Alone In The Machine

A Terminal Case

I continued like this for days. Ruminating about life. About existence. Trying to express it, whilst at the same time believing that existence had no purpose and that nothing could be expressed. Affirming life, whilst at the same time denying it.

It was an exercise in futility. Finally i decided to go to the doctors to see if i could get diagnosed with something. To see if they had a name for what i had. One told me i had depression. Another dissociation. Where as i diagnosed myself as a philosopher. I went with the third diagnosis, yet accepted the label and the cheque anyway. It allowed me to sit around and wallow in myself. To dream. To paint. To sit on the outside of everything they called society. I was a hermit, a misanthrope, and a social critic that wanted society to leave him alone.

The truth is i was terminally unambitious. I didn't want a thing. In a society like ours you have to consume. You have to produce, to sell. Everyone's got friends and careers. It's unthinkable. It's impossible, even sinful, to not have a job. So i accepted the label. I settled for depression. I thought it would be easier to go along with and explain. The government doesn't hand out money to people who are terminally unambitious, though in today's society it's more deadly or threatening to the life of the body than depression or cancer, or anything else you can think of. It is simply the absence of something. How in the hell can you fight an absence?  How can you cure it?

I even managed to get myself diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, but the truth is i wasn't socially anxious. I was socially absent, and to a large degree socially indifferent or averse. Nobody could ever consider that i was simply happy in my own company. That i didn't want a thing and very rarely felt the need for human interaction. What good could it do? I thought, yet id sit and write alone. Writing about humanity. About meaning. About love, though socially and personally i had little desire for these things. Then I'd paint alone in my room with the assumption or hope that one day they would be seen or appreciated. Then I'd get a thought and feel compelled to write it down. To write it down as though it expressed something. As though it had meaning. As though any human eye's would ever see it. And finally i would write something true, the desire to be alone, and on writing it down realize it was an attempt to connect or communicate.