But where had it all gone wrong for me? I must have been happy once. Or at least content. What was it that had pushed me over the edge to permanent melancholy? To the land of hopelessness through which I now wandered? I suppose it had been many things.
But it must have all started with school. I hated going to school, you see. I even had to repeat the ninth grade. Not because I was dumb but because I didn’t like to study the things that I was forced to study. I didn’t like waking up early. I didn’t like tests. I didn’t like homework. And I didn’t like the other people in school, who mostly seemed like shallow idiots to me.
After I had finished primary school and went to high school, I only managed about a year or so before dropping out. My grades were good… but soon enough, the bullshit seeped through and I just couldn’t continue justifying the study of the state-mandated things they were telling me were important. Instead, I decided to educate myself.
I began reading books from Nietzsche and other philosophers and took long walks in nature to let the words settle. What I discovered was that there were various ways how one could look at things. And the view that prevailed at any given age was not dependent on the truth, but on power.
Which brings me to school. A school’s purpose wasn’t to enlighten anybody or to make them into a critical thinker. Schools existed only to train people for jobs, dulling their ability for critical thinking in the process, so that they could readily accept authority and mindless routine. In fact, when I read about the history of the school system that was commonly used in the world, I discovered that it came from the Middle Ages and was originally designed to teach people religion. And what did religious people do? They accepted absurd ideas without questioning. The same system that was designed to brainwash them—full of rote learning, non-questioning, conformity, and punishment—was the same one that was still being used today. Why? Because it worked. At least most of the time. For some reason, it hadn’t worked on me.
Eventually, I got into science. I watched hundreds of documentaries, read books from various scientific fields, such as astronomy, evolution, and neuroscience, and listened to academic lectures. I discovered that many of the ideas that philosophy proposed were hopelessly obsolete by now and demonstrably wrong. Instead, it was science that seemed to be the key to understanding the nature of existence, and I soon came to think that there was nothing it couldn’t solve.
I even went back to high school for a while. But I dropped out again after about a year or so because the kind of science I was interested in—a way of looking at everything—wasn’t being taught, or even appreciated, at school. So I continued studying it by myself.
Eventually, however, I began to see a huge problem with science. Although it had promised to fix everything, a casual look at the world showed that it had much less power than its proponents thought. That was because people, by nature, weren’t science-minded beings. Instead of chemistry, they preferred alchemy. Instead of astronomy, they preferred astrology. Instead of atheism, they preferred religion. And instead of the truth, they preferred comforting lies.
And thus, it was my appreciation of science that eventually led me to resent society. All around me I began to see how badly everything was designed. How badly everybody did things. Not to mention all the absurd things people believed in without questioning, such as acupuncture and homeopathy and wars and politics. This made me feel depressed. And the depression didn’t go away.
During all this, there were jobs and girlfriends. The jobs that I was able to get without a college degree quickly grew boring and unfulfilling. The girlfriends came and went, none of them ever understanding me or my views on reality.
After a while, I began to lose interest in science. Science had shown me that the entire world was materialistic and fundamentally meaningless but where anything could potentially be achieved through knowledge and technology. But then the question was, why hadn’t it been achieved? Why was the world in practice such a miserable fucking shithole if theoretically it could have been so wonderful? Why was there so much superficiality, stupidity, corruption, greed, poverty, inequality, sickness, suffering, and death?
Perhaps it was due to the fact that most scientists were deluded optimists and few of them used the scientific method on society. For them, science was something narrow that was done as a job, whereas I felt that everything was supposed to be viewed scientifically. Including religion, traditions, and the socio-economic system.
And if one did examine these things scientifically, one was in for a rude awakening. Science hadn’t actually done much to change the core of society, which had been the same since the Sumerians first began agriculture twelve thousand years ago when the first cities appeared around the first farmlands.
Indeed, I learned that the cities of those times were very similar to the cities of today—full of poor people with a few rich people ruling over them. The rich controlled the poor who did all the dirty work for them from which the rich profited. Perhaps that was a simplistic way to view things but it was essentially the truth. It always had been. It always would.
And so, I began to distance myself from science. Science as it was practiced in our society began to seem to me as little more than a club of capitalist lackeys. Science that could be sold became popular; science that could not, nobody gave a fuck about.
I began asking myself whether there was anything beyond science. Whether there was a field that could explain, without being held accountable to optimism bias and capitalistic greed, the true nature of existence?
I went back to philosophy. I discovered that linked to Nietzsche were various philosophers that were quite pessimistic about our lot in life. Schopenhauer, Heraclitus, Diogenes, Chamfort, Mainländer, Cioran, and more. I began reading about them and their works… and I was amazed. Here were people who said precisely what I had been suspecting for a long time now and they didn’t mince words. They said exactly how bad things were and how this badness was built into reality and how there was no hope of it ever getting any better because such presumptions were based on delusional thinking.
In my attempt to deconstruct everything, I had also learned that there was no free will. Despite what most people thought, nobody had any choice whatsoever in what they did in this world. It was as though life was a movie, and since we were conscious of it, we thought that we could have changed the narrative if only we had done something differently. But this “choice” was only an illusion. Studies had shown that the conscious idea of being able to have done differently arose after the brain had already made the decision. In other words, random evolutionary mutations had made us erroneously think that we had free will, when in truth we never did.
After I had learned that there was no point to anything and that life was mostly suffering from which people escaped through illusions, I realized that the only sensible thing for the human race to do was to go extinct. And I was far from the first to have suggested it.
In truth, there were many like me in the world, though we mostly kept our views hidden. The idea that existence was a good thing was something that was so deeply embedded in people that almost everybody accepted it without questioning. For to seriously consider, even for but one moment, that it might have actually been better never to have been, was to cast doubt on everything you had ever believed in. And normal people didn’t have the balls for that. For them, life was simple. You did what you were told and pretended you were happy about it. Because when you kicked the bucket, you’d go to heaven and everything would be fine forever.