Morsels for the Depressed, Depraved, Pessimistic, and Otherwise Declining

by Saul van der Walt

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  Just like hellfire, karma is a feeble person’s way of ringing order.

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  Life as an in-joke between you and yourself.

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  When you’ve been listening to someone now for 27 minutes, and you can’t tell if they’ve actually said anything.

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  The best part about being in flow is not paying attention to your own otherwise useless existence.

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  How horrible to have a bout of clarity in the midst of one’s madness.

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  The brain, a fatty ~1.3 liter blob that has "you" as an infinitely irrational feature secondary to its baser functions.

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  As a medicine, other people are good for distancing you from yourself, your strife, and the relentless emptiness of life. But, it’s no cure. The scripts of lives and systems only run under scarcity, no one budgeted for a time after, well, within more or less corporeal bounds anyway.

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  You're forced to expend to expand and expand to expend; with every transaction or iteration costing a little more each time, until you're either subsumed, consumed, out of room, broke, or broken.

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  How must a life be lived? Among friends, food, and festivities? In a fervorous race against time, to construct something larger than life? Against all that is human, in a haze of indifference? With the total negation of this world, in excitement for what one must only imagine comes next? Should you preserve yourself somehow? Would it matter?

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  If your body is a prison, at least keep a library in your cell.

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  You carry your whole life with you, one stupid move and it’s over.

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  With the syncretic and newage stuff, when it falls into either: karma; it’s your fault, you chose your parents before you were born; you need to respect nature, x, y, and z; trust the guides, trust the angels; it’s part of your soul contract; honor thy tribe; the quality of your incarnation speaks to lessons’ you’ve yet to learn; or .

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  Nonsense moves from being an issue to turning into a problem the moment one is prohibited from politely refusing it.

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  Want something to do? Fester on ambivalence, entire careers have been made that way.

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  It’s a habit, but I should really be against saying thank you, because it’s too casual. On one end it’s like people who are paid to do a job are actually providing a courtesy they really didn’t need to do for you, no that’s nonsense, I don’t want to feel guilty or indebted for something prepaid. On the other end, saying thank you in such a loose way undermines the value of what we mean to each other. I want you to understand that what I do for you, I either do for my own sake or pleasure, or because I genuinely like you, saying thank you takes that away, and not saying thank you makes people look rude or look like they’re saying things which they are not. I think it would be better just to assume appreciation as the norm, whether it is there or not, and say nothing more of it unless it truly means something, because then nobody is obligated or socially indebted to anyone, and the absence of a thank you does not have to be interpreted as not being appreciated, which also ties horribly into self-worth issues and passive aggression.

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  For all its pretenses, at least poetry knows what it is.

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  You don’t lose touch with “reality” so much as you instead grow into it in a maladaptive manner, everyone does this one way or another.

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  When you, blissfully unaware, or perhaps just without a care, use the same point you were criticizing a moment ago in your next argument.

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  Life’s about moving dirt, usually from the soil and then either back into the soil, but also sometimes into the sea, but really, mostly into the air these days.

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  That a misanthrope should like to enjoy the company and comfort of fellow misanthropes.

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  An ethical yet hardcore misanthropic move: taking your name off the organ donor list.

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  “The Bigger Picture” is the uncensorable source of all futility, and the inevitable washer-awayer of every cheap veneer of personal meaning.

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  One day, after mommy and your daddy, your uncles and aunties, and granny and gramps, and your friends, and you have all gone away, and after the sun eats the world, and all the stars go out, then still, long long after that, there will be many black-holes, just like in that movie we saw, holding on forever and forever, all until there is nothing and nothing and nothing, and then, maybe, just maybe maybe, there will be something strange and exciting that no one will ever get to see, something that’s not even nothing. But don’t you worry about that love, just go to sleep, we’ll get some ice-cream tomorrow.

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  If you had to choose between your children and your people, which do you choose?

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  Assuming the thaumaturgy of “free will” is not employed, then for better or worse it seems that, if freedom is to be determined in accordance with one’s learned desires and proclivities, then the fight for freedom is a fight for the domination of a particular normative or hegemonic mode of determination.

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  What’s worse, learned helplessness or learned success?

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  It is often an unspoken cancerous virtue, that: To honor others’ suffering, which is necessarily greater, you must accede your own as definitively less; if you should fail to do this, then you are surely insensitive and selfish.

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  This world full of lumps, if it was conceived, it is clearly ill-conceived.

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  “People won’t see what they can’t handle yet.”

  No, people see it, but what it is, is not a livable answer, so they find ways to shut it out or work it away somehow, but deep down, they know.

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  New shirt, new pants, new shoes; same shame.

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  It doesn’t matter how good life gets, you’re still going to have to deal with shit everyday, or at least every other day.

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  You think your views hold some substance?

  Wait until you try and write them down.

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  As it stands, humanity is the earth’s self-contempt.

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  Imagine someone builds a thinking cap and puts it on a lion, and then proceeds to explain to the lion that its natural lifestyle and dietary habits are highly immoral and that it should really feel bad about that. What must the lion do now, plea for forgiveness or commit suicide? It is absurd.

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  Between life and consciousness, life is the lesser enemy.

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  All those affectations are just a thin veil on a yearning and pain that wants to eat the world.

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  You know what, never mind all the pains, it’s the impracticality of falling apart.

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  Some have posed philosophy as therapy. That is a terrible idea; it’s like trading anxiety for horror. At least with anxiety there is the hope that it’s not real. Ugh, but then again, at least with horror, you can get bored of it.

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  A little pessimist plush toy that screams “It’s the End!!!” every time you touch it or if there’s a noise.

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  [[[“What if the voice of god was just a tulpa people prayed into existence?”]]]

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  Negation of the negation, double jump for mad logicians.

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  “No rational human community would let an AI take the wheel.” Fortunately, there has never been a rational human and there never will be.

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  A crook whose ways you know can often be much more useful to you, than a person of trust and virtue, because you can know where the crook’s bullshit stops, you don’t know where old trusty’s even begins (nor do they).

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  When you say something stupid and no one hears it, is it still stupid?

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  Ironically enough, Truth is socially incompetent and at once highly inconsiderate yet amazingly egalitarian, wherefore politics appears both strangely allergic to it, and but yet behaves exactly like it. Ideology always advertises itself as metaphysics, but there is a difference.

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  Slavery is fine, so long as it is of the ever so slightly less than human variety.

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  A lonely color cannot be art. But two together? Maybe.

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  The arts are the balms and playthings of tortured children.

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  It can be enjoyable to be an artist; it is not as enjoyable to be a factory.

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  Arts, ideals, and fantasies are the reason we have names, and the medium through which we fashion identities for ourselves, and thereby learn who we are (and what others are not).

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  The artist is an imagination’s shitty printer.

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  Art is a vain fetishistic indulgence, it’s hedonistic and propagandistic, useless, a cuckoo conspiracy against life, and many other things, sure; however, all pretenses aside, art is often also the only thing that makes a life bearable.

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  Aesthetics is not a final solution to anything, but it definitely feels like it could be.

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  “Dried brain flakes crushed and mixed into a wordy powder, which is sometimes salty, but that nonetheless goes well when sprinkled at the odd occasion here or there, but which is really also quite ok, if not better, by itself and by yourself.” — A description of aphorisms.

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  If you can’t move forward, either grow forward or default.

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  You are going to get ground down eventually; the trick is just to enjoy it.

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  Give what you give, but don’t make the recipient suffer for it.

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  You might as well shake hands with your stupidity, it’s going to follow you everywhere.

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  The benefit of a slow decline is the knowledge that nothing matters, especially not this.

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  Then there is always: “the schizoid solution”.

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  What’s the use in praises from idiots and lay people? They can’t appreciate what it is for you, what it took from you, and neither can those up high, because after all, life is lumpy, no one truly pays the same price. Getting where you’re going requires developing a compass all your own, flying high on empty praises will lead you to empty plateaus where you can live happily mediocre ever after.

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  Why must it always be in bed and at the most ungodly hour that a lifetime of embarrassment and shame smacks you in the face, and you have no option but to lay there, incapacitated, and just amazed at all the damage.

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  Oh don’t worry, your hypocrisies are blind to you too.

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  While it is certainly possible to live despite so many things, the question is just: why should you, and for who?

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  Life is by no means always the viable option.

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  If the world flows forward deterministically according to causes and effects, whether they may be understood or not, then there is no free will. However, if the world is subject to flux and contingency, which appears might be, then there is still no free will, because you are then merely at the mercy of chance and randomness that you have no control over. However, if instead you would claim that you can identify-with, edit, choose, misinterpret, or forget which causes mold you, then that still offers no free will because the choice in it becomes an arbitrary property of how your particular psychosomatic setup was determined to interpret or misinterpret itself in response to the conditions of the world around you, like how if you grew up immersed in certain ideas, you probably wouldn’t even be able to think it could ever be any other way, the same way how, to some, all alterity is the veneration or worship of falsities and evils. That said, having no free-will doesn’t mean you are helpless or can’t do what you want, free will needn’t have anything to do with fatalism, what it means is that you can only do what you want to, well, insofar as worldly resistances will let you.

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  The only ultimate freedom there is lies in formlessness and we are not formless, we exist, live, individuate, and die inside and according to the irrecusable rhythms of the natural world, just like a computer program, we operate in a space of bounded possibilities. There is, however, a kind of psychic freedom in the sense of discovering the seams and contradictions in myths and the fanaticisms of society, and thereby to succumb to a kind of horror and alienation that permits you more quiet, equanimity, and calm as you get older and give up on more and more.

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  Even pleasure is a kind of slavery. Pleasure is the reward the non-you parts of you give you for your efforts toward remaining alive, delightful, and useless as ever, or at least some semblance thereof.

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  We must imagine Sisyphus as a masochist.

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  Just because you inherited a heap of shit, does not mean you need to stay shackled to it for the rest of your life.

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  The hairless apes who sigh, felt their souls homesick from the knowledge of their pain and fragility in a world made of betrayals, so, like lost children, they made for themselves a father who bore their likeness, infinite, loving,[ wanton,] and wise, one who would, if they are true, steer them and embrace them the way their cold mother, lady nature, never could, and thereby, they understood, in no words necessary at all, that this harsh world was never meant for them, for they are bound for the great father who lives beyond, in the bliss, where all things are good and eternal, a place where finitude may never tread.

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  No, everybody can be absolutely right, we must just never meet.

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  Why does time bless those who have no use for it?

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  Even if it would pay, what is the use in being good at a thing only other people care for?

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  “Whatever” is neither an insult nor a win; if anything, the exclamation “whatever” is bitter resignation upon the failure to communicate.

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  “No, I’m not going to apologize because your misinterpretation of what I said hurt you.”

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  An insult is not an insult, it is the world’s call for you to be better than you’ve been.

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  Flatteries and praises reap license and approval in proportion to the insecurity of who it is aimed at.

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  Fear and insecurity are what first made acting possible.

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  In ancient times, they often wouldn’t even bother to tell you you’re a knob, the whole tribe would just up and leave before you woke, and you’d have no idea where they went.

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  The sacrifice of a heaven above is infinitely worth it for even just a moment of love in this abyss, and mind you, no matter always whom with.

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  You wanna know what’s depressing? More than half of all the billions of people in the world, putting their love and every hope on things that not only don’t exist but also doesn’t function well enough as useful fictions. Archaic belief systems cause so much damage, and also enable incredible neglect or even vehement rejection of important issues and entire people groups. But worse than that, the absence of such fealties are not necessarily all that good either, there are no decent answers when it comes to the inherent shitnesses of life, but everyone must justify why they live, and the pressure of it is getting worse as all the older systems and ways of answering falter with the times we’re living in. Public life has collapsed, community does not mean what it used to, there is not always hope, or a purpose or a future for everyone anymore.