Published on 12, July, 2020
I've come to this realisation today sat in the library of my old university that the trajectory of my life is that I will be forgotten and die alone. This is where inertia seems to be taking me. Around me I see students making friends, sharing drinks, laughing. I am forgotten. connectionless. My few friends are either distant, busy or suicidal. My family is restless and leaving me behind. I have no wife, girlfriend or children. No one shares my interests, no one gets me. No one who is available, connectable that is. All I have is my science. It's the only thing I've been able to hang on to and even that has been a huge struggle.
Even if I am successful by normal career metrics I will most likely die alone and friendless, a lonely old university 'don.' The people I thought I would grow old with when I was younger will forget me, many will not even hear of my passing when it comes. They have their wives, husbands, serious others, a few of them have 'besties' of 'bffs.' Platonic friends they seemed joined at the hip to. Evidently, they all decided that shouldn't be me. Many have just disappeared. Even their Facebook pages deleted, almost nothing to show they were ever a part of my life.
I am tired of trying to be strong. I’m tired of trying to be good and take the moral high ground. But I don’t know how to be bad and even if I did it’s too late to do me any good. Lives of selfish and destructive indulgence are a young mans game and every day my body seems to betray me a little more. For years I tried to just pretend I wasn’t getting old. That nothing had changed since I was 18 or so. I probably still will as well as I can.
No councillor can help me. No program of inner healing or self-reflection can fix this mess. I need my circumstances to change. And no body cares. How could they, they barely know I exists and when I remind them of my existence the usual reaction is to try to sideline or exclude me as quickly as possible.
I need to do something radical. To pick the nuclear option, other wise my life will spiral down the plug hole unless a deus ex machina intervenes. But I’ve no idea what the nuclear option is.
Ideas?
Blaise Pascal's 'God-shaped hole'.
Faith was the one thing keeping me sane. This World believes that faith is an obstacle, due to the fact it challenges dependency on the State. Creature comforts are good, but not the be-all and end-all.
Desmond79 said:This World believes that faith is an obstacle, due to the fact it challenges dependency on the State.
I think it goes deeper than that. For millenia the Church was an organ of control, using elements of faith as its ways to control the masses for its own furtherment.
Think of the absurdity of catholicism that an innocent, unbabtised baby would have its soul go to hell if it is not promised to the church through babtism if it were to die.
It also promises damnation to the followers who do not routinely confess their sins to the priests so the goings on of all are kept in the knowledge of the Church - and the constant guild laid on the flock through their doctorine is cruel.
The "God shaped hole" you refer to is an artificial construct pushed on you through fear by the Church and its followers to make you like them, to make you feel the same guilt they do and to be saved from some vaguely unspecific damnation in the afterlife.
This reflects my beiief that faith is a good thing, but organised religion is a terrible thing.