[CN: Existentialism; emo] Ok, this is probably the most personal (and rambling) post I’ve written so if you don’t want to read the musings of a 30 year old that could well sound like the emo diary of a 15 year old, you know what to do…
I’m a pretty curious person. I’m interested in almost anything and I have been doing a lot of learning over say the last 12 years (from personal experience, books, articles, travel). I have a pretty good memory, so a lot of it’s stayed with me. And so, the more I’ve learned about the world, the more horrified I’ve become. It’s like a fractal of suffering — no matter what level you magnify things to, there’s always people doing unspeakable things to others.
I’ll give just one example. In Colombia, there are LOTS of people living on the street. The response of many business owners has been “social cleansing”. This means hiring death squads to murder people literally called disposables, from petty thieves to street kids. The street kids have retreated to sleep in the sewers for safety, literally stewing in the shit of rich people. This doesn’t stop the squads (where mercenaries and off-duty cops walk arm-in-arm) from performing expeditions into the sewers to burn the street kids alive, rape them and shoot them on sight.
There are no words for the kind of brutality described above. It’s so unspeakable that it’s hard to comprehend the words — but it’s just one example of such things that you might not have known about. The world contains thousands of similar examples. Millions. Tens of millions.
The more I’ve learned, the harder it is to justify any part of normal life. How can I be complicit in all of this? You can’t even eat a meal or wear clothes or earn money without being involved in these chains of horror. It also gets more and more obvious how much every part of my existence is totally undeserved, a lottery. This was powerfully expressed by a Holocaust survivor in a documentary I saw. When he went back to the camps many decades later, he said he specifically didn’t wonder “why did they die?” but “why did I survive?”.
None of this is novel by any means. But it’s often accompanied by sentiments like: it’s important to take a step back every now and then, to engage in self-care in order to recharge your batteries. In that context, the idea that maybe my own existence is a net negative can easily get interpreted as suicidal thoughts instead of acknowledging a crappy situation.
Anyway, with these responses seeming really inadequate, I had the following analogy come to mind.
You live in a giant apartment block. Life in most apartments (including yours) is fine. But every night, The Gentlemen enter the apartment block. These are villains from the episode Hush of Buffy. They enter a random apartment, supernaturally paralyse a person and slice them to death with their scalpels. And unlike Hush, the person will scream through the torture. So life for most people in the apartment block is good but every night there are the screams of someone being tortured to death. And maybe you start thinking that you can’t be happy with life in the apartment block. That even if the average life is ok, how is it possible to be happy at all knowing that you will hear someone screaming the scream tonight (not you)?
These would then be responses to such thoughts by other people in the apartment block:
- This is not normal. You need professional help. Essentially this is saying that it’s normal to ignore the screams and you should get a professional to help you stop caring so much about the screams because there is something wrong with YOU.
- You need to stop learning about the bad things to recharge. This means not finding out about the screams each night. But even if you wanted, how could you? Someone will be screaming every fucking night.
- You’re not going to make any positive difference if you run yourself down. This is saying that to help some people protect themselves against the Gentlemen, you need to get better earplugs for the screams at night.
- You can’t stop the Gentlemen from dismembering people. Therefore, learn to be happy over the screams at night.
- You’re not focussing on all the good that happens in the apartment block. I know there is a lot of good, but there’s still someone screaming each night.
- But things are getting better! There are far fewer people being murdered by the Gentlemen compared to the 1960s. Woo-hoo!
How would you like living in the house of screams?
I’ll end with a quote I thought was pretty good:
I don’t think it’s right to say the world is “broken” because that would mean it used to be better. The truth is, everything that’s bad now has just been worse in the past. Which only reinforces the point that being happy isn’t a moral failing – because if it were wrong to be happy now, it would be wrong to have been happy ever. [Source]
I agree with everything except the last part. I’m not so sure anymore whether it’s right or wrong to have been happy ever.
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