Thursday 21 March 2013

A Depressed View of the World


As I sit here and try and decide what to write first, There's an overwhelming desire to be melodramatic. To come up with some short, punctual, poignant words that will sum up and dramatise my current mental state. But there are no words for it. Trust me I've tried. There are none. No words can ever be sufficiently self obsessed and clichéd to fully portray the level to which I loath my own being. I hate myself.
"But why?" I hear you cry. "What could possibly be so terrible in your life that you could truly think that little of yourself?". Well that's a good question. Why when there's poverty, famine, pestilence, murder and worse do I think I have the right to be miserable? To be honest I don't. I'm sat here writing this on a £700 laptop, which to some is more money than they could ever imagine owning. But that doesn't stop me from feeling like this, If anything it just adds wood to a stove that's already burning strongly. A fire of guilt and misery.

Sufficiently melodramatic? I think so... But at the end of the day what does it matter? I am just one person of seven million on this earth, I am neither important nor significant. Which brings me on to Twitter, where the hipsters of the earth congregate to broadcast their every thought, as if it were so valuable it would be a crime if it were lost. I do not do Twitter. Micro-blogging is not for me. I am properly self obsessed. I blog for real.
No one reads it of course, because like the other 6,999,999,999 humans on this earth (give or take a few) I am simply a person. Nothing exemplary, nothing unique, nothing special. Many world religions of course would disagree with this, They'd say that we are each special and we're all here for a reason, maybe they'd even go as far to assert that there is a god who loves us uniquely. Maybe there is... More likely not. I can fully entertain the idea that there may be a higher being, something on a scale so massive that we couldn't possibly comprehend it. In the same way that a bacteria couldn't comprehend a human, or understand why the Dettol that was being sprayed on it was so damn 99.99% effective at killing it. You see I don't believe in a god who has direct meaningful interaction with us. If there is a god in my opinion, there's no point praying, because he can't hear you.

We know however that humans are hard wired to accept the existence of a god. An omnipotent being who has influence over our lives. Someone powerful who allows us to look to the future with optimism and faith that no matter what, things will work out for the best. It's a great evolutionary tool for sentient beings when you think about it, you program a creature which has the ability to hate itself to be able to have an inner optimism. Ironic, but useful. So it seems a pretty negative step then to reject the existence of a god. Surely removing this staple of inner strength would leave one open to all manner of ultimately truthful conclusions. These being that the life of the individual was ultimately pointless and would serve no other purpose other than to pass on their DNA, providing they were able to reach an age where they were able to reproduce and didn't die or kill themselves along the way. But of course today we deny Evolution. We aid the sick and the lame, and who's to say whether that is right or wrong? Ultimately all you're doing is denying death to those who deserve it and that's just not fair. Death is not a bad thing. I could go on forever as to why, but ultimately it removes unwanted genetic code from the gene pool , faulty DNA goes and successful DNA can be passed on. That's just evolution, nature, but we deny some the chance to do the one good thing they could do for the human race. The right to die.

It's a pretty sombre thought, but then ultimately the entire universe is a chaotic destructive place. Nature is a destructive and careless entity, which is hardly in-keeping with our pre-programmed desire to believe that we are special and purposeful. We are little boxes of chemicals, programmed to fuck and to kill to survive, and yet here we live. Neutered in a society where it's legal to kill your unborn baby, but not your suffering loved one. So that's religion, or to be more precise my lack of it. "God" plays no part in my life, and neither am I a member of a cult like organisation that provides support and unconditional love to all it's members. I'm one of the faulty ones, the ones who let their logic override their instincts.

Another interesting human condition is that of friendship, or to be more general, the ability to be social. It's another one of those basic human evolutionary tactics that's there to help us survive. As sentient beings it is advantageous for us to live in groups, the list of reasons why is near endless, but it boils down to sex, food and support. Now as a prepubescent human being I should have mastered my social skills in order to allow me to integrate tightly with my surrounding humans for the above reasons. The consequences for not doing so would be isolation from the group and the lone hunter has no one to watch his back. Now I'd not describe myself as completely socially inept, just socially awkward. I get on with some better than others as is natural, but the proportion is not in a good direction. I find conversation with those I have little in common with very difficult, my default response is to be quiet and that compounds the difficulty of making progressive conversation. I end up being the one sat in the corner, on their own and isolated. A lone hunter who evolution would decide, shouldn't survive.

Moving on... Intelligence is a funny old thing. "Ignorance is Bliss" what an incredibly observant quote that is. I see that there are two ways to decompose intelligence, the advantages and the disadvantages. As a person with a persuasion towards the negative, I'll focus there, sue me. On the plus side, intelligence can to an extent allow us to overcome obstacles and survive in situations where we may otherwise not. But notice something, we are talking about survival, and survival normally would imply a relationship between a predator and its prey. Regardless of which we are, to have intelligence alone is never enough, to win the battle the victor would need a balance of strength, stamina, speed and brain power. To have too much of one and too little of another would ultimately render the contest over. The poorly balanced would lose and either starve or be eaten. I find it funny that the brain's balance of intelligence is so closely linked with other crucial capabilities such as social skills. Aspergers it would seem, is the ultimate proof of a god. Or at least that Evolution has a sense of humour.  

I would say that I have an average to above average intelligence, but I am far from "clever". People often perceive me as someone with a particular aptitude for intelligent thought, but I say they're wrong. They misinterpret my relative well spoken-ness (did that on purpose) and my preference for extended vocabulary for intelligence when it's just exactly what it says on the tin. I am well spoken, and I like long words. Why? because they make me sound clever. And I used to want people to think I was clever, even though I wasn't. Why? Maybe it'll keep me alive 5 minutes longer.

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