You know, maybe I'm simply not as chronically unhappy and crushingly depressed like I used to be, that's a good thing. That unhappiness has scaled back, and has degenerated from 'unhappy' to simply 'confused'.
Like... and I've asked this question before... Like, how do you even meet people? Like, make friends or meet members of the opposite sex? I'm sure the question is reductive to the point of stupidity, but it's one that has been a sticking point for my entire life now. I can blame the increasingly large emphasis on technology, in how people's social lives are basically subcontracted to Facebook at this point, or I can blame the effect of affluency in modern western culture reducing the necessity for strong community and therefore closeness between people that is based in a sense of hard pragmatism, but goddamn it really seems like the majority of people just have no problem with this shit.
It doesn't help that actual, real examples of this behavior is either so astonishingly rare that I never get to see it in the wild (and thus mimic it crudely like the subpar learning AI that I am apparently), or it's happening all the time but in a stealthy form that I'm apparently completely blind and deaf to.
"Josh, just focus on your interests and let things happen naturally. IS IT REALLY SO HARD?" Yes it is, hypothetical interjector. I can't help but get the sense that everyone is simply wrapped up in the minutiae of their own lives, that everyone's social lives and emotional load are already at their breaking point, that my obtrusive desire for some connection is an unwanted burden. With this in mind, I can't help but get the feeling that everyone is neatly insulated away from me, existing behind a thin film, safe from my contamination.
When I was riding my bike the other day, I saw such a pleasant scene: a couple with a dancing instructor being taught how to do the four-step in preparation for their marriage ceremony. I stopped bicycling and even asked to watch, it was such a rare and lovely scene I simply had to study it closely. I felt like some avid naturalist sneaking up on some creatures in the middle of their mating dance; "Ah, and here we can find the Human Animal in their natural habitat. Their mating ceremony is both complex and informal, highly traditional and ritualized but also ruled and predicated solely by their primitive instincts. Studying them from afar, you'd never know how any of them manage it at all, but in practice they seem to do just fine."
But that seems to be the last thorn in my paw, just the feeling that we're all disgusting animals, that all our society building and inventions and whatnot are all just pretension, a thin disguise over our collective triviality and reptilian cave brains, which is our actual natural state. I mentioned in a sad post a while ago that I wanted to have more dignity than an animal's dignity, and that phrase has been echoing nonstop in my head ever since, because it's true, and it's also false. True because a good-faith effort has been made to rise and become greater than stupid creatures, and false because we, or atleast *I*, have failed spectacularly.
What does that actually mean in practice though? Well, even though I'm whining about my loneliness like a little bitch, out in the field I see people and I never feel any inclination or desire to actually talk to them or get closer to them. In everyone I can plainly see the mundanity of everyday people, that my mental image of getting closer to people perhaps vastly overhypes what people actually are: trivial beasts, with rarely any special qualities to them. And seeing that, I can't help but be repulsed from the very creatures who are my peers, who share their own trivialness with my own trivialness, who in fact have everything in common with me and upon whom their is a mutual and meaningful codependence for both survival and the meeting of those animal needs which we are unfairly saddled with. It is an affliction in which I am both disgusted with the world, and disgusted with myself for being disgusted with the world. It is a self-destructive compulsion, but I suppose the allure and intoxication of my own undeserved egotism and arrogance is simply irresistible to me...
I wonder where my breaking point is, or if I'll simply be taking this neurosis to my grave.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9777839 times)