“You woke up today and looked at yourself in the mirror.
Your face, your facial expression, your eyes, your gaze, are different. No, it’s not the wrinkles that are starting to appear. No, it’s not your tired appearance. No, it’s not the years that insist on passing, and that line up before your eyes to tell you: time is passing. No, there’s something else, something that was never there before or, if it was, it was always hidden or just budding. You can’t smile like you used to anymore. Something has stolen the innocence from your smile. It won’t be the same again. Your eyes seem to eternally gaze into space, you can’t look at yourself. Without saying a word, you ask yourself: What now? Where to go? Which direction to turn? Who to talk to? What to read? The questions line up and, without answering any of them, you carry on.
Another day.
The train, the people on the train, the job, the people at work, the clock is set to work. Your day was already planned long before it began. On the street, at work, in the building where you live, the same people, the same words, the same phrases. The same songs and the same jokes.
How did all of this become so patently uninteresting all of a sudden?
You ponder.
Much of your life could be written down in a manual, and a robot be programmed to live it: it would be the same. In many ways, you live a mechanical life. You don’t need to imagine what it would be like to have an intelligent robot by your side, because many a time you FEEL like a robot. A robot among dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions, 7 billion other robots.
You have forgotten your enchantment with life somewhere, and sometimes you simply can’t find it.
You remember your family. Your father drinks. Your mother loves all her children, but has nothing to say to them: she is provincial and illiterate. Your brothers are “decent people”, married, single, with children or without. You have never really belonged among those people, not spiritually, at any time in your life.
The robot has a family of robots. The individual does not have a family of individuals, because the individual is a monstrosity. An aberration. An absolute impredictability. You would be perfectly fine in the company of your family, if, one day, you had not stopped to think and understood that you had no place there, among those people. So, you remain alone - but the obviousness of much of your behavior makes it clear that you have only partially freed yourself.
The gears keep turning.
There is a flaw in your inner mechanism that allows you, at times, to feel ‘out of place’ in the crowd of identical beings. However, this flaw is not powerful enough to make you break away from humanity once and for all. So, for all intents and purposes, you remain just another robot. They all look at you as a robot, and you give them what they expect of you.
‘This kind of dissatisfaction is usually resolved with Prozac, the Beatles, Facebook, pornography or Hollywood, bro!’
But even having such a big supply of solutions, you still ponder.
One day, you woke up and started thinking about the people around you.
Not your family, but other people.
From an early age, you hear people referred to with a label that defines them, delimits them and determines their every action. There are, you have always heard, capitalists and communists, rightists and leftists, Christians and atheists, Muslims and Jews, Zionists and Nazis, there are vegetarians and human flesh eaters (cannibals), there are backward peoples and advanced peoples, there are North Americans and Afghans.
These labels, these words that have always been associated with John, Peter or Joseph, have never “worked” for you. It’s not that they were never understood by your mind. They simply never had enough substance for you, the lonesome individual, to cling to one of them.
You could define yourself as a capitalist.
But money has never meant anything to you. You have never made more effort for money than was strictly necessary. You have never been excited about “status”, about owning anything. You never wanted to show anyone that you had this or that. So, no, you could never call yourself a “capitalist.”
You could call yourself a socialist.
But other people always seemed like a nuisance to you. Noisy, nosy, even repulsive people surround you wherever you go. You never thought it was worth “sharing” anything with anyone, because you never felt like a member of any group. Distributing money among everyone? Well, if you’re interested in money, go get it. You would never do anything to stop anyone with such a mindset. But feeling proud of eating at the same table, reading the same books, having the same things as many other people? That’s what has always happened. But you never saw any reason to be happy about it. No, you could never be a socialist, communist or anything like that either.
You could call yourself a Christian.
But the Christian religion was created, thought of, established and petrified in a time long before your existence, it was designed for a reality to which you do not belong. It was planned for a type of man who no longer exists, capable of detaching himself, of “abandoning the world”, of giving up things, possessions and pleasures. You could never call yourself “Christian” because you never understood the need that leads people to kneel before a cross, or a priest, and pray, since the God they are speaking to did not address them [in the Scriptures], but rather spoke to a distant world, thousands of years away, in time and space. You could never follow a religion and a God that have been “dead” for centuries, having no more plausibility today than the nonsense posted daily on Facebook. And, no, you could never be among other people, pretending to believe in something you do not believe in, crying and begging for mercy from a Being as pale as death. No, you would never call yourself a Christian.
So, obviously, you could be an atheist.
You know the word atheist. “Atheist” is a label that could be applied to any freethinker. Montaigne, Bacon, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Samuel Beckett: you would be in good company among the “atheists.” But no. You see the universe as a parade of absurdities. Existence seems too arbitrary to you to give it a precise definition, and to say that this or that exists or does not exist. You are fully aware that gods “may exist” - you just have no idea what they are like. What you do know is that whatever the gods are, you are beyond their help. They could never fill the enormous void of existence, they would only make it more picturesque. And yet you would never call yourself an “atheist.” And not because you believe in God, but because you don’t care about affirming or denying Him: whether God exists or not, life remains the same problem, and you still have to live it for yourself, you still have to fight for it against all odds. So, no, you wouldn’t be an atheist either.
But still, you can be a freethinker, a Nazi, a vegan or a Chicago Bulls fan…
Yes, in fact you can label yourself whatever you want. No label means anything to you. No freethinker is, in fact, free if he attaches a label to himself. Everyone who hides behind a label thinks what thousands of other people think, their “independence” is merely illusory. A Nazi gets too excited about hating a small number of people and, with that, fills the vacuum he carries within himself. Why do you want to be a Nazi? To stand, like an idiot, in a line of soldiers “saluting” a leader who cares little about you? To wear a swastika and shout, like an idiot, “America for Americans”? But what do you care about Americans? After all, why label yourself as anything if you don’t even have the patience to follow the rituals that are invariably associated with any idea, with any belief?
You don’t “belong” to any group.
How can living in society be desirable when it is so obvious that society is just a farce?
Yes, it is perfectly possible to live when you are “integrated.” When the daily farce is so ingrained in your being that you lie without even realizing it. In this case, lying even does you good: you enjoy thinking that your boss admires you, without knowing that, deep down, you despise him. You enjoy hearing yourself talk about honor, dignity, love, fraternity, patriotism, when, deep down, you know that these words mean nothing. You are so used to living in a reality in which EVERYONE lies all the time that you barely notice. In this situation, you are nothing more than an actor. Acting out a tiresome and boring play, thousands of years old, and that some still dream of continuing to act out for all eternity!
No.
You know that you are “you” when you are offstage, when you are backstage, when you are isolated from everything and everyone. You know you are “you” when you finally take off the mask, look in the mirror, and realize that your performance is no longer to your liking. It will always be the same. You will spend thirty, forty, fifty more years, acting out the same farce. Telling the same lies. No, there is no way you can smile at the joke you have been helping to tell for forty-three years. This make-believe life of everyone else has nothing to offer you. It is a ready-made joke, worn out. It has lost its charm.
When you reflect on life, you understand what the real problem is. The only one.
This feeling that our social life is a farce is not a product of human imagination. It was not created by literature or philosophy. Not even by religion. The farce was established by the very structure of life. We do not lie because we like to lie (although we may occasionally like to), we lie because lying is written in our genes. We lie because by lying we can guarantee a bigger piece of the pie, a better house, a circle of friends that immunizes us against an incredibly hostile environment. We lie out of sheer egoism.
But we need also think about one essential, I dare say, religious, characteristic of life: life is a miracle. The circumstances that led to life being generated on Earth are so improbable that it is unlikely that there is another planet in the whole universe that has produced the same phenomenon. This means that the universe is, in itself, hostile to life. In order for it to be generated, and for it to continue to exist, life has to fight against all adversities. In short, it does not matter who we are, what we think, what we want. We are parts of a mechanism. We are cogs, gears, devices, robots. Nothing here, in this world, exists “for us”, but for our genes. We are useful “for something” as long as we serve to preserve these genes and, who knows, pass them on to another generation. Once we have accomplished this “task”, it does not matter whether we continue to be alive or not, whether we feel good or not, whether we are Christian, Muslim or Buddhist. That’s we in the purest, simplest, animal sense of ‘we’.
That is why labels, “beliefs” and ideas are worth so little. The different religions and doctrines were chains of ideas that emerged at different times and in different places, with the same purpose and having the same objective: to preserve the genes of the human species. Thus, it doesn’t matter if you are Christian, Jewish, Hindu, atheist, pantheist, or Nazi: you continue to believe that you must form a family, that you must “love your neighbor,” and that you must obey the laws of your country. Internally, however, what intelligence shows us is that no man is, in fact, a slave to a religion, and that is why what I said above about Christianity being a “dead” religion: man is a slave to an instinct for survival and reproduction, which is translated in a pleasant and fanciful way into the different religions, always with the same end. The Christianity that is practiced today has little or nothing to do with the Christianity of Paul, Peter, or Thomas Aquinas. But what it has in common with the original Christian idea is that it never intended to lead anyone to a more pious life in order to reach paradise. From the moment it was established as a religion, Christianity had the same purpose, duly subsidized by the most diverse States throughout the centuries.
It is easy to understand why we are always pretending to be what we are not. Why we are always uttering words that mean nothing, as if we believed in them, as if we did not perceive their emptiness: love, homeland, freedom, hope, future. There is no human concept that cannot be explained in purely biological terms. There is no human idea that does not always refer to the same “original sin”. There is no human idea or concept that is not a product of our brains. This includes all beliefs, all credos, all philosophies.
No matter how much time passes, how many generations of men live, we will always have, wherever we are, the greatest interest in defending the “honor” of a young and beautiful 18-year-old girl. And we will always be fully aware of the reason for doing so.
Here we are, once again, back to the starting point.
You in front of the mirror.
Your sudden discomfort.
You understand what this inner desire is that, sometimes, in the most varied situations, reveals itself to you. But you do not want to “kill yourself”. It is not an appeal that you want to make to the “world”, you do not want “help”. And, despite the evidence to the contrary, you do not, in fact, hate other people. You distance yourself from them, you need to distance yourself, to be able to escape the noise they make, to reflect, and to be able to understand both your situation and theirs. Like a Buddhist monk who distances himself from the world in order to meditate [but without being able to commit to any belief, for the reasons already mentioned], you understand that there is nothing to criticize in other people. So you cannot kill yourself to “punish” them or to show them your despair.
There is nothing wrong with suicide. Nor should it be glorified. But it is not, and never has been, for you. You have another enemy.
Like a Buddhist, you aspire to live a detached life.
Again, without wanting to make any commitment to Buddhism, or rather, to the word Buddhism. After all, a Buddhist is still a man like any other, another number, another genetically determined being. However, of all of them religious people, the Buddhist seems to be the one who understands the most the real gist of human existence.
The perennial dissatisfaction, the eternal desire to “be somewhere else” - who doesn’t know this?, the awareness that everything we say and do is a great farce, all this results in an enormous, an unbeatable desire to disappear. Aware that there is no other life beyond this one, and that this life is so little, isn’t it quite understandable that all we may have left to desire is sheer emptiness?
Each day brings only more reasons for dissatisfaction. Like an endless cycle, you free yourself from one malaise only to find yourself dominated by another shortly after. Your worry, your restlessness, mean nothing. It is useless to wait for God’s mercy, it is useless to wait for the mercy of men. In this spiritual desert, you walk in a cemetery of unlived memories. You are a zombie, but you have never really been alive. Your soul yearns to exist, but it has no body to inhabit, nor a world in which to develop.
Life is too short to be worth considering as something worth conquering. You either have it or you don’t.
But what can you do?
Adopt a religion?
Found a religion?
How many have not done so?
That would not be what you could do, because if you have no patience to “follow” anyone’s faith [and “follow” here is used in the broadest possible sense], what can you say about having a bunch of idiots idolizing every thing you do and repeating ad nauseam every word you utter?
An ordinary man follows a religion only as long as it more or less suits his instincts and needs.
A wise man, a prophet, a visionary, can found a religion with the best of intentions. He may even want to “improve” or “save” humanity. But, in fact, his religion only survives the test of time if it adapts to the different men of different times.
What need do you have to remind yourself of this?
So many people have said this before: Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud…
What is the purpose of founding a religion, founding a “school” of followers? Imagine yourself, a being as fragile and fallible as you, being idolized for announcing to men that they must “love their neighbor” in order to gain eternal life? Isn’t this what happened to Jesus Christ, a man of flesh and blood like you? Wouldn’t it be more honest to announce to them that they must “love their neighbor” so that their “neighbor” can tolerate their existence? So that both them and their neighbours can co-exist in this here world, the only one they will ever know? We see, everywhere, various religions that serve only as instruments in the hands of those in power, preaching beautiful things on paper but impractical in reality.
Where is the religion of the real man?
Where is the religion that tells man: "You are a fragile being who exists temporarily, and all you can do in life is necessarily limited, so nobody can expect all that much from you”?
Where is the religion of the honest man?
Where is the religion that tells man: “No one loves his neighbor. In fact, people barely tolerate their neighbors. Most of the time, our “neighbor” is just a nuisance that we would endeavor to get rid of at the slightest opportunity. When your “neighbor” comes to bother you, you do not want to ‘forgive’, but simply to kill him. For you feel if you do not do this, he will be bothering you for the rest of your life.”
If Jesus died on the cross for humanity, he died in vain.
In the same way, all the work that Moses did to free the Jews from the Egyptian yoke was for nothing. He would have saved a lot of time and effort if he had convinced himself that he was only freeing his people from one slavery to deliver them to an even worse one.
You have to forget about the possibility of finding salvation in a cult created by others and for others, and even more, forget about the idea of doing something for them.
No one can “save” you from yourself. Nor can you “save” anyone else. The lesson you have learned, among all the lessons you have tried to assimilate, is that, whatever “life” may be, it is something to be experienced, lived and overcome alone. There is no salvation in God, there is no salvation in society, there is no salvation in art or literature, there is no salvation in the love of a woman. Your only real challenge is to break all the bonds that unite you “to others”, since any connection, any relationship, serves only to insert you back into that farce that generated all your discontent in the first place.
You have to die to yourself and to the “world.” But you have to stay “here.”
The happiest men seem to be the most detached.
Men who have no beliefs, who have no homeland, who have no family or even a woman to sleep with. Not that they don’t still have their basic biological needs. But they overcome them by the simple fact of not depending on such things. The fact of living in isolation already shows a concern with eliminating the most basic vital instincts. In this sense, the existence of monks and celibates within the Christian religion is an interesting phenomenon.
But one has to be very careful not to transform detachment into a new religion. This is the mistake of “institutionalized” Buddhism. When you start to worship something, anything, that thing becomes a “thing in itself,” an immaterial, unattainable object, hovering above you. What you need is to embrace life itself, as it is, to live fully your own life, without huge expectations or unreal beliefs.
And what is this life?
Life is the true reality of your existence.
Life is the real goal, the authentic essence of reality.
The meaning of our malaise, the desire to disappear into the void [nihilism] is exactly the perception that we can’t achieve this life, that we can’t live it, thanks to all the things here in this world that turn us into automatons.
The universe, in its almost entirety, is dead. Life is a miracle that only occurred through a spectacular accident. At an infinitesimal point in the universe. Throughout the rest of the universe, there is only death. Everything is dead. When man “embraces” life, and wants to exhaust it at any cost, he wants to continue defying a reality that impels him to self-destruct, and to destroy everything else. Powerless to destroy more than himself, man limits himself to dreaming of a reality in which there are no obstacles to life. A reality in which there is no struggle, no sweat, no conflict, paradise: the eternal cemetery.
Life is man’s metaphysical goal, since death seems to be his goal as a living social being. Interestingly, while religions seek to perpetuate life at all costs (insisting, for example, on the need for man to perpetuate himself), they actually offer man, as a prize, a paradise in which all of life’s conflicts disappear. In other words, a place where life itself loses its meaning, since one seeks paradise precisely while facing life’s challenges.
Religions offer man eternal life. Metaphysically, this eternal life is no different from eternal death. Religions therefore offer you only death. The cult of death. The eternal postponement. The indulgence of submission, of acceptance, of cowardice.
That is why Buddhism is honest in defending the idea of Nirvana. Instead of promising man a paradise in which he will essentially enjoy the pleasures that he cannot enjoy in this life, Buddhism offers him the stillness of Nothingness. A stillness infinitely more interesting than eternal life, because it puts man on an equal footing with the rest of the universe- death, finally, permeating and being all that there is.
‘Why aspire to live eternally a mechanical and nihilistic life, which has no other purpose than to maintain its appearance of reality eternally? Isn’t it more beautiful to join the rest of the universe in the silence of the void? Why continue to nurture vain passions forever?’- so the religious mind goes. Now- why don’t we realize that if we can’t really enjoy anything “in this life” we will never enjoy anything period?
Look in the mirror again.
When you overcome these feelings born out of your inner tendency to negativity, born out of depression, out of despair, you are really capable of achieving that kind of lucidity no religion, no “philosophy” could ever offer you.
You’re just a man.
You have nothing grand or absolute to offer others. You crave nothing grand or absolute from them. You can’t see yourself as a leader of man, ie, as a shepherd with his sheep. You just want to live, you want to exhaust life, and that’s why all that makes life become something so mechanical, so insipid, so predictable, bothers you so. You don’t want to be discontent, you don’t want to be an eternal rebel without a cause. You don’t want a ‘cause’ either, you don’t want to belong, because you have penetrated, if only for a second, in the very essence of life, and you have see what it actually is, and you want it as it is, not as whatever comforting or degrading idea of life your brain might have concoted in its feverish dreams.
Nope, life is not bad or degrading, it’s not a nightmare and surely not something to be thrown away like a worn out set of clothes. Life is everything you really feel worth attaching yourself to. And what you see everywhere, and also inside yourself in these moments of despair, is the cult of death, the apology of death, the begging of every fiber of one’s body for death. All religions, even the most rational of them, share this same common belief in the supremacy of death. To them, death is the biggest moment, the one essential moment in a man’s life- the moment his entire life will be justified. Whether it is in entering Heaven or in entering Nirvana. But life doesn’t require death to be justified, death is the impossibility of life, it’s the perfect denial of life. They’re both forever sworn enemies. When your death is a requirement for you to achieve anything, then automatically your life doesn’t mean anything. But your life, which is a small repetition of this eternal [for us] process of life, is not something meaningless to you, because if it was, you would be entirely satisfied as part of the crowd, as another robot, another number. Your dissatisfaction betrays you, gives you away.
You’re just a man.
You would really love to offer a solution to all the problems you recognize in the world, but you can’t. You would really like to stand proudly in face of every difficulty that makes life almost impossible to so many, but you can’t. You would really love to speak in place of others, but you can’t. You would really love to have a guidebook, a ‘life and how to live it’ manual to share with others, but you can’t. You live, you exist individually. That’s the perception that’s the source of your perennial sense of alienation from others. You exist individually. It’s not you, as part of a group, against all odds, it’s you alone against all odds, against this world that wants to engulf you and deny your existence. You have to either affirm yourself against everything else or to succumb as an individual. Because others, “they”, find satisfaction in belonging, their inner urge to rebellion- which is nothing more than their perception of being individuals- is sublimated in favor of comforting conformity. But you want no comfort. You want no subterfuge. You want not to be part of a farce.
You’re just a man.
Your dissatisfaction is just as limited in time as your power. That’s something that you forget everytime you feel inclined to despair. Dissatisfaction, like everything else, like you yourself, passes. Then, when you indulge yourself thinking- ‘oh, this suffocatingly predictable life I lead’- try and think a little more. You know the meaning of freedom. It’s inside of you. You know the essence of your life- it’s you yourself, as a being conscious of himself, conscious of being a miraculous spark of life in a universe of death, knowing how to overcome everything, life included. Yes, knowing life means knowing you can finish it anytime you want. If you were just an ant, you would never come to such a conclusion [or to any conclusion, btw], life would just go on mechanically. Nope, you have found in yourself, and couldn’t find anywhere else, the solution to all fits of despair.
You’re just a man.
Calm yourself. Get a grip. Wake up. There’s a fight to be fought, there’s a battle to be won, there’s a job to be done. All your thoughts on giving up, on accepting a deterministic fate, come from the same source as your thoughts of acceptance, of tolerance with yourself and your limitations- your mind. You’re a limited, fragile and transitory human being, who, in comparison with the crowds out there, can accomplish so little, but, in relation to your own shortcomings, to your own acts of self-sabotage, can accomplish any and every thing you really want in life. The secret to this freeing perception of things is to see things clearly, with eyes wide open and wide dry. Freedom of the mind is to have a mind that can differentiate between the power of external things and our fear of external things. And fear is the only thing that really paralyses you, the only thing that’s an obstacle to your going on. You fear others because they are many, you fear the future because it will bring disease and death, you fear God because He’s omnipotent and ruthless, and you fear life because you have not really learned to experience it fully and uncompromisingly.
Alongside fear, you have to deal with your feeling of not being enough.
Make no mistake. What really afflicts you, your Achilles heel, what disappoints and paralyzes you, is the perception of your IMPOTENCE. It is the impossibility of using your strength in this or that way, of imposing yourself on circumstances, of dominating and being master of the events in your life, that frustrates you, that is the very source of all your discouragement. When the person you love turns against you, revealing the fragility of a feeling that was intended to be unforgettable, when a police officer forces you to keep quiet, to do this or that against your will, when the job you wanted cannot be yours, when the environment in which you live is unbreathable, and when life, life itself, is configured in a way that suffocates your smallest intentions, transforming every tiny action of yours into martyrdom, what speaks within you, what is laid bare, is your feeling of IMPOTENCE. Not being able to change things, not being able to rise up against them in a decisive way, having to let yourself be carried along, dragged along, through the hours and days always with your will mutilated, your desire silenced, your true disposition muted - this is the feeling of IMPOTENCE. And the more you wallow in contemplation of your insurmountable limitations, the more you tend to sink into the worst kind of agony, despair. Despair- this is the real evil, the real, the only real problem. It is the perception of weakness that leads us to it - being tied up in the face of destiny, seeing it lead us to a state of affairs that never corresponds to what we truly want. And how do you deal with the feeling of impotence, and how do you avoid sinking into despair? You are one, you are dust, you are a worm, and you have a world, an entire universe against you. Now that you have realized that the real problem is being powerless, not just feeling it, because not having the strength to fight against circumstances is something real and material, just as real and material is your flesh, which feels pain, your blood, which boils, your heart, which agonizes in the face of the immutability of what seems like an inexorable destiny. However, you have the advantage of awareness. You know the root of your anguish (powerlessness) and its consequence (despair), you can react, you can fight, even if it seems useless, even if it seems better to simply let yourself go, while you breathe, you live, while you live, you fight, while you fight, little by little your power increases, until you have sufficient control over what matters most- the sanity of your mind. Behold, life is configured as a struggle for power, and the more powerless you feel, the more it seems like an unbearable and useless tragedy. And the more power you have, the stronger you are, the less you are affected by vicissitudes, the more life appears as something precious, because everything that turns it into a burden is exactly what your strength allows you to conquer.
So, yes, you’re just a man, a very limited man, but you’re also the one man that matters in the whole world, the whole universe. The entirely self-aware individual. This is not something you should take for granted.
So look in the mirror again, and you’ll see the expression has slightly changed. It’s not one of dismay or defeat anymore, as you can’t be defeated anymore now that you have penetrated the heart of things- your mind, the astounding potential of it to help you realize life, make life be something more than an ideal always striven for or a burden on your shoulders. You want no more burdens on your shoulders, you’re no Atlas, you’re just a man, pretty content in being so and pretty satisfied in having just one single life to live, as fully as your limited possibilities allow you to."