And though there were people who spoke of potential scientific utopias, these ideas, as time passed, began to seem more and more removed from reality to me. I came to realize that they were mainly based on optimistic and wishful thinking and could never be achieved in reality. So either I had to accept the shit society around me, work on changing it without really changing anything, or perish. Those weren’t pleasant options.
Since I had failed to find in science what philosophy lacked (solutions), I started questioning science itself. Particularly why scientists rarely seemed to use a scientific attitude towards society and its traditions and values. Indeed, they seemed well-entrenched in the illusions of society, most of them believing in country and family, some even in God. Ultimately, they didn’t seem like real scientists to me. A real scientist, I felt, would question everything. Not just what they were paid to question.
So I went back to philosophy. Disappointed in ideology, I sought out writers who had been similarly disappointed. I discovered a book by the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran called On the Heights of Despair. The book blew my mind. Although it was negative to the extreme, it seemed to say what I had suspected all along. That we were living in a world of delusions, that life was mostly suffering, and that it would have been better never to have been born.
This kind of thinking, I soon learned, had a name. Philosophical pessimism. And for obvious reasons, it was about as non-mainstream as it got.
As I dug into it more, I discovered some really far out there thinkers, such as the German philosopher Philipp Mainländer who thought that before the beginning of the universe there was God. However, unlike Christians, he concluded that the reason why the universe was formed was because God wanted to commit suicide. Thus, God shattered his timeless and non-material being into a time-bound and material universe—in other words, the Big Bang. The reason God did so was because existence was unbearable even to him. And since the entire universe was essentially God’s rotting corpse, everything in it had an inbuilt will to die. Everything was destined towards oblivion.
To me, his philosophy appeared to be a more poetic way of saying that entropy always increased and would ultimately result in the heat death of the universe. Although Mainländer’s cosmogony was a rather wacky idea, it held a certain doomed romance to it and it was without a doubt the most interesting alternative theory of the universe that I had ever heard of.
Out of all the philosophical pessimists that I discovered—and for obvious reasons, there weren’t many—I found the most reasonable among them to be the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. The main problem with humans, he claimed, was that we had too much consciousness. Unlike other animals, we weren’t satisfied simply with being. We needed a reason to be. In other words, we were the victims of an evolutionary oversight—the need to have meaning in a meaningless universe. And this was the tragedy of our existence.
According to Zapffe, mankind had invented four major strategies to cope with this. The first strategy was to isolate all unpleasant thoughts from our minds and to banish them from our daily lives. This was why people tended to be optimists and why they didn’t want to go “too deep” on any given subject for fear of what they might find.
The second strategy was to anchor ourselves to artificial social institutions like church, country, and family, so that we could live within the illusions of certainty that these provided. This was why people thought that family was everything, why they went to war for their countries, and why they went nuts just to believe in a god.
The third strategy was to distract ourselves with pointless pastimes, such as sports and drinking and nightclubs and dancing and violin practice and movies and pornography and soap operas and so on. Which was a very popular strategy indeed.
The fourth and final strategy was to sublimate the horrors of existence and use them to create a meaningful experience, such as a novel or a painting or a song or even a philosophy. This was clearly the best strategy out of the four. But it wasn’t easy to achieve.
Of course, Zapffe had also found suicide a perfectly natural reaction to our existential predicament. As, indeed, over time had I.
Although at first it had felt good to discover these outcasts who felt the same way about life as I did, this soon grew into a confirmation of how bad life truly was and what a curse it was to be forced into this world. Philosophical pessimism had thus made me feel even more depressed. Alas, I had passed the point of no return, and it was now too late to go back to the land of naïve dreams and happy fantasies.
Ultimately, due to the incessant disappointments from school, family, philosophy, science, jobs, girlfriends, friends, and life in general, I began drinking. Drinking often made me forget the shittiness of things, even as it sometimes made me act erratically. This culminated when one morning, after a night of heavy drinking, I woke up on the outskirts of another city. I woke up with my phone smashed, my cash gone, a cut on my head, and my hands bloody. I had no recollection of the last fifteen hours, but all the signs pointed towards violence and insanity.
Of course, I knew inside what had happened. For when I drank enough alcohol in a low mood, which I usually was in, the anger of having been forced into this world and having lived an unsatisfactory life came bubbling out of me and eventually exploded like dynamite. Alcohol removed the chains holding in check my wish for revenge over having to conform to the stupidity of everyday life. Alcohol turned Jekyll into Hyde. But Jekyll was merely a façade. Hyde was there all along. Hyde was hatred for the world. And Jekyll the attempt to hide it.
And yet, I had managed to find something positive about the experience. I wrote a short story about it called Desolation. It was the first story I had written that was based entirely on my life. Although I hadn’t realized it at the time, the story was a Zapffean attempt at sublimation. Unfortunately, when I sent it to various magazines, they all rejected it.
I continued writing more stories which also got rejected. It didn’t help matters much that I didn’t have any friends or relatives who were involved with writing or publishing. For it was often through connections that people got things done in this corrupt society. Of course, it was also entirely possible that the stories just sucked.
Still, I continued writing. Some of what I wrote was pure fiction and some was based on my own life, though all of it was pessimistic. Regardless of whether it was good or bad, it seemed unlikely that I would ever get published because the stories focused mainly on the negative and rarely had a happy ending. Dark and depressing stories didn’t appeal to most people, and even when they did they had to have a happy ending. In horror fiction, the serial killer had to be caught, the monster had to be killed, the ghost had to be banished. A happy ending was expected. Despite how much suffering was caused, all was well that ended well.
But what if the monster was reality itself? What if there couldn’t be a happy ending because the horror in the story was existence itself and existence always ended in misery and death? That was what my stories were about. Not exactly a light read.
Out of all the stories that I wrote—and truth be told, there weren’t many because I was a perfectionist who lacked motivation, which meant that each story took a while to finish—only one of them got published. It was one of the best feelings I had ever felt in my life. Even if it was just some obscure online magazine that didn’t pay me anything for it.