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

by Saul van der Walt

  there is abundance, infrastructure actually works now, things run on time, education has been massively reformed and separated from politics, most businesses and institutions have migrated to heterarchical and often fully dynamic and autonomous technology driven modes of operation, there are no more centralized governments...

  ~

  “A Selected Collection of Important Writings Which All Manage to Say Nothing, Vol III, Second Edition,” that, and other doubts.

  ~

  H: “When was the last time you had a friend?“

  P: “Oh god, it’s been years.”

  **

  H: “When was the last time you went out of the house?“

  P: “Since today, last year sometime.”

  **

  H: “Why don’t you socialize more?“

  P: “For what? What good will it do? There is no one and nothing I’m obliged to become, nothing I have to do, no one to please, nothing to say worth saying, nothing I want, no one I need to make unhappy too.”

  H: “…”

  **

  H: “You know you’re not alone, there are others like you.”

  P: “Yes indeed, millions. And but so what then? I don’t know them, I don’t see them, they’re nothing to me, we don’t talk, and even if we did, what could there possibly be to say? I’m sat here dealing with what I’m dealing with, I don’t need fucking solidarity or your empty “humanness”. What is needed is a fucking answer! And a real one for once. Please, just not some wishy-washy nonsense. I am so tired.”

  ~

  Y: “Morality is a kind of pathology.”

  X: “Yeah, but damn it comes in handy when you can’t reason with people.”

  Y: “Also, it’s nice to look nice, it feels good to be righteous.”

  ~

  “I was discovered on the suspicion of being a malignant growth. Perhaps this was a premonition of some sort.”

  ~

  B: “What is the recipe for a good life?”

  K: “Effort paired with enough enthusiastic idiocy still to believe in love, satisfaction, and better days.”

  ~

  Philosophizing with friends: sitting in a circle with our philosinoodles all turned on, we’re slinging thick ropes of word salad at each other, everyone is getting completely covered with it; ooh, and the recipient of joint rebuttals, they’re like the center piece of a bukakke session, receiving all that thick erudition and repudiation right in the gob. Glorious.

  ~

  Conservative mother walks in and to her horror discovers her daughter jilling to anatomically correct yiff.

  Mother: * commits suicide *

  ~

  If humanity is the Earth’s itchy yeast infection, then rue the day our great mother Gaia comes down for a scratch.

  ~

  Eh, just give the planet a fever; it’ll be fine again without us.

  ~

  And it would helped if you’d have at least reciprocated some humanity, instead of always dawning a face either whitewashed by years of discovery-fears and anxiety, or one that is too self-absorbed to show anything vaguely resembling love.

  ~

  Not sure if not feeling good enough to change, not changing because not feeling good.

  ~

  Cleanse the house, consecrate the space, masturbate furiously in every place.

  ~

  A Magnifying glass held under sunlight does not have the same rejuvenating effect as laser skin treatment.

  ~

  Don’t waste your time getting a degree, unless it’s for the experience of it alone, because everything you’ll ever learn you learn yourself, other people can only provide the occasion and help to make it easier, but you will always still be doing the heavy lifting. If you’re getting higher education for the sake of a job or training of some sort, that’s your choice, your call; and, if it is appropriate, sorry that the world doesn’t always recognize all those skills and learnings that aren’t accompanied by an expensive piece of paper, or, an elaborate overly competitive portfolio, or, the “required experience” that’s so hard to get. But, if all you need is to learn, and to know for yourself, then all you have to do is obtain access to the right books and media; and for these, you can always search or ask online, on reddit or forums, which books will help most in your quest, perhaps with good methods you’ll even obtain them freely, either way, just know that, money and entrance to higher learning institutions are not the only, and dare I say, the best ways of learning things for yourself.

  5-25 minutes of decent free online video is often worth infinitely more than multiple lectures that costs your everything.

  One wonderful thing that crawled out of Kant’s bussy:

  “Sapere Aude!” — Dare to Know!

  ~

  What if there was a free passive education accreditation system? A learning system where, not unlike wikis or other online encyclopedias, the flows of links you follow, your interactions, and your consumption of information from the system all gets monitored (just in this case with your opt-in permission), and with the addition of some direct but non-invasive micro-interactions, the system learns how you learn and so passively gauges and infers how much you are learning and checks that with non-invasive and non-time-consuming methods, all of which culminates in a sharable knowledge graph that you can actually use when applying for work or something, or that could perhaps be integrated into a social network helping you find like minded people. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, when your curiosity or boredom drives you to explore an online encyclopedia that just about effortlessly legitimates your learning in ways that have real cash value?

  ~

  There are about two or so reasons to study a thing:

  1 — to raise from it something worth either building, retelling, or becoming.

  2 — to judge it, feel better, and stave off boredom, lest it should mortally consume you.

  ~

  Only Nowhere to Go:

  To be trapped in a vortex of the world’s inanity,

  it drives me right to the brink of insanity.

  There is no war, there is nothing to be won.

  I want nothing, there is nothing to become.

  I am superfluous, nothing more to be done.

  Hear me now, one step further, I am

  coming undone. And even though I am

  so young, my life feels ended before it begun.

  For, like so many others, I am an anchorite, lingering, hanging on, in the temple of

  nothing, and no one.

  ~

  “Follow your dreams,” they said.

  ~

  Of resignation, hedonism, and hyperreal indulgences: for your safety, I would tell you what it is, is a cocoon, but really it’s a somewhere stillborn souls go so they can find peace in wasting away. There can be no metamorphosal only pleasure and waste disposal.

  ~

  Everyone rambles on about “self-worth”, but has anyone considered “other-worth”. Like, you know, it’s one thing to think you yourself have a shitness or lack of value, use, or substance about you, but it’s another when those around you are the shitness. And mind you, the shitness of other people is not my fault, and neither is the negativity that stems from that, I am allowed to feel what I feel, and if I feel everything is shit, and that so with good reason, then so be it, there’s nothing there that needs curing, what needs work is the world we’re living in. You can’t magic things away, you have to deal with them and cheap sophistry, like theologies, various therapies, and crystal this and chakra that and other thaumaturgies only gets you so far. But there comes a point where all those tricks falter, and it’s just you and the abyss, and the racket next door, and the night you have to get through, and the days, and the weeks, and the years, and nothing changes, and nothing truly gets better, and on top of that, people think you’re just another depressive asshole who doesn’t know better, or worse than that, being as you are, and coming from who you come from, they go further, they say it’
s not only your fault, but your fucking responsibility too, like you have to pay for some platonically/categorically/sociohistorically ascribed transcendental shitness that you’re just born with. Fuck that, I never asked for any of this shit.

  ~

  L: “Open the lid, is he still going?”

  T: *opens trashcan and peers inside *

  X: *grumbles at having been disturbed * “…”

  T : “Looks like it.”

  L: “Shame.”

  ~

  Nanny: “I warned you, if you misbehave I’m going to make baked beans!”

  She grabbed the 4 year old, pinned him down, pulled them down, and held a lighter to his testicles.

  ~

  What is hidden in the other is the very possibility of friction or communication, if we actually knew each other we would be alone as one, wholly unable to live.

  ~

  There was a time when it rained for 2 million years.

  ~

  One of the seeds that bloomed into nihilism: As a child, when you lived from excitement to excitement, and at some point it all kind of reached an excitement plateau and life felt dull and boring, because there is just nothing to look out for now.

  ~

  See Me Not:

  Alone in their midst, I keep

  the lights off and make no sound.

  Please don’t know me, my existence

  has no ground. When I was small,

  I couldn’t stand the dark. Now,

  it has become a friend and shield

  from a terror stark, the human being,

  which in all its forms, hides beasts of

  want, violence, and confrontation, come

  to blight me, in my alienation. Oh let me

  converse with the shadows at night.

  Swallow me in, unnatural forms,

  take away my fright.

  ~

  Member of X: “So you’re not feeling too good about X are you. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  Y: “I can’t, you don’t have the capacity to respond rationally, sanely, or for that matter humanely.”

  * Redacted *

  Y: “I can’t, I don’t understand things myself, nothing makes sense, shit’s a mess, especially yours, I want none of it; plus, I don’t like you, and I don’t want you to drag it out of me, cause I’ll cry.”

  ~

  When they’ve invested a lot of talk and energy into you, using you like a confessional or urinal for their emotions, having somehow learned that, that’s ok (having probably picked up on your damage and nonthreatening ineptness), since being as you are you can’t say no or really shy away, and then (ironically) they feel appalled when you’re unable to reciprocate, laugh on command, or approximate the correct face, and don’t initiate things, although at heart you really don’t want to seem disinterested and rude, and now, feeling kind of trapped, you just go along with whatever this is because who knows what the hell you’re supposed to do with your life, and they say you need friends and people, but that’s just not a feasible thing because it’s all empty and their sentiments, drinking, infatuations, and lustings, and everything just feels unpleasant and really doesn’t arouse anything in you. Yeah, that.

  ~

  “Hearing a voice screaming out in pain extremely loudly in a dark room when no one else is there.”

  ~

  How to have a meaning or purpose:

  - work it, get grand, get status, get respect

  - be oppressed, make other people suffer for it

  - say or write things people get emotional over

  - become a spectacle, make yourself “unique”

  - find a way to be part of some righteous or chosen X

  - make bold claims and predictions

  - get hurt or die in an unusual way

  - make others hurt or die in less than usual ways

  - give away a lot of time or things, until you’re loved

  - be rich, so rich other people wish they were you

  - lament publicly in ways others can identify with

  - get a statue erected of yourself

  - build big things with your name attached

  - look smart enough to make others seem dumb

  - collect things and make a big deal out of it

  - make/finish lists of things or people you’ve done

  - climb high things, walk or ride long roads

  - see more things than other people have seen

  - go places most other people haven’t been

  - be prettier/fatter/thinner/uglier/X-er than X

  - prevent something bad or cause it

  - invent or discover something, be remembered

  - clean or fix things, big things, and often

  - give up on yourself, live your life for other people

  - keep talking until it doesn’t matter anymore

  - or have children, make them figure it out

  ~

  Hey, it’s daddy death’s call for you to come home. Now, you can either go running, or you can take your time, it’s your call.

  ~

  Happiness is watching fails, meme compilations, you-laugh-you-lose, or videos of squirrels, raccoons, and cats performing frivolous inanities. However, the absurd reality of finitude is what sets in when you’re all spent out doing that for too long, and the anhedonia starts to bleed over into everything, and almost nothing can make you smile or laugh anymore.

  ~

  When there is more humanity in a 22 minute ASMR video than in a lifetime with family.

  **

  “Tingle-Immunity,” an ever so slightly obscure tragedy.

  ~

  On the 47th day since becoming an Absurdist, Dave was still disappointed that nothing and no one cared. In line with his new feelings on life, Dave did however, purchase his first bracelet with an Anarchism symbol printed on it; still, no one was impressed, not even those who noticed.

  ~

  Existentialism is playing Dark Souls without uninstalling. Absurdism is replaying the game again from the start. Nihilism is dragging lines on the desktop, because it’s too fucking hard and just not worth it.

  ~

  There! You may have it all. Strip the flesh from my bones and enjoy the screams. Don’t forget to crack the spine too, suck out the marrow, it is the tastiest treat. Here, I’ll help you pry apart the ribs also, to expose the fleschen heart ye deem so corrupt. Does it suffice?

  I would not pay for the privilege of suffering, for it comes freely to me, in abundance and good faith. I too am forlorn, in the twilight wastelands betwixt old cultures and a new humanity acculturated in the after-party following gods’ wake.

  Condemned to a freedomless freedom, unequipped and over-encumbered. What now dearest other, big Other? Where hence must we venture in the new world?

  ~

  Just imagine someone somewhere finally figures out some fragment of the “True-True”, and then they write it all down, and put a patent and copyright on it, so now only a select few can have any of the true-true because it belongs to the estate of the figurer-outer or who ever bought it from them. Or like, two scientists or philosophers stumble on the same piece of reasoning independently and then there’s a squabble for who got there first, did they copy someone, who gets credit, and with all the little differences, who’s true-true is the true true-true. Or like, when they share the true-true but it’s either behind a pay-wall or only people belonging to a certain group or set of qualifications get to have access to it. It’s nonsense, if status and money weren’t so important to us, we’d all have access to things that are too important to belong to anyone.

  ~

  In our time, in childhood, we all dream of being someone one day and making an impact or doing big things, but gradually as reality sets in, our dreams are scaled down and we either settle for: a cold and disillusioned realism (which is skin deep, existing only in mechanism and theory, as a vague metaphysics, if we actually felt what it meant, we’d die); looking awa
y, likely toward frivolous distractions and abstractions; crashing and recovering and crashing again; ending it; a steady slow burn; giving up on yourself and placing that burdensome hope for a better life, and better now, on children; adopting or constructing useful fictions to settle the accounts; but, most likely some abominable mixture of these.

  ~

  X: “You need help.”

  Y: * hands over a little paper from a stack * “Ok sure, here’s my paypal email, below are EFT details, you can send me money, oh and right at the bottom you’ll see there are two codes, one is for Ether the other is Bitcoin so you can send me crypto too. Thanks.”