Tag: society/politics
Dictatorships, theocracies, democracies, Americanism, capitalism, liberalism, globalization, exploitation, the rat race, selective social inclusion, double standards, hypocrisy.
The embarrassing political theater of form made of psychiatric cases.
The high-ups who move independently of us and who are at the mercy of the Market and the Technology (which has now become an end in itself), and influence the lives of the poor and the less poor.
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/06/the-catastrophe-of-birth.html[🡕] Continue reading
The Suffering of the Everyday Banalities of Life
r/Pessimism, u/forestofdoom2022 Continue reading
And what do those philosophers who oppose our resenting life propose? The forging of new myths such as the übermensch or the deification of human history. However, changing gods won’t make a difference, just as returning to medieval or ancient times won’t make a difference. Eventually, these new myths will die, too, because some of us are intelligent enough to see through them. Read the full page
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/09/excess-lucidity.html[🡕] Continue reading
Most people accept work and take it for granted, like the air we breath
Just try it. Say «All work sucks» to someone. See how people contort themselves philosophically to defend this “striving” belief system. Read the full page
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.
https://www.madinamerica.com/tag/chemical-imbalance-hoax/[🡕] Continue reading
r/Pessimism, u/Robotoro23
This is how people today justify suffering of people when industrial revolution began, “it was worth it because we now have a fridge, medicine and technology.
This is how now people are justifying suffering of people today, “it’s worth it because we will reduce even more suffering with additional technology
The problem with that line of thought is that it presupposes an end to our misery, that technology will bring salvation and create Utopia.
What those same people don’t get is that suffering is fundamentally ontological to humans and everything around us.
Hypothetically even if we managed to cure every disease, every mental health ’problem’, everything being automated, upload our consciousness to machines etc…
After all of that, the questions people very like to ignore is this: what after that?
A sterilized society devoid of pain will only bring boredom and boredom eventually turns into suffering and we are back to square one: how to reach salvation of existence?
Why is living a constant torture?
Rant on Reddit, with good comments. Read the full page
r/Pessimism, u/Robotoro23
People ultimately read books, play video games, watch fiction etc… Because they suffer. They engross themselves as a fictional spectator to forget about their personal life predicament thus unawarely denying Will to Life and affirming non existence periodically to lessen their suffering.
Andrew McIntosh – Earth of the Scum (Ineffectual Whinging)
Isn’t it time we had World War Three? Read the full page
Andrew McIntosh – The Point of Pointlessness (Ineffectual Whinging)
[…] that whole insane “get up and go” mentality, starting with the obscenity of the work ethic, squirming as it did like soft stool out of the arsehole of Christianity, condemning us to mindless labour and activity simply for its own sake. Work for its own sake – what kind of fucking numpty thought that was a good idea? Read the full page
One day is the time it takes to get bored of your new shiny toy.
So you then go back to either your life as a slave or your basic organic distractions.
Also see Fichte
Andrew McIntosh – On Conspiracy Theories (Ineffectual Whinging)
One of the main reason for getting into conspiracy theories is to get the illusion that by doing so, you’re exercising some kind of agency in the world. Read the full page
Andrew McIntosh – On Leaving Scenes (Ineffectual Whinging)
But that’s the thing: with scenes, it’s the ideals first, not the people. People become mere faculties for the ideals, which is bizarre because all ideals only come from people. But scenes thus tend to act as if the ideals they live by and promote are like divine commandments handed down from on high. Read the full page
Existential Comics #501[🡕] Continue reading
RL is cringe.
It’s 2023, and newspapers are still talking about Berlusconi, and about the pope too. Okay, let’s not even get into politics, that’s a matter of mafia. But they’re still talking about the POPE (complete with vestments) of the CATHOLIC CHURCH. Continue reading
Brief and simple guidelines to navigate the mental health system
The human being is by nature incoherent and inconsistent. Read the full page
Dario Fabbri – The Cultural Element in Geopolitics
XII Festa Scienza Filosofia – Dario Fabbri – 2023/04/22 – The Cultural Element in Geopolitics – How History and Customs Influence the Trajectory of Powers. Continue reading
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
Why I don’t kill myself: an essay about beliefs
r/Pessimism, u/finitemode Continue reading
An idea about why most people are so irrational
r/Pessimism, u/Wanderer974 Continue reading
Majority always wins.
Discerning gullible people, with judgment
In these last decades, conspiracy theories blew up. Stuff inside vaccines, UFOs, chemtrails, but-you-can’t-see-the-stars, it’s weird for a building to collapse just because a large airplane crashed into it at 750 km/h, and so on… Continue reading
Psychiatry is a pseudoscience (a collection of posts from Reddit)
Disorders are not included within the DSM based on any objective evidence, and are always a reflection of the normative biases of the society. For example, homosexuality was in the DSM until the 1970s, but neither its inclusion nor its removal were based on any kind of objective evidence. Read the full page
r/Pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered
Too much ignorance, and we have absolutely no respect for the potential for suffering that exists here. We are far more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot (so to speak), cause others as well as ourselves more pain than we ever thought possible, only to eventually decay and die.
Too little ignorance, and you become completely frozen by fear. You fully recognize the fragility of your body, the consciousness resting in it, and the fragility of all individual life forms.
[…]
A certain level of solipsism is required for a decent quality of life. A certain level of ignorance and delusion are required for a decent quality of life.
[…]
The sweet-spot of delusion. That’s where it’s at.
[…]
Meditation has helped me in very gradually lifting the veil of safety/security. And then psychedelics rip the veil off of your face all at once and it’s just WAY too much. We are biologically programmed to be reproducing machines, and there are many mechanisms in place that keep us from completely losing our very complex human minds.
Derek Muller went to visit Chernobyl… Read the full page
(Speaking about abortion and guns)
Welcome to right wing America, where if you want to end a young life, you have to shoot them.
Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)[🡕]
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
Things change faster and faster and we keep keeping up because we are afraid to die.
Vsauce in the video “Illusions of Time”, inspired by “Social acceleration” by Hartmut Rosa
[young people] went out there to stop discrimination – not all discrimination, just some of it… Which is a weird form of discrimination, but…
Louis C.K. – “Sorry” special
Fucking bastards. Read the full page
Rocco Siffredi and Candy Red chatting in “Rocco’s Intimate Casting 21”
– You’re a nymphomaniac. […] When I was young, I was like you. […] I’d just think about sex, all the time.
– Yes? And you fucked all the girls?
– I tried.
– But?
– I didn’t fuck all of them because it’s difficult for a man. But for the woman it’s more easy (sic): you can fuck everyone. Right?
– Yes.–, and she laughs.
Ironically, the most anti-work post ever written, without realizing it: https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html[🡕] Continue reading
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
whatever question you’re asking yourself, the answer is that you’re not in control, so ride the wave but be ready to swim
Natalino Balasso, YouTube, @Telebalasso, 2018 New Year’s Speech[🡕], in the end credits
Morally, having children is worse than murder: you create a life out of nothing and you sentence it to suffering for decades.
https://dnamistakes.webcomic.ws/comics/pl/1569766[🡕]
– What’s so bad about being a pig?
– It’s undignified.
– Undignified?
– Walking about with your nose the same height as your asshole.
– Snout.
– What’s that?
– Pigs have snouts, not noses. So it would be your snout the same height as your asshole.
– Nose, snout… You’re still trotting about gazing up everybody else’s assholes all day long. What kind of society is that?
– An equal one?
Black Mirror S04E05 “Metalhead”
Exclusion from the sphere of labor equates to social insignificance.
Umberto Galimberti at a conference
When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real. Read the full page
Why “We Are the Flesh” has a deeper twist ending than “The Sixth Sense”
filmcolossus.com, review by Jordan C. Johnson Continue reading
Beyond the Sad Passions – Miguel Benasayag
Everything happens as if the permanence of his suffering were the undisputable proof of his identity in the sense of its singularity: “I suffer, therefore I am.” Read the full page
– There’s a common, sentimental notion that angels are all around us, solving little domestic problems. But in the Bible, when humans encounter an angel, they fall to their knees in fear. These are beings of tremendous power. Think of the first renegade angels, in league with Lucifer. They were strong enough to challenge God. And surely, God…
[…]
God actually created these rogue angels, knowing that they would defy Him, because what was the end result of this defiance?
The police superintendent: – Lucifer came to Earth in the guise of a serpent.
– Very good…
[…]
And what did we gain from that famous snake? Knowledge, free will, the ability to think for ourselves, which led to everything you see now in this room: civilization, art, culture, music… life. In some strange way, these rogue angels were the architects of all that we hold dear.
Dr. John Rexroth in The Exorcist (TV series), episode 6 season 1
I envy people who commit suicide
r/offmychest, u/SoulOfTheInternet Continue reading
Love doesn’t exist: it’s just the forceful echo of moral rules pressing on people’s cravings; the easiest remedy for the fear of being unable to stand alone.
Fabi Silvestri Gazzè – L’amore non esiste (“Love Doesn’t Exist”)
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
Money doesn’t buy you happiness, it just buys you a lot of therapy to talk about why you’re not happy.
Castro in Grand Theft Auto V
Suffering is not just an intellectual game
https://reducing-suffering.org/the-horror-of-suffering/#Suffering_is_not_just_an_intellectual_game[🡕] Continue reading
What we should do is take all the mentally defective people in this country and give them government jobs, and just sit back and watch things improve.
George Carlin quoting a joke by his brother Patrick – “Unmasked” interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-clvDxl8qI[🡕]
I told him, at that time already, that my “not living” was dissolving the fear of dying… Read the full page
2000 – Dialogue with The Dreamer
We have been in a mental crisis since 2000. Read the full page
– You’re young and still think there’s something out there, floating… that resembles dreams. And there isn’t.
[…]
Let’s not discuss tastes. How could we ever understand each other? It’s like a 17th century knight meeting a rock singer. Young people like impossible things. And older people, the simplest. It’s like flying: when you’re young, you think you can fly. That your car just flies away. Flies away, I don’t know… from this country, from this bathroom, from this world. The whole point of fucking you was to fly with your wings… fly a little while. To get a little taste of youth.
[…]
– Real politicians make me sick. They deceive people.
– You think people want to know the truth. They’d rather be deceived.
– You can’t be happy if you don’t lie to yourself?
The park is now empty and bare[🡕], with an abandoned chain about it. The jungle gym, the slide and swing have rusted together. They’re all so terribly alone now. Where did all the children go? Didn’t they know that the park needed them?
A child’s intelligent heart can fathom the depth of many dark places. But can it fathom the delicate moment of its own detachment?
Detachment
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
You can imagine, a seventeen-year-old, it’s the age when one fights furiously with their father, even now, and they fought furiously back then too (ed. in the Middle Ages), as in every era, at that age.
Alessandro Barbero, Festival della Mente 2011[🡕]
This is a strange, rather perverse, story, just to put it in very simple terms. It’s a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.
Tim Jackson’s 2010 TED talk
We live in a decadent civilisation which robs us of our ability to shape and define our destiny and hence robs us of our spirit and identity. Western man has been gradually separated from his natural environment, his spirituality, his fellow man and finally from himself. Life has been reduced to an animalistic base as we drift from one empty satisfaction of technological convenience to another.
Art and culture no longer carry any grand or heroic ideals but rather seek to stimulate base emotions through ugly and abstract forms. Art and culture rarely serve as little more than distractions from the torment of perception – no longer seeking to order, interpret or explain the world around us but preferring instead to excuse it, replace it or deny it with an increasingly less interactive and more atomised and abstract alternative.
We were promised technological salvation but have been led to an air-conditioned hell by the false idols of progress who sought to remove the struggle from existence, not stopping to think what would be left. For life in essence is struggle and the will to participate in that struggle and make it one’s own is the most sacred characteristic of man.
The Harsh Noise Wall[🡕] is the soundtrack to our spiritually vacuous and culturally bankrupt age. There is no struggle here. There is no spirit. No personality. No society. There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere to progress. This is the end product. This is the end.
“A View From Nihil” in “Triumph of the Broken Will”
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
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.
The famous geologist said, on television, that our heads are too big, and it is difficult for us to get out of the pussy; the ribcage protects only a few organs; the veins in the legs struggle to hold up the whole body; the back, for it to keep the erect position, it needs to arch, and therefore back pain, etc.; vision also has several problems, etc. In short, we are shit. We are not as wonderful of a machine as they say, we have a thousand flaws. And therefore we are not the result of a divine plan, blah blah. Obvious stuff, it was a speech against religions, but I was more interested in the fact that evolution is still ongoing and we are currently far from perfect; his words: «we adapted as best as we could». Here you are. Difficult evolutionary natural adaptation. Interesting parallelism with social adaptation, which is ultimately strongly linked to it. And someone makes fun making memes that show how, in a certain sense, we are now living an involution. Very in tune with the cyberpunk world, which sees the end of man coinciding with the maximum technological development. Continue reading
– …because next year you’re not going to see me, you know.
– Oh, so you are in fact retiring. Lucky you, prof…
– What?! You shouldn’t say such a thing, you are young!
An ex-classmate
There’s a thirst for ignorance, because for millennia there has been a thirst for knowledge. Humanity has got to know so much, too much. And as it now notices that it’s worse off than before, the desire has reversed itself, and so there is a thirst for ignorance. But this has not led to a productive step backwards, because by now the damage has already been done and it has already changed the game: it has led to a heavy, aggressive and self-destructive ignorance, not the simple smug knowledge of the old years.
«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.
Once that which is in fact an illusion has fallen, you will suddenly find yourself thrown into reality. Read the full page
(At the zoo.)
– What do you see?
– Animals.
– Prisoners, held in a cage like us in a world without risk, or struggle, or danger. The only difference is that they are able to see the bars, and that takes away any hope of escape.
Choke / Soffocare
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.
Often attributed to Mark Twain, but origin unverified
The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery
Lastly, teenagers think they’re adults when in fact they’re imitating adults who never really made it into adulthood and who are running away from life. It’s pathetic. Read the full page
Excerpts of interviews to Thomas Ligotti
Three interviews. Read the full page
I think everybody should get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that that’s not the answer.
Jim Carrey, Ottawa Citizen, December 2005
✻
I’ve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame, so that they could see that it’s not where you’re going to find your sense of completion.
Jim Carrey, commencement address at Maharishi University of Management, May 24, 2014
Big city life Here my heart have no base And right now Babylon de ’pon me case
People in a show, All lined in a row. We just push on by, It’s funny, How hard we try.
[…]
Soon our work is done, All of us, one by one. Still, we live our lives, As if all this stuff survives.
[…]
I find myself in a big city prison Arisen from the vision of mankind
Designed, to keep me discreetly Neatly in the corner
[…]
Mattafix – Big City Life
But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
David Foster Wallace, This Is Water (commencement address at Kenyon College
No matter what one does, there is never enough time.
Invisible
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”
In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.
The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear – Part 1. Baby It’s Cold Outside
There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life – I repeat, everything – is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.
Thomas Ligotti – “Fantastic Metropolis” interview
Old people, they look back at the good old days, and it was good because they were young. But they act like it was “the day”. No, it was ’cause youth is good: that’s gone, you’re fucked; it’s not the day. And then they reject anything that’s new, it’s like we do with fucking hip-hop, if you’re in your 30s: «Oh, fuck that, that ain’t music, we had music back when 38 Special was around…» What? No. Let’s all fucking kill ourselves for the hypocrisy, right?
Doug Stanhope – Deadbeat Hero
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Pirandello proposed, among the alternative solutions to the problems of existence, murder, suicide, or madness; nowadays, in an age of frantic synergies, we must combine the different possibilities, so we must become completely mad, kill the highest possible number of individuals, and then finally commit suicide.
Carl William Brown (Bruno Mensi)
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
The age-old development of consciousness Drives us away from the essence of life We meditate too much so that our instincts will fade away They fade away
What’s the point of life And what’s the meaning if we all die in the end? Does it make sense to learn or do we forget everything?
Epica – The Phantom Agony
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
Carmelo Bene – Four Moments on the Whole Nothing – 4°: Art
(Miserable) artists and relative (miserable) consumers. Read the full page
Waking Life – Richard Linklater
A thousand years is but an instant. Read the full page
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Children of the workers Children of the tradesmen Children of those who matter, and of those who never will
C.S.I. – Tutti giù per terra (All Fall to the Ground)
Some people are alive simply because it’s against the law to kill them.
Variations:
Many people are alive only because it’s illegal to shoot them.
The law against murder is the number one thing preventing murder. Louis C.K.
[…]
You stand before the final dimension, and I am the darkness of eternity…
[…] All life bears death from birth. Life fears death, but lives only to die. It starts with anxiety. Anxiety becomes fear. Fear leads to anger… anger leads to hate… hate leads to suffering… The only cure for this fear is total destruction. Kuja was a victim of his own fear. He concluded he could only save himself by destroying the origin of all things – the crystal.
[…]
…Now, the theory is undeniable. Kuja’s action proves it. All things live to perish. At last, life has uncovered this truth. Now, it is time to end this world.
[…]
I exist for one purpose… To return everything back to the zero world, where there is no life and no crystal to give life. In a world of nothing, fear does not exist. This is the world that all life desires.
[…]
Foolish creature… Your fears have already deluded you. One day, you will choose destruction over existence, as Kuja did. When he sought to destroy the crystal, the purpose of life ended. Now, come…
Necron, Final Fantasy IX
I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.
Agent Smith in “The Matrix”
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
Agent Smith in “The Matrix”
Right and wrong are not what separate us and our enemies. It’s our different standpoints, our perspectives that separate us. Both sides blame one another. There’s no good or bad side. Just two sides holding different views.
Squall Leonhart in Final Fantasy VIII
Fishermans Horizon – A tribute
Music and pictures for the nostalgia of that place. Read the full page
– 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)
– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?
– What?
– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?
– You wouldn’t be you, if you couldn’t play.
– No, I want to know.
– Our bodies sway to music. «Oh, brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?»
– But don’t you wish, sometimes, that you couldn’t play, that you could just be ordinary?
– Like what? Live in the country? Making bread? Feeding chickens? Playing once a year with a bunch of amateurs?
– How dare you insult my sister like that…
– I wasn’t insulting her.
– Well, at least she chose her life. Not like you and me. We’re just trained freaks.
Hilary and Jackie, the movie about Jacqueline du Pré
– But dad, you’re talking, like, in 25 years. Sorry, but I’d rather be happy now than in 25 years.
– Sure, you’re right. Perhaps it’s not much of a comfort at the moment. But anyway…
– ’Cause in 25 years… That’s, like, 25 years. It doesn’t exist.
Show Me Love / Fucking Åmål
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
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
The sinking of the Titanic represented the end of an era, the broken dream of the belle époque. As with the fall of the Babylonian empire, the sinking of the Titanic represented the symbol of the crumbling of proud empires, with a similar mix of rich, bourgeois and poor all destined together for the abyss. It was the end of a legend that married technology to wealth, materialism to romance, illusion to fantasy.
Massimo Polidoro, The Curse of Titanic
Athletes
[…]
But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing… the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way ‘up close and personal’ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small… [Tennis player] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way… Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.
David Foster Wallace, “The String Theory” (July 1996, Esquire)
Shut me in, Levante. Shut me in.
Libero (Massimo Ceccherini) inside the casket, in The Cyclone
You know how I know it’s the end of the world? Because everything’s been done, every kind of music’s been tried, every government’s been tried, every fuckin’ hairstyle. How you gonna make it another thousand years, for Chrissake?
Max Peltier in “Strange Days”
A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
The Liars’ Club – Mary Karr
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Already from our dusk of birth, begins a destiny. Ruthless, for most human beings: if you are not born a billionaire, you are doomed forever. You have to give in to the everyday, procure stimuli for the project; instead of de-projecting, you are damned to the drawing.
As it began, it was over already, as in all Lorenzaccesque misadventures. If I had been the billionaire Schopenhauer, I certainly would not have written “The World as Will and Representation”. I would have been careful not to: one is not born to work, to explain oneself, to think; one is not even born to un-think, because even that is engaging with thought. One is not born to manage, to act-suffer: all this is inflicted upon us by circumstances.
Just as we passively endure every prenatal perception, we will also endure the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.
The registry office, the studying to survive, condemn us to in-forming ourselves, to form ourselves, deform ourselves, to become hunchbacked like Leopardi, just to have a part, when we would want nothing more than to put aside art, and life itself too. A true curse.
Carmelo Bene, Autografia di un ritratto (“Autograph of a Portrait”)
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
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Any so-called “know-it-all” expertise is bullshit, and any problem is a false problem. For once, on this show, we’re really talking about bullshit, finally! It’s about time!, to recognize that we’re always talking bullshit. Tonight we’re saying it’s not just tonight that it’s bullshit, but that we’re always just talking words – that is, bullshit.
Carmelo Bene at the Maurizio Costanzo Show (“Uno contro tutti” special)
Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as he law of the market’. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. On the economic plane Raphael Tisserand belongs in the victors’ camp; on the sexual plane in that of the vanquished. Certain people win on both levels; others lose on both. Businesses fight over certain young professionals; women fight over certain young men; men fight over certain young women; the trouble and strife are considerable.
Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte), Michel Houellebecq
Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself. Read the full page
There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.
Cormac McCarthy, The New York Times Magazine, interview
Under neon loneliness everlasting nothingness
Manic Street Preachers – Motorcycle Emptiness
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
Terminator 2 – Apocalypse scene
Noam Chomsky on wage slavery, slavery and classical liberalism
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin – Doin’ It Again
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
If you don’t remove the world as will and representation, this mania… The principle of individuation by which we wake up in the morning, we want to kill ourselves, then two or three coffees are enough, and off we go, back to deceive, to kill time. But theatre is essentially the non-place.
Carmelo Bene at the Maurizio Costanzo Show
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
[…] for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called “schools,” […]
“The Abolition of Work”, Bob Black
Bill Hicks
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
It’s no longer a question of staying healthy. It’s a question of finding a sickness you like.
Jackie Mason
Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of life’s certainty and exactness.
This used to irritate me, because I naïvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction to something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply a superior attitude, today I see it as the sign of an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in us, who are devoted to dreaming and expressing, something different that makes them suspicious, just because it’s unfamiliar. I like to think that the smartest among them sometimes detect our superiority, and then smile in a superior way to hide the fact.
But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.
Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
There’s no bad like a good man gone bad.
Charlie (Bud Spencer) in “Who Finds a Friend Finds a Treasure”
God: he can’t find us any better than Santa Claus.
The Blue Lagoon
The sentence, otherwise obvious, carries weight because of the context of the film, as it is spoken by castaway “children”.
Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.
[…]
Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now
Translated with the help of LLMs from the Florentine dialect (WTFPL).
We are that breed that’s never quite alright, jump ditches by day, skip dinner by night. I’ll shout it loud till I’m hoarse and dry: we barely get laid even though we try. We’re the ones who pack the cinema tight, to see naked girls, jerkin’ off all night.
Yet nature still whispers, through valley and hill, that caterpillars can fly, if they’ve got the will. But we’re the breed that defies all the rules: born as worms… still worms we stay, like fools. We’ve been fucked by misery, went in raw, no glove: didn’t pull out clean, now we’re stuck with bad love.
Bozzone in “Berlinguer, I Love You” (Giuseppe Bertolucci)
Erich Fromm – Normal people are the sickest
I think it’s a common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. Read the full page
Becoming aware of the oblivion of Being means witnessing the collapse of all that has been built upon its forgetting: God and world.
Umberto Galimberti – Heidegger, Jaspers e il tramonto dell’Occidente (“Heidegger, Jaspers and the Decline of the West”)
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
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Because nothing challenges power as much as Resignation, which is, in fact, the rejection of power in any form (that is, it reveals power for what it really is: an illusion).
P.P. Pasolini, in “Tempo Illustrato”
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
Robert A. Heinlein – Time Enough for Love
Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. I’ve got several degrees. Call me Mr.
Charles Bukowski – South of No North
It seemed a man only had two choices – get in on the hustle or be a bum.
Charles Bukowski – South of No North
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
In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.
Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities
That Day on the Moon – Oriana Fallaci
[”…] And on their return, rest assured, they won’t be writing poetry. If they were capable of it, after all, they wouldn’t be going to the Moon. And, most importantly, they wouldn’t be coming back.” Continue reading
Our Lady of the Turks – Carmelo Bene
He who has never thought about death is perhaps immortal. This is how you can see the Virgin Mary. 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”)
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
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
We asked the woman if there was one thing she wanted more than anything else in life. She looked at us, puzzled. Then, in a half voice, she said: “To sleep. Three days in a row.” “Nothing else?” we asked. She nodded. “To die,” she replied; and she wasn’t joking.
Fazzoletti di terra (“Patches of Earth”), a documentary by Giuseppe Taffarel about two elderly farmers from Val di Brenta.
What we are unable to change, we must at least describe.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.
Unknown source, generally misattributed to Alejandro Jodorowsky.
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited
”… Because, really,” I continued, “there is no point in staying
here.”
“There is no point in staying anywhere,” said Lolita. Read the full page
The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
Various attributions
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre
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
[…] After the horses came Muriel, the white goat, and Benjamin, the donkey. Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm, and the worst tempered. He seldom talked, and when he did, it was usually to make some cynical remark—for instance, he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies. Alone among the animals on the farm he never laughed. If asked why, he would say that he saw nothing to laugh at. Continue reading
(In the dedication to Leone Werth)
All grown-ups were once children (but only few of them remember it).
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
The rushing river they call violent But the riverbed pressing it in Nobody calls violent.
Bertolt Brecht – On Violence (poem, excerpt)
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
And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.
Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
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
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
The old norms having collapsed, and the new ones not yet arisen or firmly established, it is natural that the concept of the relativity of everything has expanded in us to such a degree as to almost entirely make us lose our sense of evaluation. No one is any longer able to fix for themselves a firm and unshakable point of view.
Luigi Pirandello – Arte e scienza (“Art and Science”)
Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer – Studies on Hysteria
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
Mark Twain
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.[🡕]
Friedrich Nietzsche – The Joyous Science
Nowadays it is not only a matter of habit for me, but also one of taste, a malicious taste perhaps? – To write nothing more that would not drive to despair every sort of person who is “in a hurry.” Philology is, namely, that venerable art that requires of its admirers one thing above all else: to go aside, to take time, to become still, become slow – as a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word, which has nothing but fine, cautious work to take care of and which achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for exactly this reason, philology is today more necessary than ever, by exactly this means, philology attracts and enchants us most powerfully in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of precipitateness, of unseemly and sweating overhaste that wants at once to be over and done with everything, […]
Nietzsche – Dawn – Preface – 5
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
(The Anna Karenina principle)
Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.
Henry Thomas Buckle
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things…
Henry David Thoreau – Walden
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
A man is wise only on condition of living in a world full of fools.
Arthur Schopenhauer – The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
I will answer you in good conscience and I will swear to you, that since I set foot in this city, not a single drop of pleasure has fallen upon my soul; except in those moments when I have read your letters, which I tell you without any exaggeration have been the most beautiful moments of my stay in Rome: and those very few lines that you placed beneath my Mother’s letter, were for me like a flash of light breaking through the dense, mute, and desolate darkness that surrounded me. You will say that I do not know how to live; that for you, and for others like you, the fate would not be the same. But listen to my reasoning and to the facts. Man absolutely cannot live in a large sphere, because his strength or capacity for relations is limited. In a small town we may grow weary, but in the end man’s relations to man and to things do exist, because the sphere of those relations is narrow and proportioned to human nature. In a large city, man lives without any relation whatsoever to what surrounds him, because the sphere is so vast that the individual cannot fill it, cannot sense it around himself, and thus there is no point of contact between it and him. From this you may infer how much greater and more terrible is the boredom one feels in a large city than that which one feels in small towns: since indifference – that horrible passion, or rather non-passion, of man – truly and necessarily has its main seat in large cities, that is, in very extensive societies. Man’s sensitive faculty, in these places, is reduced to sight alone. This is the sole sensation of individuals, which in no way reflects inwardly. The only way to be able to live in a large city, and the one which all, sooner or later, are obliged to adopt, is to form for oneself a small sphere of relations, remaining in complete indifference toward all the rest of society. That is to say, to build around oneself a kind of small town within the large one; the rest of the big city remaining useless and indifferent to the individual. […]
Giacomo Leopardi to Carlo Leopardi – Rome, December 6, 1822
Men in the vehement pursuit of happiness grasp at the first object which offers to them any prospect of satisfaction, but immediately they turn an introspective eye and ask, “Am I happy?” and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, “No, you are as poor and as miserable as before.”
Then they think it was the object that deceived them and turn precipitately to another. But the second holds as little satisfaction as the first… Wandering then through life restless and tormented, at each successive station they think that happiness dwells at the next, but when they reach it happiness is no longer there.
In whatever position they may find themselves there is always another one which they discern from afar, and which but to touch, they think, is to find the wished delight, but when the goal is reached discontent has followed on the way stands in haunting constancy before them.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte – Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (“Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgment on the French Revolution”)
[…] and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv’d and practis’d on.
Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Benjamin Vaughan
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
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal