Fourteen years ago, I wanted to die, as in, not be alive anymore. But not actively, passively. I wanted to not have to live each day. I'd chalk this up now to an existentialist crisis that had its roots in my late childhood. "Not being" had come upon me suddenly when I was 9. Any sort of consistency and predictability was shaken. Throughout the years that followed, the crisis was not resolved because it wasn't fully understood nor could it be dealt with adequately.
Due to the lack of resolution, however, there were times that were deep, dark holes of anguish and frustration over the growing realization that one cannot define life [maybe it's what drove me toward atheism (soft atheism) in the present]. I intuited that there were no answers, or at least none that would satisfy me at that moment {or even now}. Maybe there is an answer that I will adopt at some point, but in the throes of an existential crisis that finally surfaced at 18, there was nothing comforting. Maybe it was almost like a fasting monk's vision, but when you're at the end of your rope, you start to see everything more clearly, for a time. And you begin to notice what you're "de-potentializing" by ending it all.
Part of giving up or giving in to the nihilism that "nothing matters" is that it helps you to see what you do to control as much as you can about your experience of this world, our "life" narratives. Imagine what would happen if you stopped performing actions that offer you a sense of power over your own destiny. You'd probably be a lot less stressed actually. Fuck control, because you don't actually have it. Even if your motto is "Everything happens for a reason," or, "God has a plan," both of which superficially embrace a random element to existence, you're still trying to make rational sense of the irrational. The universe is not uncaring, the universe doesn't have that capacity. We like to personify the universe as "cold" or "unfeeling" but that's not fair to the universe. To bring it down from the infinite to something more tangible, rocks also "don't care" about your existence, but we're using human emotions to classify something that doesn't have them. Rocks "be" and cannot care or not care. The universe also just "is."
There is more than your own self in the driver's seat. Imagine we're all driving giant cars with individual steering wheels that give us some pull, but not as much as we think we have. We're so damn focused on the road ahead, we can't see the dashboards of all of our vehicles are actually connected. Control is a coy mistress, she knows exactly what she's doing, but you're letting her, too. Control or more correctly, power over, is dangerous. At any moment that answer you thought was there could be gone. Because it isn't actually there. It's a construct of your thoughts, of your memory, and even if others have similar memories, it won't be exactly the same as yours.
Think about telling a story with someone else. They remember details that you don't, you fill in gaps that they glossed over. You complete each other's narratives. When it comes to our own memory of ourselves, we're only relying on ONE set of details - and humans have repeatedly proven to be pretty fucking terrible eyewitnesses. People claimed to have seen a leprechaun and Big Foot. NO. WTF. Occam's razor people, Jesus.
Embrace the random. I have been trying to for 14 years. It's hard sometimes. But it would pay off if I could.
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