Lying My Way From You

We live in a world of phonies and charlatans, surrounded by fabrication and illusion, with no way of conclusively determining the truth of our lives. Science tells us that it is impossible to know a particle's exact position both now and one microsecond from now; by measuring the truth, we change it, and quantum physics muddies the waters even more with the idea that even passive, informal observation creates a single reality, where myriad overlapping half-truths once existed. Hollywood and Madison Avenue spin tales of the improbable to amuse and indoctrinate us; many people have come to believe the "facts" as cinematic tradition portrays them, expecting that when they swing a sword in real life, it will make a "cutting the edge" sound-effect just like it does in "Highlander", where that completely abnormal sound was really inserted into the movie to demonstrate the sharpness of what was actually a dull-edged prop claymore. Corporations retain highly-paid lawyers to argue semantics in order to protect their bottom line, intentionally operating across absurdly long chains of accountability, so that their officers can plausibly disavow knowledge in the event that anything goes wrong.  Public-relation firms establish a reputation for trustworthiness by distorting the facts to conceal evidence of wrongdoing, and meanwhile a malicious rumor about a potential employee can blacklist them from the entire industry without a shred of evidence.

Everything that our society depends upon, everything we believe in and rely upon daily, is false, contradictory, and pulled out of someone's butt. Our knowledge is guesswork, our self-perception is both narcissistic and depressive, as we pit contrary exagerrations of our own mental image of ourself against each other, trying to be both modest and cocky at the same time, so as to woo and spellbind our potential allies, lovers, rivals and patrons. And amidst all this insanity and confusion, today I find myself tempted to come to the conclusion that it's okay. Because there's a saying in the employment counseling industry, and one that's often repeated in other contexts: "fake it until you make it." By pretending to be a thing, we often transform into the role we've assumed, slowly absorbing by osmosis those characteristics which we only claimed to possess, stealing them away from our fictional selves through the magic of pretense itself.

The bardic tradition is as old as language and civilization; all human life is a story, and we are all storytellers. What could be more poetic, than to realize that we are writing a better life for ourselves, using our imagination to make reality conform more nearly (if never completely) to our wildest dreams? As I often do, I remember the words of Bill Hicks: "it's just a ride". Life is meant to be taken seriously, but not in the main because it actually is serious. It is a portrayal of seriousness, a roller-coaster ride full of thrills and chills, which we play along with by obeying the rules of the game, lest we be denied the chance to enjoy its outcome. This is a challenge I must consider at length; my instinctive desire is to reject all falsehood, demanding certain and complete knowledge of all facts. But ultimately, I doubt I could handle the granting of that request -- there are too many apparent truths in this cosmos which I feel compelled, on the grounds of ethical rigor, to deny and refute, even if they are known absolutely to be unquestionable. If the truth is in fact fluid and impossible to capture in one's hand...then at least there is an upside to that liquidity.

Let us see if the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

Don't Mind Me, I'm Just Babeling

(Image is copyright Wizards of the Coast, used for fair use purposes, no infringement intended.)

Imagine for a moment that you saw a rickety scaffold, just five feet wide at the base, which goes up five feet and then has a platform ten feet wide, from which more scaffolding goes up another five feet to support a fifteen-foot-wide platform, and so forth and so on. (The picture above should give you a vague visual cue to this concept.) Obviously, this is not a very stable structure, particularly not if there are a bunch of people standing on the platforms. Let's say that you saw a large number of people under the scaffolding, all working together to hold it up, while more and more new people climbed up to the current top layer and worked to build another layer, which was only half-complete yet already people were climbing up onto it and building on top of it as well.

It should be clear enough that this is a recipie for disaster...but say that the people inside the scaffold absolutely insisted that you *had* to join them in trying to prop this insanely unstable structure up, or else they would blame you when it fell. Let's say, in fact, that everyone in your town, if not your country, was all involved in this ridiculous scaffold-building enterprise, and they'd brought all the food in the area and hid it inside the scaffold with themselves, and were saying that if you didn't join them in trying to hold up the scaffold, they would let you starve. Plus, because anyone who isn't helping them is obviously their enemy, they would throw rocks and knives and such at you, until you joined them in the scaffold. And once you were in the scaffold, you'd have to hold up the layer above you, while other people climb up on top of it and add more and more weight, until eventually, inevitably, the whole thing finally collapses and crushes everyone inside it.

This is the way I feel about our society. It's an insane house of cards where everyone just agrees to go along with obvious idiocy, and because I try to tell people that they're going to ****ing die and they should get out now before the collapse happens, I'm looked upon as an antisocial malcontent, instead of as someone who's trying to help. It drives me mad to see the way people just blithely insist on continuing to pretend nothing is wrong, rather than listen to someone who tells them truths they'd rather pretend not to be able to see for themselves.

The four pillars that I think are holding up our scaffold are Money, Law, Faith and Violence; some combination of these factors seems to be critical to pretty much everything that carries weight in our society. And I seethe with intense dislike for all four; Money is a flawed premise, Law a complete fallacy, Faith is lunacy incarnate, and Violence is as intolerable as it is efficient. A myriad of permutations emerge from these pillars: Money and Law create Bribery, Law and Faith together form Obligation, Law and Violence produce Intimidation, Money and Faith are crucial to Fraud, Faith and Violence combine into Xenophobia, and Money and Violence are both synonymous with Darwinism, and these six further combine with each other and their ancestors to give rise to an ever-widening web of extortion, mercenarism, brainwashing, contractual enslavement, financial intenture, crime, black markets, institutional corruption, mutual backscratching, pederasty, indoctrination, cycles of abuse, propaganda, oligarchy, ethnic cleansing, hypocrisy, bastardization of truth, confidence games, pyramid schemes, generational rifts, communication breakdowns...the list goes on and on. But ultimately, I think all of them boil down to one root concept, a name for the entire scaffold: Dehumanization.

Money teaches us that life has a price, which is factual but untruthful; while it may cost something to keep body and soul together, every life is nonetheless priceless, because it is unique and cannot be replaced. Law tells us that we are bound to obey our previous agreements, but this ignores the entire fact that life is nothing but the process of change; the creature who signed a contract in your name yesterday wasn't you, but something that evolved into you, and you in turn will evolve into something else, so you can't make promises today and expect your future self to honor them. Faith is nothing less than the antithesis of reason; sure there are questions we don't know how to answer, perhaps never will, but is that any reason for us to believe something that someone tells us is true, when they offer nothing resembling convincing proof? And violence, well, it gets results; kill everyone who disagrees with you, and you can damn sure get people to cooperate (either with you, or with each other against you). But it is nonetheless true that, ethically speaking, we have no right or entitlement to kill each other; again, our lives are of incalculable value, and every death is an intolerable waste, of an endlessly replenishable yet nonetheless crucially limited resource.

So we've built ourselves a very impressive scaffold society using these four bits of rebar I've described, and I can't say that I exactly want to see it come tumbling down - but I'm absolutely certain it will, and I am strongly unhappy with people's attempts to convince me to come join in the doomed effort to hold it up, when the only possible result is that I'll be crushed along with it. In fact, the more rocks the people inside throw at me, and the hungrier I get because they're hoarding all the food, the more I find myself tempted to locate a weak point in the structure and give it a good push. For now, I continue to resist that urge, and it's probable I'll die before the opportunity arises for me to act upon it. Certainly, all of you people in the scaffold are justified in hoping so. You've every right to ignore my ravings telling you to start climbing down and spreading out, every right to keep piling ever higher in your mad scramble to be one of the ones on top, who hope they'll survive when it all crashes down, as long as it doesn't fall too fast or tip too far to the side before flattening. If that's what you want to do, I can't stop you.

But I think you deserve better than that...and I'm certain that I do.

Meditations on Life's Dynamics - Insects, Conspiracies, and the Six Coercion Methods

The world of today is a wonderful and terrible place; if you want to see that fact writ large, go on a Wiki Walk, a journey through the absurd fucktons of information that the Internet has enabled us to collect, organize, and interrelate in ways previously unimaginable. Where once the sort of research, fact-checking and comparisons that are central to the plots of mystery and Lovecraftian horror novels was the work of many hours or days, carrying books from place to place and sifting through pages of mostly-irrelevant data in search of items of information that were worth considering in relation to other such details, now we have Google and Wikimedia and similar companies doing most of the work for us in a trillionth of a second. And I've developed a bit of an addiction to immersing myself in this flow of knowledge, which is one of many reasons I haven't been back to update this blog in something like two years wow, it was actually only like eight months, but still.

Today, just previously, I've been getting my fix of instant gratification for my mental hungers, watching a sequence of YouTube videos which has touched off a cascade of interesting thoughts. This sort of thing happens to me a lot when I'm at my job (minus the YouTube part; I must make do with more work-safe forms of gratification when I'm in the office, with minimal privacy and no functioning speakers); I've often wanted to post as a result, but not found the time to organize and topicalize (?) my thoughts to be worthy of blogging. Now, the stars have aligned thus that I have the opportunity to share my thoughts fresh from the tap, and I've come up with quite a concept to delve into by comparing two videos on very different topics which came up in rapid sequence.

First, there is this collection of interesting-looking insects from all over the world. There are well more than five million kinds of insects (according to Wikipedia the number might be as much as double that), and they range from the beautiful to the hideous, and from the absurdly rare to the inescapably numerous. For the most part, these groups seem to align; the most attractive insects (for example the Jewel Beetle or the Blue Morpho butterfly) usually come from remote places and are largely unfamiliar to the rest of the world, probably not terribly common even there. Meanwhile, insects that are plain-looking or hideous, colored brown or black to blend into their surroundings (or painted in nauseatingly gaudy hues so that a hungry bird might mistake them for its own droppings), covered in spikes and oozing stenches to ward predators away and often capable of nerve-rattling vocalizations or skittering speeds that set human nerves acrawl, and frequently delivering a poisonous bite, agonizing sting, or just scratching open the skin they scuttle across to leave behind an irritating rash...all of these insects are often highly successful. The cockroach shits where it eats and swarms worldwide; the Argentine Ants form a single ruthless colonizing army whose soldiers around the globe will form ironclad alliances on sight. Termites, firebrats, boxelder bugs, cicadas...at best these creatures are unsettling to look at, and often they cause substantial property damage. And why? Because they're the product of three hundred million years of evolution, since the first insects appeared in the fossil record; they'll do anything it takes to survive, and they're damn good at it, while the prettier and more harmless specimens are quite possibly a Darwinian dead end, whose small range ensures it would take only a single, localized disaster to decimate them, and speed them toward extinction with irresistable inertia.

The lesson:  In our world, being quirky and unique and well-meaning gets punished with death, while the greediest predators and most fecund infestations are feared, respected, and allowed to flourish by Mother Nature and all her other creations.

The other half of this little brainstorm of mine comes from a fiery political video, which I won't bother linking to because I half-suspect the members of a shadowy conspiracy are going to get it pulled down as soon as they get back into their government offices on Monday er, wow I was paranoid back then, it's right here. In this video, former Minnesota governer Jesse Ventura pokes quite a few holes in the official story of America's current military situation, and points out that wars are often spurred by religious hatred, perpetuated by government incompetence, and provide fertile soil for the flourishing of corporate greed which quickly overtakes any less tangible motivation behind them. I've often observed such facts as these as seeming to describe the world in general, and bemoaned the seeming inevitability of this foolishness, and in doing so today, I touched off an interesting series of meditations on the various forms of coercion, the ways that the malevolent masters of our society today have discovered to enforce their will - highly efficient trump cards, against which idealism like mine is largely powerless.

Since I like making lists, I'm going to go ahead and spell out what I've come up with:

First, there is the threat of immediate violence. If you put a gun to someone's head and say "Do X or die", it's extremely likely that the victim will do X, regardless of their usual objections. And if they refuse to help, you can just kill them, and at least they aren't working against you. Thusly, groups who have the ability to use violence are very good at getting their way.

Second, there is intimidation. This is the threat of non-immediate violence, the application of fear to compel obedience without necessarily forcing you to execute (or at least brutalize) the victim the moment they refuse. This also means it is effective even while you're unarmed, or while under the effect of laws that attach awkward consequences to an act of immediate murder; you can simply tell the person they'll be on your "hit list" if they don't cooperate, and imply that even though you can't kill them then and there, you're perfectly capable of getting away with doing it later, if they don't act now to avoid it.

Third, there's a different kind of fear, which involves invoking paranoia. When it's known that some people use violence to get their way, other people will use the first people to get their way. Instead of saying "Do what I say or I'll kill you", they say "Do what I say or that guy might kill you; I can stop him but only if you give me a reason to bother." This can be applied more subtly, and is a favored technique of agencies in our society, who often claim to know that dire consequences are on their way and can only be averted by their own actions. Such claims are often spurious on the face of them, but we've got another technique coming up in the list which works very well in conjunction with this one.

Fourth, we switch over from negative reinforcement (which is generally more powerful in the short term, but often denies the existence of the long term) to more positive ways of motivating people, collectively termed "bribery". By appealing to someone's desires, you can lure them into cooperating with you; this can be portrayed as a simple exchange of one favor for another, or it may be more involved, with concepts such as customer appreciation or romantic entanglement enabling the interaction to take on various dynamics over the course of time. Money, sex, fame, professional accolades, or even simple friendship are just a few of the many things you can be in the position to grant or withhold to another person, and attempt to use these various currencies to purchase their aid, either now or in the immediately-projected future

Fifth, there's a more rarefied and abstract version of the previous methods, which I'll call "allegiance" (a more impolite term might be "racketeering") - rather than immediately providing a bribe or a threat, you incorporate yourself into a structure which possesses enough power to be taken seriously, and then you use the mere existence of that structure as a reason why people should obey you. Any national government is one of these monoliths, and the general concepts of money and law are more generalized examples, whose power extends across national boundaries with various degrees of effectiveness. A politician, lawyer, businessman or the like doesn't actually need to promise his company's aid or threaten its enmity; he can simply use his affiliation with such an organization as a reason why he must be obeyed, in the hopes that his victims will assume the possibility of future bribes and threats depending on whether he renders aid or not.

And sixth, finally for the moment, we come to the most intangible and worrisome of these malignant strictures: belief. If you don't currently have any power to reward or punish others, you can still obtain their cooperation by convincing them to accept a blank check, persuading them to trust in your future ability to make good on your promises, through any number of methods of earning someone's confidence. These can range from the very noble (such as a long history of seemingly thankless charity work which eventually might pay off in offers of assistance in return, but is performed without actually guaranteeing such repayment) to the utterly monstrous (such as brainwashing children to believe whatever they're told and then teaching them to regard critical thinking as a tool of malign forces, so they will resist any attempt at deprogramming themselves)

So, for the moment, I've identified these six methods of controlling other people, all of which I believe our society's authority figures do not hesitate to use in order to keep their position. (Granted, as the webcomic XKCD often points out, our society's authority figures are generally inept enough that their ability to succeed through these Machiavellian techniques is distinctly limited; it may not be quite as true or quite as obvious as in the Saturday morning cartoons, but the real world's black-hats are far from immune to being incompetent enough to serve as their own worst enemies.) I mention these in the same breath as the video about the insects, because I see there as being a parallel; in nature and in society alike, the ruthlessly efficient tend to flourish, and the harmless and unique and special are at best marginalized, more often crushed altogether. The bumbling overlords of our society, fallible and wracked with human frailty, and the implacable forces of nature, nonsentient and devoid of motivation though they can safely be assumed to be, are both in essence working out of the same playbook. Kill the fragile butterflies with a harsh winter or a drought or something; the ants that swarm beneath the dirt will devour their corpses and multiply in droves, and Nature will be happy. Throw the hippies in jail for having had the gall to sing in public about peace and love and freedom, then give a medal to the jack-booted racist thugs who happily volunteered to kill foreigners on your say-so; Civilization will approve.

What would I do differently, if I had the chance? That question is the upshot of this article. If I had power exceeding that of both Nature and Civilization, I would want to see the pleasant, harmless, and magical preserved, rather than allowing the highly efficient to succeed by becoming monstrous. I think that rarity is a virtue and that artistry is a signal of cosmic merit; to my way of thinking, Life is not a net positive, but rather requires enjoyable input to be worthy of continuing to bother with. So I would like to see anything that makes life more fun and interesting preserved and supported, while things which automatically preserve and support themselves a little too well, in fact flourishing in the face of adversity, ought to be ruthlessly culled down to manageable numbers and told not to be so boring or evil all the time. Rather than seeing the world be a rat race where the losers are killed and the winners given their stuff, I want it to be an egalitarian procession, in which every runner is told to remain within sight of those behind him, so that all may marvel at the spectacle each other are presenting, and the whole group can gradually make as much process as they feel is absolutely necessary without ever having to go too far.

There would be no need for coercion techniques in such a world.

An Update about Why I Haven't Updated Much Lately

I have tried several times over the course of my life to keep a diary, and have invariably been stymied, mostly because of my inability to function in an organized manner, but perhaps also by a certain sense of futility. I am completely in love, lust, and worshipful reverence with the state of inspiration, the condition of having words magically flow from one's tongue or pen as though beamed down from a benevolent celestial realm, expressing ideals that seem perfect and true and sacred; I feel more alive while so vociferating than at any other time. At the risk of proferring TMI, the act of writing is so much an affirmation of life to me as to seem almost sexual, the ultimate vindication of humanity's nature, and nearly as pleasurable as the physical act which is necessary to create life (or at least was until the advent of in vitro fertilization; now we let our machines fuck us as often as we fuck ourselves).

But no matter how vital and empowering it is to write, the written product thereof is dead, dry, and difficult for me to stomach in quantity; occasionally something I read comes alive in my mind, but just as often the act of translating symbols on a page into living ideas is a tiresome mental chore, and the result often doesn't seem worth it. Why did I slog through 2000 words on Wikipedia just to completely and accurately learn a single fact, when I could have made up a fiction to amuse myself in 1% of the time required and felt as though I'd just gotten my mental rocks off in the process? Something is weird in my brain, probably from 14 years of growing up with essentially no friends who weren't imaginary, and the difference between a factual truth and a fictional Keatsian beauty of a "Truth" has never seemed all that relevant to me. After all, the world we live in is just kind of there, sitting around ignoring us in its typical nonsentient way; we didn't create it, it doesn't belong to us, and I don't feel that we really need to care about it. But the worlds in our imagination, the ones we weave into being from the stuff of dreams and whimsy, those are real to me, at least as real as the ground beneath my feet and a lot more important, but located in a dimension of pure mind where our squishy, filthy meat-bodies can't ever touch them.

So to me, writing is a holy act, the opening of a channel to a higher dimension of pure mind and the ultimate affirmation of the self, for whatever you write was written only by you, and no one else could have written exactly what you did for exactly the same reasons at exactly the same time. But that's only the action, the process, the verb "to write" in its third person present tense; the resultant noun whose plural is "writings" is only a consequence, as inevitable as the wet spot in the bed after you and 0 or more sexual partners have finished opening a channel to a higher dimension of lifeforce, possibly in an attempt to ultimately affirm your DNA (after nine months of discomfort and one resounding crescendo of agony for whichever of the reproducers has the misfortune to be a girl). I'm far more interested in the verb-writing than the noun-writing, and that goes double when I wrote them both.

Therefore, while I have written a number of what may well eventually make good posts for this blog, and tucked them away in my Escherian labyrith of disorganized notes, I am very seldom in much of a mood to go looking for them, edit them into something resembling a product fit for the consumption of my very small target market, and toss them out on the series of tubes in hopes of applause and vindication for my chosen path in life. It'll happen eventually, but it requires me to be in a productive mood when I have time to do more than simply produce. Producing is the easy part; it's cleaning up the mess that sucks.

Fuck You, Darwin

I've always hated strong people. My mom is a strong woman, and I hate her. I love her too, don't get me wrong; those two are not mutually exclusive like a lot of you have been taught. I love her for a lot of things about her that are good, but her capacity to be an unstoppable juggernaut who knocks down anything and everything in her path, stops at nothing to achieve her goal, is something I've always hated. She never accepts that she's beaten, just like me, but she doesn't settle for sitting around and fuming and wishing things could be different; she changes things, even if the only change she can make is for the worse. That's called strength, and I hate it.

I choose to be weak. I choose to do nothing rather than the wrong thing, and I believe that choice makes me noble. If you don't agree with that, then fine, that's you're right - and also fuck you for feeling that way, that's my purely personal response. You have every right to feel that way, and I objectively accept that; subjectively, I hate you for it. I hate a lot of things; we need more hate in the world.

You always hear about what a bad thing hate is, but it's not hate that is a problem, it's acting on hate. If you just don't like people of Type X, nobody gives a shit; you have every right to hate them for any reason or no reason. It's only a problem if you treat them poorly because of it. Your thoughts are your own, and they're wonderful no matter what they are; your actions are the part that needs accountability, the part where you have to be reasonable to others. Hate them all you like as long as you don't do anything about it.

We need more people willing to not do anything. I never want to do anything, and I hate myself about it. Hating yourself is a good thing, it makes you a little better prepared to deal with other people hating you. It's good practice. Thicken your skin, grow a spine, accept the hate and make it a part of you. Love your hate, and love yourself for being hateful. That's the answer right there.

Oh, and while we're talking about self-contradicting statements, here's another one, from 1984: Freedom is Slavery. That one's bullshit of course, but right under it is another one: Ignorance is Strength. That one's true, and you can find plenty of proof. Look at a lynch mob, or a stampede of frenzied bulls. Strong, and ignorant. If they took time to figure out what they were doing, they'd stop doing it, but then they'd be weak. Stopping and thinking is weakness; after all, strength is the capacity to exert force, and you can exert a lot more force if you don't care what you're exerting it on. You can drive faster if you don't watch where you're going, and that reckless speed makes you very good at smashing things that get in your way, like the aforementioned frenzied bulls. We need more weakness in this world. It shouldn't be the strong that survive, because they usually don't deserve to.

The Virtue of Omniscience

I have long believed in many notions that seem absurd to the conventional thinker, but which I feel to be fundamentally right on a deep, instinctive level. Here is one example.

It is always preferable that everyone should know everything. For instance, if someone knows exactly how to break into my house without being caught, and I know exactly how to catch him anyway and stop him without breaking a sweat, it's preferable to neither of us knowing those things. If someone knows my bank account password, that is fine as long as the bank knows that the person using my bank account password is not really me, and I know who the person trying to break into my account is, and that they have failed and where exactly they are, even why they were doing it. Maybe they legitimately need the money more than I do, and I know how to call the bank and let them know to allow them to get the money, and I'll know if they spend it for any other purpose. If you know how to destroy the world, you also know why you shouldn't (unless, factually and unarguably, you should, in which case you also know exactly what will happen after you destroy the world and why it is preferable to continued existence). An insane person knows he's insane, and knows how to be otherwise at any given moment; he doesn't use his knowledge in an insane way because he knows it would be insane to do so. You would even know how not to know a thing if you'd rather not know it, and you'd know that you opted not to know it and why, and could work around that knowledge as well as employ it.

Knowledge is only ever bad if it's inequitably distributed; we would all be best off having an infinite amount of it. The desire to keep secrets is a destructive twitch leftover from our caveman days, an irrational impulse that drives us to violence against those who breach our privacy rather than tolerate their knowledge of things which we feel shameful about. Fear, shame, wrath; they are all primitive emotions which omniscience would temporarily increase, only to eclipse and annihilate them in short order, leaving a world in which everyone is glad to be exactly what they are, and incapable of acting inappropriately (by a factual, not subjective and humanly flawed, definition of 'appropriate'). The faster we expand knowledge toward the infinite, the sooner we will begin to resemble the gods, who (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they do indeed exist) are omniscient and beyond our animal urges. Knowledge is literally what makes us divine, and so we should increase it ad infinitum.

The Bleak Certainty of Despair

None of my usual highfalutin' ideals today, I'm afraid. If you have an aversion to emo whining I'd suggest you skip this entry, because I'm in a dour mood indeed and I feel compelled to vent.

For years I've struggled knowingly with manic depression, after having not known that was what it was before. I've gotten past the point where it could control me as completely as it used to, but I still have entire weeks when nothing seems to go right and I'm just useless for accomplishing anything and can barely stand the thought of living to see another day. I know these moods pass and have banished the thought of doing anything irreversably drastic as a result of them, being sensible enough to realize that I have no right to deny my future self opporunities on the basis of my current moods. So I've taken refuge in a number of coping strategies, of which one of the most successful has been self-aggrandizement. I would imagine that what few virtues I do possess (writing talent, for example) might eventually earn the approval of some agency that was in the position to grant me ultimate power to make the world right according to my preferences, or at least to escape the world into a neverending fantasy that would fulfill my wildest dreams.

Today I confronted yet another of these bleak moods, promoted by a series of petty annoyances (and one not so petty one which puts my future, as in my having one at all, in serious question). And when I reached for my usual power trip, I found that the idea didn't satisfy me this time, because I realized that ultimately, my problem is an inability to stand the possibility of things going wrong in the future. Any current happiness is fleeting to me; no matter how much it satisfies me, the best it can hope to accomplish is to temporarily distract me from the knowledge that things could go horribly wrong tomorrow, condemning me in an instant to unbearable agony, degradation, terror, or any number of other fates I would give anything to avoid. But I saw today that there was nothing I could give, even if an entity of ultimate power were to offer me some bargain...for what that being could grant, it could also take away, for any reason or no reason, and I would have nothing but its word to suggest otherwise. Not being a person given to trust or faith, I couldn't believe that word, and so I would never feel secure, not even after being blessed by a benevolent deity with the fulfillment of my every whim. (That's not to say it might not be fun, but it would have to continue being fun forever or it would still fall under "temporary diversion"; I'd still never be content.)

So I see now that the adaptive nature which I've always believed was humanity's greatest strength, and also suspected was its greatest impulse, indeed has me by the balls even more thoroughly than I had suspected. There is no gift I can be given which would entirely and eternally free me from the fear of pain, disgust, and fear itself. Today I am legitimately a being without hope, and I recognize that I will be overcome with fear for the rest of my days, that short of the complete obliteration of my personality (which I would not submit to even if I trusted that the method employed was capable of doing the job right, and I certainly have no such faith in modern medical methods), nothing can ever set me fully at ease. Right now, the only thing I have to live for is a vague sense of gratitude toward my parents for having put up with me when I was terminally unemployed and seemed incapable of ever amounting to anything. I've made something of myself, but it's a something I don't much like, and I legitimately wish I would simply cease to exist forever (not simply dying, mind, for that makes no guarantees regarding any afterlife), because I see no other way I can be guaranteed never to suffer the worst fates I can imagine, and those fates are so frightening to me that no reward would be great enough for me to be able to accept the risk.

That's where I am today - nowhere, and going nowhere. To be very explicit, this isn't a "cry for help" and suicide is not on the table as an option; I simply have the bleak realization that life brings me no satisfaction, and probably never will again. I will eventually escape this mood, and you'll hear me ranting about how perfect the world could be if we all did X, Y and Z, and I'll believe it wholeheartedly and disavow this dour mood as just a depressive episode, over quickly and better forgotten. I'm not going to try and say otherwise; I just know as of now that this darkness will always return to snuff out all my joys, and that I can think of no way to guarantee it won't.

EDIT - Just to put things in perspective here, it's an hour later and I feel somewhat better. This in no way means I don't still believe as I did above, only that I've been distracted from that belief and am no longer fixated upon it. Like I said, I've learned that these moods come and go, so I need to take them with a grain of salt.