Inspired by this small success, I kept writing more stories and sending them to various magazines. All of them ended up getting rejected. And it usually took months to even get a reply. One magazine—a major one—managed to take an entire fucking year before getting back to me with their rejection. I was beginning to get disillusioned to say the least.
In total, I sent stories to about fifty different magazines before giving up. It seemed that the story that got published had been a rare occurrence, a fluke. Indeed, I soon learned that only around one in ten thousand books that were written ever got published. It thus began to seem that writing wasn’t going to be the salvation that I was seeking. And so, I eventually stopped writing altogether.
I tried to find other things to do in life. I tried exercising. I tried traveling. I tried other jobs. Other girlfriends. But it was never enough. None of these things were enough in the long run to keep me satisfied. Sooner or later, that old thought crept back into my mind. About how utterly futile everything was. How nothing was ultimately worth the bother. And so, whenever I tried to find something in life worth doing, I quickly lost interest. The only constant companion that I had was my depression, which rarely left me. Even as everyone else did.
Occasionally, my depression turned into anger. Anger over not having any friends because I couldn’t relate to people. Anger over my family not caring about what I was going through. Anger over not being able to keep a girlfriend. Anger over having been born. Born without a choice into this rotten world. It seemed that my brain just kept remembering the bad shit over and over again, repeating it like a broken record. “See how bad your life is?” it reminded me. “See how everything keeps getting fucked all the time? See how you’re never satisfied with anything?”
“At least you’re alive.” That’s what normal people said. As though just being alive was such a boon. “You’re making yourself miserable by thinking these things.” That’s what my mother once told me. As if I was intentionally trying to make myself miserable. People who said such things clearly didn’t realize how the mind worked.
The mind was not a thing that existed by itself. It was an illusion that emerged from having thoughts. But what were thoughts? Thoughts were based on experience and information that was stored in the brain by having specific neurons fire in specific patterns. Since thoughts consisted of millions of such neurons firing together, any one of them was not a memory in itself and only a large number of neurons firing together formed the image of a “thought”.
As an analogy, one bit in a computer held nearly no information whereas many bits together could form an image on a screen. However, unlike the information stored on a computer hard drive, the image a thought formed was much more vague and volatile and subject to change.
But how were these thoughts recalled? Why did they occur in our brains? Was it because we chose to recall them? Did we choose to think about miserable things? Clearly not. Recalling a thought was a reaction—light entered our eyes or sound entered our ears, which created an electrical signal of specific strength in a specific area of the brain, which traveled to a specific region and made certain synapses between a bunch of neurons trade various specific chemicals in specific amounts; this then formed a pattern, which formed an image in our consciousness, which we then automatically either expressed or did not express, depending on the circumstances.
The more one reacted to the external stimuli that activated these patterns—which started out as very simple and were built upon over time, as was obvious when one thought of the development of a child—the more one strengthened a particular thought and the more likely it was to be recalled when reacting to the things in one’s environment related to it.
Consciousness, on the other hand, was being cognizant that all this was happening, whilst erroneously thinking that the reaction happened because we willed it to, when in truth it was all automatic. This was what Schopenhauer meant when he said that a man could do what he wanted, but that he couldn’t want what he wanted.
There was thus no “mystery” to consciousness despite what most people thought. An artificial brain created exactly as a human brain, which received the same sensory information from the same body would behave just like a human being would. Provided it also had the opportunity to grow and slowly gather experience and information which made the brain automatically choose what was subjectively useful or not, depending on what provided more pleasure and less pain, thereby creating the illusion of a persona that through many a feedback loop was ultimately able to perceive itself. Which was the reason why very young children didn’t realize that they existed until the brain had developed enough of these feedback loops.
Simply put, human beings did not think, there was no mind, and there was no consciousness. Not to mention something as utterly absurd as a soul, which for inexplicable reasons many people still believed in. Why hadn’t science found any of these things? Because they didn’t exist. They were only self-flattering fantasies that stemmed from the illusion of having free will and were in no way needed for the operation of a human being.
Which brings me to free will. Since thoughts were automatic reactions that formed from physically encoded memories in the brain, our reactions to our environment were involuntary. The illusion of free will arose from the simple fact that both human beings and their environments were vast and diverse and with an inconceivable number of variables that each affected another, which in turn affected another and so on until the outcome indeed appeared to be a mystery.
So it was with our so-called choices, for we were in most cases unable to see the specific string of causes and reactions that led like a mathematical calculation to a particular “choice”, whereupon we proclaimed that we had made it, as if by magic, as if it had not been affected by anything other than our own free will.
However, a choice was always affected by something. If we had never learned about a thing, it would not have been possible for us to conceive of it, and thus a choice that presupposed—and all of them did—knowledge of something beforehand would remain impossible for us.
And even if we were to have more or less equal knowledge about two distinct subjects and were put into the position of having to choose between them, wouldn’t we simply choose the one that seemed more beneficial for us at the time? And wouldn’t this “free” choice come from our past experiences which had tilted the balance in the present towards the choice that had worked for us in the past?
So where did our persona come from? From our environment. Environment shaped and created people while people shaped and created the environment. And when one was wretched, the other one was likewise—a vicious cycle from which there was no escape. Yet first there was the environment. And since man did not have free will, which would account for his malignancy, it must have been the environment itself that was malignant. Which meant that man was ultimately little more than a suffering puppet in an adverse universe.
At least, so it would seem when one anthropomorphized it. To put it more objectively, the universe didn’t even care enough about man to torture him, for it operated without any purpose whatsoever. We were merely the unlucky fragments of it that had become conscious. And most of these fragments were so weak that they would take any delusion that came their way and even preached it to others just to make their brief period of consciousness seem less empty and meaningless than it actually was.