TV, a newspaper… It’s kind of idyllic. That’s why there are movies to experience another life. More or less, that’s why there is art.
Kamen Petrov in “Invisible”
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
Umberto Galimberti – The success of philosophy
But for those who, adapted to the world, and with a moderate self-awareness still do not find a meaning of their existence, and therefore come into contact not with this or that pain, but with the essence of pain, for those there is no remedy in the pharmacy and perhaps not even in psychotherapy. 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
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
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)
Shut me in, Levante. Shut me in.
Libero (Massimo Ceccherini) inside the casket, in The Cyclone
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
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
Under neon loneliness everlasting nothingness
Manic Street Preachers – Motorcycle Emptiness
Madness is the emergency exit… you can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away… forever.
Joker in Alan Moore’s “Batman: The Killing Joke”
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
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
I was looking for a job, and then I found a job And heaven knows I’m miserable now
The Smiths – Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
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
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
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
– 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
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
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).
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
(Giuliana and her son, in front of the factories)
– Why is that smoke yellow?
– Because it’s poison.
– But then, if a little bird flies through it, it dies.
– Well, by now the little birds know, and they don’t fly through it anymore.
Red Desert (“Il deserto rosso”) – Final scene
– 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
Who Works Is Lost (Chi lavora è perduto) – Tinto Brass
The world be damned, breaking your back for a slice of bread. Damned be the world, either you die of hunger or you die or boredom. Continue reading
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
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
You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.
Olin Miller
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
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
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
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
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