Fereling somewhat better today. I guess venting my pessimism and/or worries for the future yesterday did me a lot of good.

I am not, by nature, a pessimist. I consider pessimism to be a waste of time that only gets in the way of making things better.

The way I see it, both pessimism and optimism are logically unspoortable. They both assume that life has some kind of underlying, predictable nature that conforms to the highly subjective categories of “good” and “bad”.

And that’s utter nonsense. Where could such a unifying force come from? What would its enforcement mechansm be? What are the fundamental physics at work here?

The way I see it, both are merely subjective points of view. As such, they can be useful as a reflection of our mood, but to suppose ithat it goes any further than that is laughably arbitrary and subjective.

The very idea of being able to judge life in general based on the single data point of one’s own life makes no sense to me. Even judging one own’s life as good or bad is logically iffy. Most people have had times when their life seemed good to them, and other times when it seemed bad.

So what is the point of making a grand generalization about your life when you know damned well that you will feel differently later on?

So both optimism and pessimism are illogical and unsupportable. That does not mkake them equal, however, because the optimist, at least, is happy most of the time. Maybe they have unrealistic ideas about the world and maybe their optimism leads them unto error sometimes,. but at least they feel good.

Pessimism, on the other hand, leads to an unhappy person whose only pleasures in life come from the “I told you so” moments they crave in order to validate what they know is not a sensible logical position.

“Ha! See, life DOES suck and you WERE wrong to be happy when I am incapable of it and that makes me so much smarter, wiser, and tougher than you! .”

It’s pathetic, really.

The way I see it, if you have to pick one, you might as well pick the one that leads to the better outcomes. That is clearly optimism. Study after study shows that optmimistic people life longer, happier, healthier lives than sad sacks.

Ideally, one would reserve judgment entirely. That’s more or less my attitude. Whatever the nature of life (if it even has one), might be, I sill strive to make things better and to embrace the pragmatically optimistic view that we must always act as if things can get better because tha’s the only way things ever do get better.

No matter what your goals are, optimism will get you there faster than pessimism and make the trip a ;lot more fun too.

I understand where some pessmism comes from, though. The kind I call “reactive pessimism”. That is pessimism formed as a reaction to the excesses of the sort of optimism that causes people to ignore unpleasant truths and fall victim to easily avoidable disasters as a result.

On a case by case basis, this doesn’t lead to pessimism. But over time, it can make a person very bitter and misanthropic from the feeling that you are constantly rescuing idiots from theie own stupiditty.

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Time skip! I was having trouble thinking so I took a nap.

To sum up : Not a pessimist. That might surprise some people, given my depression. But it’s not the conflict it sounds like.

Actually, let me refine the statement : I’ve never been a pessimist in general. I am definitely a serial pessimist when it comes to myself personally.

That’s the depression part. And even that is slightly wrong because, to be honest, depression often keeps me from thinking about the future at all.

I’ve been pondering that barrier lately : the obe between “thoughts related to myself” and “thoughts relating to everything else”.

As befits my senselessly cerebral self, I am quite sane when it comes to matters impersonal. Excessively son, perhaps, at least according to some. The sort of people who find my hardcore clearheaded enlightened rationalism a tad unsettling.

And I get why. It can be harrowing to be around someone who… how do I put this without sounding like a raging egomaniac.

Fuck it. It can be harrowing to be around someone who sees through the illusions and nails the truth right between the eyes nonstop.

Socially speaking, it makes me quite weird.

It’s that whole “he who walks through walls” thing. I see through the social illusions that define the structure of reality for most people. And this gives me the autonomy to step in and out of their reality as I see fit.

The flipside,. though, is that I don’t see those social illusions very well,and so it’s hard for me to stay within them and “act normal”, no matter how badly I might want to in a given situation. This would not be a problem if I was some kind of radical individualistwilling to be exactly himself in all situations and damn theconsequences to myself or others.

But I’m not. Perhaps I should be. But I’m not, at least. not all the time.

Maybe  would be a happier man if, instead of half-assing my identity because on part of me wants to be fearlessly myself and another part doesn’t want to hurt people on any level for any reason,.

Maybe my attitude should be “I am me, unique and bizarre, and if people can’t handle that, to hell with them. ”

It might be impossible to go through life without hurting others. And some hurts are just plain not my responsibility even if I am the cause.

Maybe it’s just plain impossible to live a happy life if your identity is trapped in a tiny cage of overexaggerated empathy where everyone else’s emotions are more important than yours, to the point of never addressing your own needs.

Maybe I need to stop skulking in the shadows for safety and develop my own solid identity, and commit to it.

Maybe I need to grow the hell up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Y’all better back the fuck up because I’m gonna puke my pain onto the page and the first three rows WILL get wet.

Been pretty depressed lately. No source except possibly the change of seasons. No terrible event looming…. well, not in my personal life, anyhow.

The world itselgf is slowly sliding into an environmental apocalypse and we’re all watching it happen and not doing a damned thing about it, like we’re all tied to the tracks watching global warming steam towards us.

We all know it’s only going to get worse. And we know that with the idiots the pold people have put into power all around the world, the source will continue.

But eventually the problem will sort itself out.

When society has fallen apart to the point where nobody drives cars or runs power plants and factories any more.

So…. yay that.

And I guess that has been eating away at my mood. I have glimpsed a future where we finally went ahead and broke the goddamned planet amd the evidence of how badly we fucked up will be all around us at all times and we will have to live and die with the knowledge that bnothing short of nuclear war could have failed our kids’ generation harder or more thoroughly.

That horrifies me far, far more than whatever happens to me personally. I am sure my life will change a fair bit and I might have to become that hardcore angry bludgeoning bulldozer than I have been dodging for my whole life.

But I will survive somehow. I’m extremely intelligent, have many talents, and I’m fairly adaptable when I need to be.

I am sure gonna miss video games and the Internet, though. Who knows, maybe they will survive in some form.

But life will still be far more shitty, with extreme weather events becoming the norm and the average person’s life becoming more desperate and brutal.

It’s the food that really worries me. It would not take much of an unpheaval in the bread basket area of the world like California to send the prices of every day foodstuffs through the fuckin’ roof.

That would trigger inflation, maybe even hyperinflation.

And that’s just here, in the ridiculously decadent modern world. Here, we can survive there not being as much variety in our foodstuffs and people having to start really hardcore think about how to cover their basic nutritional needs with money that is shrinking in real value every day.

Might cure us of our junk food habit. But probably not. Not as long as junk food remains much cheaper than real food AND tastes better in an artificial hyper-stimulus kind of way we all know and love.

All those survivalists should really be investing in agriculture. The future will belond to the people who make food.

I hope democracy survives. It stands a good chance. The modern democracies of the world have all raised generations of citizens who expect to have a say in things and who really do not like being told what to do.

It might become an even more corporatist form of democracy, though. Depends on how the power dynamic battles go. Might end up with a world run by big agribusiness. Or we might end up with a real people’s revolution where people know who’s to blame for the hell life has become and want their fucking heads like in the French Revolution.

Certainly, people will no longer be content to sit on the sidelines saying “Well, if the politicians won’t do anything about it, I guess we’re fucked. ”

I predict a rise in eco-terrorism. There will be a lot of angry young people who are extremely aware of how badly they got screwed and want to strike back at the people they hold responsible for it.

Depending on how my own life goes,  I might be right there with them, gathering wood so we can burn these bastards at the stake.

Right now, in North America, we are in the dying days of people being able to ignore the problem as long as it isn’t having an effect on them in their lives and in their area.

Not too long from now, the craziness will be happening everywhere. Forest fires, hurricanes, tornados, pestilence and plagues, you name it.

It would be the days of the Black Death all over again. Maybe not in terms of loss of life – depends on whether we can defuse the next superbug viral bomb before it explodes or not – but in terms of things getting seriously fucking Biblical.

I suppose religiong of all kinds will see an upsurge of people looking for answers.

So yeah. Pretty sure the world I know and love will end within my lifetime and possibly within this decade.

That might be dragging me down a bit.

Like everyobne else, I’d been shoving that thought out of my mind because it is simply too big a thing to cope with. It’s too monstrous and horrifying and probable to think about. Much easier to hide in our hobbiexs and pretend it’s Business As Usual, full speed ahead, no problemo time.

Ironically, given all the doom and gloom I just portended, I actually feel a lot better now. It feels good to have finally let the truth in and spoken it aloud (so to speak). I think the denial was taking a heavy toll on me. I am not someone with a knack for protecting my hapiness from unwanted interference from reality.

So now that I have all that out of my system, I feel much better. That might even have been the root cause of my recent mood downturn.

The world seems like a brighter and happier place now that I have finally admitted to myself that we are all doomed.

Because gosh, team, what’s important is that we have each other.

Plus, when things get bad, there’s always sex cults.

And I want my own sex cult.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.