Tag: suffering
Suffering: actually experiencing the existence. Mal de vivre, physical pain, etc.
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/06/the-catastrophe-of-birth.html[đĄ] Continue reading
The Suffering of the Everyday Banalities of Life
r/Pessimism, u/forestofdoom2022 Continue reading
How sad it is to be ill⊠knowing so much about your own illness and yet being unable to do anything about it.
I donât want to play the game of life
The most frustrating part is that there doesnât really seem to be a real solution for this problem because every piece of advice people usually give is like, self-contained within the parameters of life if that makes sense, like every piece of advice people give still involves having to participate in life. Read the full page
u/defectivedisabled, r/Pessimism
Suffering when seen as a metaphysical force is just like a perpetual machine. It runs on the fuel that is suffering and generates suffering as the byproduct, which it then uses to fuel itself further and continue the cycle. There maybe some peak and trough in the amount of suffering but suffering can never be fully eradicated. Suffering is self sustaining and is basically like a pantheist âGodâ. We are all part of it and it and it only exists through our suffering. Suffering is the essence of life, it is the reason for everything we do what we do. Suffering makes us perform actions to relief itself but would then create new forms of suffering as a result. A lion kills and eat a zebra so it may stay alive and procreate to further perpetuate this cycle in an ever increasing scale until the zebra population collapses and the lion population collapses as well. This cycle would then start afresh, it is an endless cycle with no end in sight.
We are all parts that made up of this âGodâ and it is our suffering that gives âlifeâ to it. What this means for we is that we are created to suffer and perpetuate suffering. All for the manifestation of this âGodâ into the world. You can only do what is allowed within the limits of being a cog in this ungodly machine and any attempts to fight against the will of this âGodâ is futile. An end to this metaphysical force is nothing to grieve for indeed.
Why do we want to create an ASI
Perhaps, at least in part, the quest to create an artificial consciousness is part of a longing that comes from the human unconscious. We long for entering into communion with other minds different from our own. We do not want to suffer alone in a high degree of knowledge and for this we are willing to create an artificial consciousness. The same impulse may serve as the basis for those who seek to find other intelligent consciousnesses in the stars, through the discovery of intelligent alien life.
Fernando Olszewski, https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/01/the-mistake-of-rokos-basilisk.html[đĄ]
And what do those philosophers who oppose our resenting life propose? The forging of new myths such as the ĂŒbermensch or the deification of human history. However, changing gods wonât make a difference, just as returning to medieval or ancient times wonât 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
SzPD â Playing life in hard mode
Reply to âWhy is being schizoid bad?â:
r/Schizoid, u/melonpathy
I think being schizoid is like playing life in hard mode. You donât belong but you have to play along. Itâs tiresome to have to just observe human life, not being able to really participate, itâs 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. Thatâs 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 doesnât mind their schizoid traits and they are able to function fairly well then itâs not a personality disorder but a personality style, and Iâm speaking of the former here.
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/09/excess-lucidity.html[đĄ] Continue reading
God handed me the fruits of his creation, then took my taste.
Reddit, u/Illustrious-Back-944 talking about anhedonia
r/Pessimism, u/SIGPrime
The risks we take during life to ultimately not suffer are due to the original imposition done upon us in birth. Whoever you want to blame, be it your parents, ancestors, or god, someone created you into a life where you must impose to limit suffering.
I suppose one could argue that being a parent could also be necessary to achieve happiness in many cases, but this is a Ponzi scheme sort of arrangement.
Iâm perfectly crafted to not be able to live.
u/homebrandusername, r/Pessimism Continue reading
I think I have postpartum depression. It started right after I was born.
From the internet.
Treading water
u/Critical-Sense-1539, r/Pessimism
I get a similar sentiment whenever I come across popular âself-improvementâ content. Iâve never bought any promises that I could ever better my life or progress in any real sense, for no matter what I achieve, I will always be striving. I donât get inspired whenever I see someone struggle really hard for wealth, influence, a big muscly body, a romantic relationship, or some other insipid marker of success.
I see a futility in these attmepts to attain âfulfilmentâ or the âgood lifeâ, a bit like the futility of treading water. You swing your arms and kick your legs to stay afloat, just so youâre able to breathe for a moment longer. However, no matter how hard you try, youâre not going to get out of the water. Youâre always sinking so to stay above water, you have to expend effort over and over and over again until youâve got none left to expend.
I see all pursuits for fulfilment in this sort of image; we are always lacking something. Living to try and satisfy all your desires is a game that you can only ever lose because for every desire that one satisfies, another shall show up in its place. Now, realizing this probably wonât fix the pain associated with not achieving your desires but it might help alleviate feelings of self-hatred or guilt for having a âbad lifeâ. After all, thereâs no need to feel bad about yourself for losing a game that was impossible to win all along.
u/Kunigunde9467, r/Pessimism Continue reading
If one thinks about the (obviously made up) religious scenarios, or any other kind of hellish stories invented by humans, itâs obvious that most real lives donât even come close to that. Continue reading
Andrew McIntosh â On the Drive Towards Death and the Drive Away From Death (Ineffectual Whinging)
Just throwing a hodge podge of ideas Iâve read about and find interesting together in the hopes of coming up with a synthesis that doesnât mean much in the end anyway. Itâs not like I believe there are such things as âDeath Drivesâ and âthe Willâ and all that, theyâre more metaphorical for what is probably more mundane, neurobiological stuff going on in our stupid brains. Read the full page
SMBC â This life is a prison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffering_risks[đĄ] Continue reading
At the end of the day, 99% of the activity is data hoarding, 1% is making use. Music years ago, other things later. Because then, when you use it, youâll be fed up with it. Of course people like to work, because otherwise their brains explode; itâs the same mechanism. Endless search for mechanical and repetitive distractions. Tergiversations around the core of desperation.
And this is⊠when things are going well.
And then they say to the hoarder: «You donât need to accumulate everything. This thing X, you donât need to hoard it, resist it.» But if there is no need for me to save X, it means that there is no need for me to save Y, it means that there is no need for me to save anything, by simple syllogism.
And indeed, that is correct. But it only confirms the nihilism and the absolute meaninglessness of everything.
We are daily slaves to the mitigation of suffering
What can even be done? Happy or sad, you still need to eat, youâre still aging, and youâre still going to die. Read the full page
r/Pessimism, u/Robotoro23
This is how people today justify suffering of people when industrial revolution began, âit was worth it because we now have a fridge, medicine and technology.
This is how now people are justifying suffering of people today, âitâs 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 donât 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 âproblemâ, everything being automated, upload our consciousness to machines etcâŠ
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?
Volunteering is the way, kek. Read the full page
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 â Earth of the Scum (Ineffectual Whinging)
Isnât it time we had World War Three? Read the full page
r/Pessimism, u/HumanAfterAll777
I think striving for happiness is like chasing the dragon
[âŠ] When I was truly happy was when I was a child. When I was ignorant of the world and what horrors it contained. Something you can never go back to. [âŠ]
r/Pessimism, u/GloomInstance
Thereâs a moment when the intelligent empath, perhaps born with a melancholic bent, realises they are stuck in a kind of mortal reality show of endless suffering.
They look out at the sunset over a peaceful lake, only to see a pelican swoop down and grab up a fish, swallowing the fish whole as it visibly flaps around, trying to resist its awful fate.
Then the thinking empath reflects on how cruel and unfair the natural state of things is, and that they themselves are stuck inside the cruelty fishbowl and will most likely suffer their own grizzly decline.
I remember as a child of eight or nine years old, sitting in the bathtub weeping at how much suffering the world contains, and how little protection against it we have. It must have been when my first grasp on death and the nature of things occurred.
r/Pessimism, u/scorqio
One must know that things also become dull. Stale.
What i think will make me happy today, may not have that same impact next week.
Days go by without restraint.
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
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 doesnât even try to make things work because he knows they canât. 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
r/SuicideWatch, u/braujo
[âŠ] The reason youâre unhappy isnât a lack of working on yourself, thatâs something people tell you on Reddit to feel better about themselves. Plenty of fat ass motherfuckers are out there living their best lives, there are monsters that get married and built a beautiful family, ugly guys that get laid every dayâŠ
Working on yourself is great if thatâs what you want, but do not fool yourself. The reason our lives suck isnât superficial, self-help bs. Itâs something deeply wrong in our brains.
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
Existential Comics #501[đĄ] Continue reading
In his âAnalysis Terminable and Interminable,â which was written in 1937, two years before his death, Freud expresses his deep frustration with the futility of the therapeutic attempts to cure self-destructive tendencies, âIn no phase of oneâs analytic work does one suffer more from the oppressive feeling that all oneâs efforts have been in vain and from the suspicion that one is âtalking to the windsââ (p. 404) The death drive reveals itself as incurable, it is a constitutive obstacle beyond which therapy is not capable of progressing. One can say that since the curse of the negative psychoanalytic insight, psychoanalysis has functioned as a breakdown of itself. It is a disappointment, a negation and rejection and a failure of itself. Psychoanalysis has thus become negative, an empty, meaningless huskâthe living dead.
The negative insight undermines psychoanalysis from within. Like a black sun that shines with darkness instead of light and, with this, dismisses its essence. A practical therapeutic dimension of psychoanalysis is its outer shell that remains from its original positive framework. As long as psychoanalysis maintains functioning in its therapeutic dimension, it betrays its negative insight and inner breakage, making the psychoanalyst a fraud. The psychoanalyst, in this case, is like a priest who lost his faith in God and fell into deep despair but still preaches, attending to the demand of the parish.
This internal breakdown can be considered a defeat of psychoanalysis, its failure, and its disability. From this, one might conclude that psychoanalysis should be relegated to the basement of history as a failed project, Freud should be declared a charlatan, and that various more empirically validated methods of comprehension and treatments that really help should now rightfully declare their victory over psychoanalysis, or that psychoanalysis has to be fixed, for example, by combining it with modern research. Such attempts have been made many times.
However, to me, this inner breakdown of psychoanalysis, its internal tragedy, which many adherents of psychoanalysis, including Freud himself, try to cover up, is the dearest in psychoanalysis. In this tragedy of the impossibility of psychoanalysis, in its curse, one can feel something painfully dear, absurd, and therefore sincerely human, and for the same reason, unbearable and repulsive. Perhaps in this personal tragedy of Freud and the tragedy of the breakdown of psychoanalysis, in their wretchedness, they coincide the most with the more profound deep pathetic and tragic truth about each of us. In this rupture with itself, psychoanalysis coincides with us, with our inner rupture, and with the inner rupture of the world.
Plunging into a black night of its soul, it meets the soul of each of us since the darkness of the soul is the only thing we genuinely hold in common. Our internal breakdown, brokenness, malfunction, tragedy, and absurdity encounter who we most genuinely are. This psychoanalysis coincides with life as such, as something doomed to failure and, in its essence, is nothing but a failure.
Julie Reshe, âNegative Psychoanalysis for the Living Deadâ
Back then youâd say, âhumans,â as if they were something distant. And sure, we are too, unfortunately, and fully aware of it, we stayed apart, because not even between us can that self-delusion arise, the one needed for the deception of meaning to occur. And so, like prime numbers, like in that book, our ways took part. Mine isnât really a âwayâ, itâs waiting for death with as little collateral damage as possible, which never actually happens â not even that, and so come the alchemies in the blood and the desperate wails.
They carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. Read the full page
(On the romanticization of suffering)
[âŠ] And itâs all beautiful and captivating, but sadly, itâs also true.
When you have money, but you donât know what to do with it, then the gravity of your being becomes immediately apparent.
Discerning gullible people, with judgment
In these last decades, conspiracy theories blew up. Stuff inside vaccines, UFOs, chemtrails, but-you-canât-see-the-stars, itâs weird for a building to collapse just because a large airplane crashed into it at 750 km/h, and so on⊠Continue reading
Underestimating Suffering & Suicide Thresholds
r/pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered Continue reading
Oh god. Iâve woke up in my shoes.
Life is a scam. And now weâve fallen for it. Not our fault, I mean, âfallen for itâ in the sense that we happened to come into the world, but the result is the same.
Once you fall for the scam, what can you do? There arenât, like, possible choices, those are subsets. The only thing we can do is what everyone is doing, that is to toss and turn in the shit weâve fallen into. Which then takes the form of various activities, but itâs always about tossing and turning, plunged in shit.
https://dnamistakes.webcomic.ws/comics/pl/1569681[đĄ]
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.
[âŠ]
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.
[âŠ]
The sweet-spot of delusion. Thatâs where itâs at.
[âŠ]
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 itâs 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
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pessimism/comments/u8t6dy/there_are_no_personal_victories_or_bittersweet/[đĄ] Continue reading
Umberto Galimberti â Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you donât praise or exalt âthe individualâ, you are pessimistic, of course, right?⊠⊠Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isnât he? Those who say âpessimismâ⊠Iâm like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
As if through the mist Fading slow From this moment From this life
Of no fulfillment Of no discovery
Only the passing Only the flowâŠ
Leaving from all That once had a meaning
To reach deep For the inner desolation
To awaken the emptiness That was always there Here, in the stillness A yearning For an ending
Shape of Despair â The Inner Desolation
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 â 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 GĂŒre â The Occult of the Unborn
Iâm 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 canât fake a thought. Continue reading
Itâs like when you have a toothache and you curse yourself for all the times you felt fine and didnât fully appreciate how great it was not to have a toothache, and you promise yourself that if thereâs ever another day in your life when you donât have a toothache, youâll spend at least half of every day you have left reflecting on how great it is not to have a toothache, and you certainly wonât complain about stupid things anymore, like, I donât know, noisy neighbors or not being able to find a parking space â my God, how wonderful it is to not find a parking space without a toothache!
Astutillo Smeriglia in his blog âIn coma Ăš meglioâ (âBeing in a Coma is Betterâ) â Il famoso asteroide (âThe Famous Asteroidâ)
The principle of sympathy for intense suffering (ed. that is, the alleviation of intense suffering has moral priority over everything else) defended here stems neither from depression nor resentment. Rather, as the name implies, it simply stems from a deep sympathy for intense suffering. It stems from a firm choice to side with the evaluations of those who are superlatively worst off. And while it is true that this principle has the implication that it would have been better if the world had never existed, I think the fault here is to be found in the world, not the principle.
Magnus Vinding â Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications
There is no magical third act
I just⊠I just cannot believe this is it. This is life. There is no magical third act where I am the star in some fantasy adventure. I wonât suddenly gain superpowers and fight cartoonish villains. This is it. This is all it will ever be. The rest of my life, quiet and drab. Our one shot at consciousness is spent on something so unimaginably boring. My curse of sentience is spent wageslaving, consuming media, messing around with hobbies that will never fill the void, shitting, cleaning. Thatâs all it will ever be. Sad and pathetic.
Popular chansâ meme/copypasta
Once again, the children of the core think to change the inevitable. They do not see the truth, the futility of their actions. We bring purity to chaos, serenity to bedlam. All will be consumed. This is necessary and good. The children do not understand. The children believe their lives worth living.
The children are wrong. The worlds and the core of the worlds live in pain, agony, discord. We bring peace. Equality. Silence.
All are one within our embrace. The children resist what cannot be resisted. They fight a battle that cannot be won. Their actions are ultimately irrelevant. No matter how many times they rise, they will be destroyed. Their time is over. We will consume all.
The âRootâ, via âDreamerâ / âNightmareâ, in âRemnant: From the Ashesâ
Anonymous 04/23/18 (Mon) 13:55:38 No.174245, obscure imageboard
[âŠ]
>>174236
Secrets are all too easy to deal with. Skeletons in the closet are easy to hide. Itâs when your entire being itself is a secret, thatâs when interacting with people becomes complex and difficult, painful even.
Iâve 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. Itâs about seeing a reflection of yourself in your environment, seeing that a shared reality exists between you and another being, thatâs what truly quenches loneliness.
The usual normalfag advice of âjust be yourselfâ seems so appropriate now. Itâs possibly all theyâve ever known.
Anonymous 02/09/18 (Fri) 20:03:16 No.3716, obscure imageboard
[âŠ]
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.
â [âŠ] Iâd say youâre confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives: we drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job⊠or the happy marriage. But these arenât decisions, theyâre⊠theyâre impulses. In fact, youâre probably better equipped to explain this than I am.
â What does that mean?
â Youâre a biologist. Isnât self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?
Annihilation (2018)
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[đĄ]
Depression is like reverse cancer: thereâs so little you want to do, but you have so much time left.
From the internet
â What I mean is that some people are born to suffer, and if theyâre made to suffer, it doesnât matter because itâs what they were born for.
â Thatâs horrible.
â The world is horrible; the human being is horrible; but we canât run away from it, because we are the horror. You have to accept it.
Skins (Pieles) â Eduardo Casanova
When youâre suffering, thatâs when youâre most real. Read the full page
Beyond the Sad Passions â Miguel Benasayag
Everything happens as if the permanence of his suffering were the undisputable proof of his identity in the sense of its singularity: âI suffer, therefore I am.â Read the full page
Horace and Pete â How do you find love?
A sad girl after a bad online date, another girl, a guy, Leon, and an old man at the bar. Continue reading
The true, only problem, is not having the aptitude for suicide.
Someone on the internet, around 2016
Music is my friend. Understanding, empathic. Forgiving, comforter. A towel to dry tears of sadness. A source for tears of happiness. Liberation and flight. But also a painful thorn. In flesh and soul.
Arvo PĂ€rt â Even if I lose everything (2015)
I envy people who commit suicide
r/offmychest, u/SoulOfTheInternet Continue reading
About the movie âMelancholiaâ â Florin Flueras
All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is. Read the full page
Fritz Maisenbacher on YouTube commenting Feinbergâs transcription of Bachâs âOrgan Triosonata in C major BWV 529, mvt. II. Largoâ played by Feinberg himself.
For me, the greatest Bach player of all time. He works only on the total sadness of Bach. Bringing in full light the absolute despair of Bach. And with such elegance! Strange and mourning voices in the darkness. Inviting you to their dark evening.
â»
No âthumb downâ and so goes further this holy way to express Bach, and further the ultimate singing of Feinberg, oh the nightly climax between 2:24 and 2:44⊠this is beyond my own possible emotional capacity⊠and the last lights at about 5:33⊠ade⊠ade⊠and the last chord at 6:36, not to be commentedâŠ
â»
Last week, I was in the hospital for another surgery.
Upon me, before and after the operation, I saw faces. I heard voices. Looking at me, talking to me.
And this evening, listening to this music, I understand all of it.
Ill or not, young or old, all these persons, kind nurses, charming anesthetist, competent doctors, royal surgeon, all of them, all of them, with no exception, faced also their terrible destiny, on the Titanic of earthly life⊠Their eyes are full of love and anguish, in a pathetic mix between life and death.
I came home now, bleeding and suffering, in the tiny hope of a good convalescence, and I listen to Feinbergâs Bach.
He is not an Angel, but he speaks for all of us.
In his hands, our destinies. Pain and sorrow, love, kisses, incandescent lips of desire, and always these dark evenings, and sudden lights, all together.
A complete life.
Bach knew it, Feinberg knows it, all these faces, these smiles, these eyes full of sadness and hope, all of us⊠all of usâŠ
The Crazy Woman Next Door â Conversation with Alda Merini
Unfortunately, the soul, which by the way is what then writes and survives [âŠ], is the part that flies over matter and is the one thatâs 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
The Gift of Life â Astutillo Smeriglia
https://incomaemeglio.blogspot.com/2013/09/il-dono-della-vita.html[đĄ] Continue reading
Suffering is not just an intellectual game
https://reducing-suffering.org/the-horror-of-suffering/#Suffering_is_not_just_an_intellectual_game[đĄ] Continue reading
This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Itâs all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world. Blah, blah, blah, blah⊠Beyond there is what lies beyond. I donât deal with what lies beyond. Therefore, let this novel begin. After all, itâs just a trick. Yes, itâs just a trick.
Jep, âThe Great Beautyâ, ending
But youâd only take a life That was already over to save another
Electric Youth â The Best Thing
All right, look, man, Iâm cashing in. Iâm done. Iâm 40 shit years old, I got nothing, I got nobody. And I donât want anything, I donât want anybody; and thatâs the worst part: when the want goes. Thatâs⊠thatâs bad. I mean, like, suffering is one thing, or ânot havingâ is one thing⊠But when you just donât care anymore?
You know, Iâve gone soft in the last three pussies Iâve been in. You get to a point where you go âMaybe itâs time to just put a period at the end of my⊠whatever this was.â
Louie, S02E09 â Eddie (Doug Stanhope)
2000 â Dialogue with The Dreamer
We have been in a mental crisis since 2000. Read the full page
Cursed through life and condemned to misery To be left with nothing
Woods of Desolation â SomehowâŠ
As for music being a comforting thing in times such as these, Iâm sure it is for those who arenât too depressed to still enjoy it. But music canât compare with alcohol or drugs, which directly affect oneâs emotional state as opposed to musicâs indirect effect through our sense of hearing and never fail to provide an escape. Like literature, music is just a harmless form of forgetting the world and doesnât always work as well as weâd like.
Thomas Ligotti â The Damned Interviews, Tina Hall
When youâre walking down the hallway, or in class, how many of you have ever felt the weight pressing down on you? Hmm? I have. Everyone? Wow. Poe wrote about these things over a hundred years ago. So, as we read, we can see that âThe House of Usherâ is not merely an old decrepit castle in disrepair. Itâs also a state of being.
«During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was â but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I looked upon the simple landscape of the domain â upon the bleak walls â upon the white trunks of decayed trees â with an utter depression of soul. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart.»
Detachment; Henry teaching âThe Fall of the House of Usherâ by Edgar Allan Poe
â It seems that the only happy people in this movie by the end, are slightly crazy, and they are the course of future Mr. and Mrs. Wunch â a lovely name â and theyâre the ones who donât believe that you may even need happiness in the present life. So, everyone else seems to be left miserable, and Iâm curious if this is if you are being playful with this, or if this is a serious comic commentary on what life looks to you at this point.
â This is my perspective, and has always been my perspective on life. I have a very grim pessimistic view of it; I always have, since I was a little boy, it hasnât gotten worse with age or anything: I do feel that itâs a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies, and deceive yourself. And Iâm not the first person to say this or the most articulate person on it: it was said by Nietzsche, it was said by Freud, it was said by Eugene OâNeill⊠One must have oneâs delusions to live: if you look at life too honestly and clearly, life does become unbearable because itâs a pretty grim enterprise, you will admit. So, I do feel that those two people are the only two people that are happy: they are capable of deluding themselves; if I saw them at a party in real life I would think that they were foolish people, and dumb, and silly, and I would laugh at them, but they would be happier than me. So that is the way I feel about it.
Woody Allen at Cannes Film Festival Press conference for âYou Will Meet a Tall Dark Strangerâ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yVPS8XBoBE[đĄ]
It turns out that, even knowing about meaninglessness is meaningless.
People think that life is something else, but thatâs 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 didnât exist and never existed, it has less value than a turd. Continue reading
Never play by the stairs, youâre bound to fall down, Never play by the hillside, might slip and break your crown Never play by the fire, itâs a danger to your health Never play by the wall, might fall and break yourself.
Never play by the river, you might tumble in and drown, Never play by the field, get filthy, dirty and brown, Never play by yourself, itâs a danger to be alone, Never stray too far away, itâs not safe outside of home.
I didnât ask to be born, And I donât think Iâll ask to die. I didnât ask for the ground beneath my feet, I didnât ask for the sky.
Emily & the Woods â Never Play
Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
And the radiation tells you things that are true and at the same time absurd, cold, and above all rough. Read the full page
It would be quite interesting to inhale rainbows.
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
â âŠbecause next year youâre not going to see me, you know.
â Oh, so you are in fact retiring. Lucky you, profâŠ
â What?! You shouldnât say such a thing, you are young!
An ex-classmate
An embracing sadness, soft, that fails to pierce me, to kill me.
«It is society thatâs 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.
Nature is Satanâs church.
Antichrist (2009), Lars von Trier
The now, has this annoying habit of constantly existing.
Emptiness â Distraction â Dream â Desire⊠Read the full page
Dark ambient moment.
Iâm carrying the white flag, and it only makes sense that the music I listen to adjusts to that.
Everyone was staying confined to those narrow mental spaces. And I, like them; I only knew that small world. And everything was goddamn gorgeous. There was passion, challenge, dialogues, workaholism, and satisfaction. Continue reading
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Certainly, the circumstances are not favorable; when have they ever been, really⊠One ought to⊠One ought to nothing: one ought to what is, one ought to the present.
PGR â Cronaca montana (âMountain Chronicleâ)
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
There were only two or three of us in Rome who considered climbing not just a hobby, but a job: to set off, to become obsessed with a wall of rock, to feel, before every attempt, the Route looming above you in an oppressive way, to feel anxiety rising uncontrollably, to fall asleep with the Route in your head, to alternate periods of nervous insomnia with periods of morbid drowsiness, to wake up with the Route still in your head, to deprive yourself of something, and to suffer, even if that something, or that suffering, is not necessarily connected to performance. Itâs just that itâs written in the laws of the universe that to obtain, you must suffer, even if suffering does not necessarily mean you will obtain anything. So, you seek suffering, because it pricks you, awakens you, activates you, and at times breaks that opaque glass that almost always stands between you and reality; it makes you feel, at least sometimes, that youâre alive, and sometimes feeling alive is more important than feeling good. Serenity can be sacrificed in honor of life itself, if only to avoid falling back into that horrible nirvanic anesthesia.
Alessandro âJollyâ Lamberti â Jollypower
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 thatâs not the answer.
Jim Carrey, Ottawa Citizen, December 2005
â»
Iâve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame, so that they could see that itâs not where youâre going to find your sense of completion.
Jim Carrey, commencement address at Maharishi University of Management, May 24, 2014
Gavazzeni: âMusic worsens the manâ
Alberto Sinigaglia (âttLâ, La Stampa, insert) Continue reading
Big city life Here my heart have no base And right now Babylon de âpon me case
People in a show, All lined in a row. We just push on by, Itâs funny, How hard we try.
[âŠ]
Soon our work is done, All of us, one by one. Still, we live our lives, As if all this stuff survives.
[âŠ]
I find myself in a big city prison Arisen from the vision of mankind
Designed, to keep me discreetly Neatly in the corner
[âŠ]
Mattafix â Big City Life
But you canât 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
â Do you still ask God for help?
â Certainly.
â And do you still feel lonely?
â Yes, I still do. I still do.
â Isnât that really sad?
â Yes, thatâs really sad.
But so is my life.
Galina Ustvolskaya in âScream into Spaceâ
https://dnamistakes.webcomic.ws/comics/pl/1570198[đĄ]
Civilization has no appeal to me. The Eastern Peoples seem to live their lives more sensibly. Because they donât 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 doesnât matter â only reaching the goal. I want to go to the East, because there I will feel well. Iâll be able to enter the Present time.
The point is â 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 arenât a specific substance: theyâre anything that youâre addicted to. When you lose what youâve been addicted to, you have to accept something different. Iâve accepted that all these âgodsâ we have, theyâre all teachers. There is one god â they all serve him! Like in Hinduism: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva â 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, toâŠ
WIth opiates you have the sense that you are wasting your life. Sleeping. Then you say to yourself: «Iâm sleeping!» So you get up, and try to do other things, other drugs; I do all sort of drugs, but I remain active. Thatâs why I wonât quit until I find a steady girlfriend: otherwise Iâll die of boredom. But I donât 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 âNarcissiâ, blooming here in this canal. Everything is always uncertain, you are always alone, so you say to yourself: «Whatâs the point?!» If you had a wife, kids, TV, a newspaper⊠Itâs kind of idyllic. Thatâs why there are movies to experience another life. More or less, thatâs why there is art.
Kamen Petrov in âInvisibleâ
Her [ed. his motherâs] life was a failure, her marriage was a failure⊠And Iâm a part of that failure. Thatâs probably how she sees it. And she wants to start over, but she doesnât know how. You know what she does? She got an apartment, and she started decorating it in white and pink. Tsk! Why!? Total utopia.
What I mean is⊠She is starting with the things that should come last.
Invisible
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? Didnât they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And itâs the same old lesson: everything in this life â I repeat, everything â is more trouble than itâs worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. Thereâs 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 â âFantastic Metropolisâ interview
People canât seem to get it through their heads that there is never any healing or closure. Ever. There is only a short pause before the next âhorrifyingâ event. People forget there is such a thing as memory, and that when a wound âhealsâ it leaves a permanent scar that never goes away, but merely fades a little. What really ought to be said after one of these so-called tragedies is, âLet the scarring begin.â
George Carlin â When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
While my heart is sinking I do not want my voice to go out into the air
The Innocence Mission â Tomorrow On The Runway
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
Whatâs the point of life And whatâs the meaning if we all die in the end? Does it make sense to learn or do we forget everything?
Epica â The Phantom Agony
Chance doesnât exist But the path of life is not totally so predestined Time and chronology show us how all should be In the ways of existence To find out why we are here
Being conscious is a torment[đĄ] The more we learn is the less we get Every answer contains a new quest A quest to non existence, a journey with no end
No one surveys the whole, focus on things so small But lifeâs objective is to make it meaningful Only searching for this That which doesnât exist Although our ability to relativize remains unclear
Iâm not afraid to die Iâm afraid to be alive without being aware of it
Iâm so afraid to, I couldnât stand to Waste all my energy on things that do not matter anymore
Our future has already been written by us alone But we donât grasp the meaning of our programmed course of life Our future has already been wasted by us alone And we just let it happen and do not worry at all
We only fear what comes And smell death every day Search for the answers that lie beyond
Epica â Sensorium; lyrics by Mark Jansen
Oh, you humor me today Calling me out to play With your telescope eyes, metal teeth I canât 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 penâs waiting for you Just get far, far away from me I donât want your disease
Please donât make me cry Please donât make me cry Iâm just like you I know you know Iâm just like you So leave me alone
Dear Matthew why canât you see Youâre just not near enough like me With your telescope eyes, metal teeth I canât be seen with you
Eisley â Telescope Eyes
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Madness is simply pain.
Vittorino Andreoli
Despair is madness. Madness, the perception of the impossibility of living: being there, but as if not being there. Despair as an experience of madness is incompatible with life. It sees death, plans death, and kills the self and the other. Despair is a form of madness possible for man, for all men; it is, in fact, a human perspective, tied to his need to be with others, to the fact that he cannot live alone, because human life is not solitude but sharing, belonging, attachment.
Vittorino Andreoli, Il lato oscuro (âThe Dark Sideâ) (2002)
Final Fantasy X â Auron talks about âthe spiral of deathâ
Tidus: Why is it⊠everything in Spira seems to revolve around people dying?
Auron: Ahh, the spiral of death.
Tidus: Huh?
Auron: Summoners challenge the bringer of death, Sin, and die doing so. Guardians give their lives to protect their summoner. The fayth are the souls of the dead. Even the maesters of Yevon are unsent. Spira is full of death. Only Sin is reborn, and then, only to bring more death. It is a cycle of death, spiraling endlessly.
Final Fantasy X â Tidus and Auron during the imprisonment in Bevelle
Carmelo Bene â Four Moments on the Whole Nothing â 3°: Eros
Poor, poor⊠Poor lovers! Read the full page
â Oh, was I mean? You canât take it? The happening chick that you are?
â Lizzie, Iâm not crying because youâre mean. I just canât imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you.
Prozac Nation
The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
Michel Houellebecq â Platform
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. â Tutti giĂč per terra (All Fall to the Ground)
[âŠ]
You stand before the final dimension, and I am the darkness of eternityâŠ
[âŠ] 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 â the crystal.
[âŠ]
âŠNow, the theory is undeniable. Kujaâs action proves it. All things live to perish. At last, life has uncovered this truth. Now, it is time to end this world.
[âŠ]
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.
[âŠ]
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, comeâŠ
Necron, Final Fantasy IX
For living on in others, in memories and dreams Is not enough You want everything Another world Where the birds always sing
The Cure â Where the Birds Always Sing
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 âThe Matrixâ
The so-called âpsychotically depressedâ person who tries to kill herself doesnât do so out of quote âhopelessnessâ or any abstract conviction that lifeâs assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fireâs flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. Itâs not desiring the fall; itâs terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling âDonât!â and âHang on!â, can understand the jump. Not really. Youâd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
David Foster Wallace, The Depressed Person
Anyway, I can try anything, itâs the same circle leading to nowhere, and Iâm tired now. Anyway, Iâve lost my face, my dignity, my look, everything is gone and Iâm tired now. Donât be scared: Iâve 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 Iâll never read again. No concentration, just a white disorder everywhere around me, you know⊠Iâm so tired now. Donât 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 Iâve 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 â Monochrome (ft. Dominique A)
Dear world⊠I have confusion around me in every direction from my brain. Iâve tried and tried to make it here in this fucking world⊠but I think it was a mistake that I was ever born. I do not feel guilty about taking my own life. Iâve tried your ways. Iâve had a job since I was thirteen years old. Making a living was never a real problem for me. The problem was all I see is misery and darkness. Die, die, die. Iâll put a gun to my fucking head right now.
Gummo
Peoples got to work for a livinâ. I believe in a blue-collar race. I think suicideâs the only way out[đĄ] â out of life. I wanted to die. I tried to die, but I didnât. They say itâs my depression, but what the fuck, man? I donât fuckinâ know anymore. Which way should I fuckinâ turn, man?
Gummo
Shut me in, Levante. Shut me in.
Libero (Massimo Ceccherini) inside the casket, in The Cyclone
The only unbearable thing, is that nothing is unbearable.
Arthur Rimbaud in âTotal Eclipseâ by Christopher Hampton
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you wonât find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, by Richard Dawkins
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 âThe World as Will and Representationâ. 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 (âAutograph of a Portraitâ)
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 â Eugenio Borgna
âConfess! 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.â Read the full page
Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.
Michel Houellebecq â Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte)
Angels of the Universe â Einar MĂĄr GuĂ°mundsson
No, this grave is not deep enough to accomodate the feelings of us all. Read the full page
Thereâs 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 â Motorcycle Emptiness
Mitch: You ever been in love?
Curly: Once. I was driving a herd across the panhandle. Texas. I donât know⊠Passed near this little dirt farm right about sundown. Out in the field was this young woman, working down in the dirt. Just about then, she stood up to stretch her back. Ah⊠Ah⊠She was wearing a little cotton dress, and the settinâ sun was right behind her, showing the shape that God gave her.
Mitch: What happened?
Curly: Ah! I just turned around and rode away.
Mitch: Why?
Curly: I figured it wasnât gonna get any better than that.
Mitch: Yeah, but you could have been, you know⊠with her.
Curly: Iâve been with lots of womenâŠ
Mitch: Yeah, but you know, she could have been the love of your life.
Curly: She is.
[âŠ]
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
Mitch: No, what?
Curly: *points index finger skyward* This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else donât mean shit.
Mitch: Thatâs great, but⊠whatâs the âone thing?â
Curly: *smiles and points his finger at Mitch* Thatâs what you gotta figure out.
City Slickers
That one passion, that all-encompassing passion that saves a lot of men, whatever that happens to be for a given individual, and that a lot of unlucky ones will never find in all their life.
Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.
Karl Kraus
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 Mooreâs âBatman: The Killing Jokeâ
From the sketch to the work one travels on oneâs knees.
Vladimir Holan; quoted by Kundera in âThe art of the novelâ
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway â The Garden of Eden
I was looking for a job, and then I found a job And heaven knows Iâm miserable now
The Smiths â Heaven Knows Iâm Miserable Now
â What is the Nothing?
â Itâs the emptiness thatâs left. Itâs like a despair, destroying this world, and I have been trying to help it.
The NeverEnding Story
The Unbearable Lightness of Being â 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 Iâm dying are the best Iâve ever had I find it hard to tell you âcause I find it hard to take When people run in circles itâs 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 whatâs 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 Iâm dying are the best Iâve ever had I find it hard to tell you âcause I find it hard to take When people run in circles itâs a very very mad world
[âŠ]
Tears For Fears â Mad World
Itâs no longer a question of staying healthy. Itâs a question of finding a sickness you like.
Jackie Mason
Everything wearies me, including what doesnât weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.
[âŠ]
There are times when dreaming eludes even me, an obsessive dreamer, and then I see things in vivid detail. The mist in which I take refuge dissipates. And every visible edge cuts the skin of my soul. Every harsh thing I see wounds the part of me that recognizes its harshness. Every objectâs visible weight weighs heavy inside my soul.
Itâs as if my life amounted to being thrashed by it.
Fernando Pessoa â The Book of Disquiet
Iâm forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I canât 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 â only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Fernando Pessoa â The Book of Disquiet
Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.
[âŠ]
Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now
Translated with the help of LLMs from the Florentine dialect (WTFPL).
We are that breed thatâs never quite alright, jump ditches by day, skip dinner by night. Iâll shout it loud till Iâm hoarse and dry: we barely get laid even though we try. Weâre the ones who pack the cinema tight, to see naked girls, jerkinâ off all night.
Yet nature still whispers, through valley and hill, that caterpillars can fly, if theyâve got the will. But weâre the breed that defies all the rules: born as worms⊠still worms we stay, like fools. Weâve been fucked by misery, went in raw, no glove: didnât pull out clean, now weâre stuck with bad love.
Bozzone in âBerlinguer, I Love Youâ (Giuseppe Bertolucci)
Erich Fromm â Normal people are the sickest
I think itâs a common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. Read the full page
âFor [Elohim] doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be openedâŠâ
No sooner are they open than the drama begins. To look without understandingâthat is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too muchâŠ
Emil Cioran â The Trouble With Being Born
When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.
Emil Cioran â The Trouble With Being Born
Death belongs to the realm of faith â youâre right to believe you will die, mind you⊠It sustains you. If you didnât believe it, could you bear the life you have? If we couldnât totally rely on the certainty that it will end, how could you bear all this?
Jacques Lacan, conference at the Université Catholique de Louvain
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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 alreadyâŠ
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 donât 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 motherâs 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 canât change its spots. Everything else is deception, doubt. It doesnât 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 aloneâŠ
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 â âThree Daysâ, documentary
To suffer is to produce knowledge.
Emil Cioran â The New Gods (âLe Mauvais dĂ©miurgeâ, literally âThe Evil Demiurgeâ)
Our Lady of the Turks â 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
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
He who has never thought about death is perhaps immortal. This is how you can see the Virgin Mary.
Carmelo Bene â Our Lady of the Turks
Were (say) Frankl to attempt to cure (say) Zapffe from his âexistential frustration,â âontological despairâ or âmetaphysic-melancholic clairvoyance,â the chances are that Zapffe (rather than âcuredâ) would be baffled by Franklâs sophomoric philosophizing. âYou may be psychologically healthier than I,â Zapffe would gladly admit, âbut I must insist that I am a better philosopher. A lifelong search for a meaning of life in general, and of my life in particular, has led me â reluctantly, but with cataclysmic consistency and sleepwalkerâs certainty â to realize that itâs all fantasy and delusions, divinely subsidized to put us at peace with our âsituation.â You are certainly right that psycho-pathological explanations of my biosophical pessimism would be totally irrelevant; but I also fail to see what you can possibly accomplish with your naĂŻve, maladroit metaphysics, behind which â if you will permit me to speak your language for once â I see but the profoundest, most fundamental trauma, and that great universal repression which prevents all fatal insight into man and his âcosmic conditions,â the mysterious, grotesquely absurd origin and genesis of body and mind, their inalienable interests, and their final and complete obliteration, the return of the synthesis to the absolute zero.â The biosophist is fully aware of the many marvellous metaphysics offering âpeace in heart,â âreconciliation with the worldâ and âatonement with the almighty,â or the like, to anyone who is willing to join this or that suificating sect, and replace intellectually honest experience with fictitious world views. The spiritual vacuum is often so painful that if the fiction is sufficiently permanent, it does not seem to matter if it should turn out not to be so terribly pleasant.
Happiness Is for the Pigs: Philosophy versus Psychotherapy â Herman TĂžnnessen
The Fire Within (Le feu follet / Fuoco fatuo) â Louis Malle
â You still have feelings of anxiety? 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: âTo sleep. Three days in a row.â âNothing else?â we asked. She nodded. âTo die,â she replied; and she wasnât joking.
Fazzoletti di terra (âPatches of Earthâ), a documentary by Giuseppe Taffarel about two elderly farmers from Val di Brenta.
When the problem of happiness supplants that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its proper domain to engage in a suspect activity: it concerns itself with man⊠Questions it would once have scorned asking now attract its attention, and it attempts to answer them in all seriousness. âHow is suffering to be avoided?â is the first to entice it. In a phase of lassitude, increasingly alien to impersonal concerns, to the thirst for knowledge, it abandons speculation and to the truths that disturb prefers those that console.
Emil Cioran â The Temptation to Exist
Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable â 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 godâs notice. Nor am I graced with the skepticâs well-concealed rage, the rationalityâs barren mind, the atheistâs 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 werenât 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
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre
For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Do normies suffer?
In other words, you might say that I still have no understanding of what makes human beings tick. My apprehension on discovering that my concept of happiness seemed to be completely at variance with that of everyone else was so great as to make me toss sleeplessly and groan night after night in my bed. It drove me indeed to the brink of lunacy. I wonder if I have actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I. I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him.
I simply donât understand. I have not the remotest clue what the nature or extent of my neighborâs woes can be. Practical troubles, griefs that can be assuaged if only there is enough to eatâthese may be the most intense of all burning hells, horrible enough to blast to smithereens my ten misfortunes, but that is precisely what I donât 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 donât know⊠If youâve 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? Hardlyâit couldnât only be that. I seem to have heard the theory advanced that human beings live in order to eat, but Iâve never heard anyone say that they lived in order to make money. No. And yet, in some instances⊠No, I donât 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?âI donât know.
No Longer Human / A Shameful Life â Osamu Dazai
[âŠ] 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 remarkâfor 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
The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.
Sigmund Freud, letter to Marie Bonaparte
The great problem is how to live without being conscious of the fact that we have got to live; how to divert ourselves without thinking of why we should seek diversion; not only to escape the spectre of Ennui, but how to act as though we did not know of its existence. We are all playing near a great fearful Presence, and our object should be to rivet our gaze so completely on our work and busy ourselves so closely with our toys that we shall not have time to look up and see the Thing. The Thingâstark, nude, sleepy-eyed, ghastly Thingâis always right there over our shoulder. The most active beings are those who are trying, unconsciously, the hardest to dodge Its gaze. Man has no mission in life except to escape the âBlack Man who will come and get you,â as we tell the children.
Benjamin De Casseres â Saint Tantalus, chapter âDisenchantment: Behind the arrasâ
The worst part is wondering how youâll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where youâll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe itâs treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasnât enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. Iâve never been able to kill myself.
Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line, Journey to the End of the Night
Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.
Antonin Artaud, General Security: The Liquidation of Opium / La Révolution Surréaliste
I remembered then that once in England a sentence to forced labor was administered by suspending the condemned convict over a wheel turned by water, thus forcing the victim to move his legs at a certain rhythm to avoid their being crushed. When you are working, you always have the sensation of a similar constriction.
Italo Svevo â Zenoâs Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Natural law does not entitle us to happiness, but rather it prescribes wretchedness and sorrow. When something edible is left exposed, from all directions parasites come running, and if there are no parasites, they are quickly generated. Soon the prey is barely sufficient, and immediately afterwards it no longer suffices at all, for nature doesnât do sums, she experiments. When food no longer suffices, then consumers must diminish through death preceded by pain; thus equilibrium, for a moment, is reestablished.
Italo Svevo â Zenoâs Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Life does resemble sickness a bit, as it proceeds by crises and lyses, and has daily improvements and setbacks. Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesnât tolerate therapies.
Italo Svevo â Zenoâs Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Health doesnât analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.
Italo Svevo â Zenoâs Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
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 â Zenoâs Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer â Studies on Hysteria
Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousyâah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!
Friedrich Nietzsche â Beyond Good and Evil
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Anna Karenina â Leo Tolstoy
(The Anna Karenina principle)
There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, âtil at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: âOh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is â to die soon.â
Friedrich Nietzsche â The Birth of Tragedy
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 thingsâŠ
Henry David Thoreau â Walden
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth â look at the dying manâs struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
SĂžren Kierkegaard, journals
Actually, when the student happens to attain a mind so ready and vigorous, he might go astray way wilder and perilouslier than his master.
Filosofia di Giacomo Leopardi (âThe Philosophy of Giacomo Leopardiâ), Domenico Solimani
That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.
Arthur Schopenhauer â Parerga and Paralipomena; also in âEssays and Aphorismsâ
To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
Herman Melville â Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.
SĂžren Kierkegaard â The Sickness Unto Death
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 Motherâs 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 manâs 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 â that horrible passion, or rather non-passion, of man â truly and necessarily has its main seat in large cities, that is, in very extensive societies. Manâs 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. [âŠ]
Giacomo Leopardi to Carlo Leopardi â Rome, December 6, 1822
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
To desire life in any case, and in the full extent of that desire, is in short nothing other than to desire unhappiness; to desire to live is tantamount to desiring to be unhappy. (March 20, 1821).
Leopardi, Zibaldone, 829-830
Joyâs recollection is no longer joy, while sorrowâs memory is a sorrow still.
Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) â Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (actâŻII, sceneâŻI)
[The human life] swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Full excerpt:
We have already seen in nature-without-knowledge her inner being as a constant striving without aim and without rest, and this stands out much more distinctly when we consider the animal or man. Willing and striving are its whole essence, and can be fully compared to an unquenchable thirst. The basis of all willing, howÂever, is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom come over it; in other words, its being and its existence itself become an intolerable burden for it. Hence its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents. This has been expressed very quaintly by saying that, after man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom.
There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy⊠So long as we persist in this inborn error, and indeed even become confirmed in it through optimistic dogmas, the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in things great and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence⊠hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment.
Arthur Schopenhauer â The World as Will and Representation
If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred.
Mary Shelley â Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
In these last days Iâve been much better (in a way however, that anyone whoâs fine, falling into this âbetterâ, would assume to be dead) [âŠ]
Giacomo Leopardi to Pietro Giordani, Recanati, August 8th 1817
https://dnamistakes.webcomic.ws/comics/pl/1603551[đĄ]
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, âAm I happy?â and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, âNo, you are as poor and as miserable as before.â
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 â Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums ĂŒber die französische Revolution (âContribution to the Correction of the Publicâs Judgment on the French Revolutionâ)
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 â Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Imitation of Christ â Thomas Ă Kempis
Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. Read the full page
Unfortunately, I shall have to say, my mother, why did you conceive me, son of bitterness and sorrow? Why did I not die in the womb? Having come forth from the womb, why did I not perish immediately? Why was I taken up on the knees? Why was I nursed at the breasts? Born to be burnt and to be fuel for the fire? Would that I had been slain in the womb so that my mother might have been my grave and her womb an everlasting conception. For I should have been as if I had not been, brought from the womb to the tomb.
Lotario dei conti di Segni (before becoming Pope Innocent III) â On the Misery of the Human Condition
CHORUS (Str.) Who craves excess of days, Scorning the common span Of life, I judge that man A giddy wight who walks in follyâs ways. For the long years heap up a grievous load, Scant pleasures, heavier pains, Till not one joy remains For him who lingers on lifeâs weary road And come it slow or fast, One doom of fate Doth all await, For dance and marriage bell, The dirge and funeral knell. Death the deliverer freeth all at last. (Ant.) Not to be born at all Is best, far best that can befall, Next best, when born, with least delay To trace the backward way. For when youth passes with its giddy train, Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils, Pain, pain for ever pain; And none escapes lifeâs coils. Envy, sedition, strife, Carnage and war, make up the tale of life. Last comes the worst and most abhorred stage Of unregarded age, Joyless, companionless and slow, Of woes the crowning woe.
Sophocles â Oedipus at Colonus (transl. by F. Storr)
He whom the gods love dies young.
Menander, 4th-3rd century BCE
Life is suffering.
The First Noble Truth in Buddhism â though the concept also appears in much older texts from other cultures.