u/furrymask

It’s actually incredible the level of copium that veganism triggers in people. There are no equivalents.

I’m a pretty radical leftist. I mean, I think it’s fair to say that I hold what would be considered extremist views by most people about capitalism, colonialism or psychology. But none of these positions grant me the same level of hatred or resentment as my position on specisism do. People are very upset by this.

What triggers me is the level of hostility that veganism and antispecisism triggers in people.

I swear to God, I’ve had talks with 40-50 yo men, who started sulking and acting childishly to end the conversation—like turning their backs on me, avoiding my gaze, or ignoring me. None of my other opinions trigger that kind of reaction to the point where people actually regress back to toddlers.

And years after, one of these guys still holds a grudge against me. Because of a two minute conversation where I told him that milk cows and laying hens get killed as well. That’s it. And the guy has been ruminating on that for 3 YEARS.

And then of course there’s the whole « hitting the messenger instead of the message » thing where people will try to demonstrate that you’re a racist, transphobic, classist… you name it to depict as an evil person and discredit you as a person.
To be clear I’m none of those things but even if I were, why would that make my opinions on animal exploitation invalid? There’s this idealist assumption especially among new leftists who have no training that bigotry is a coherent system of thought and so people who are bigots on one thing are bigots on the others a-priori. But that’s not true, people’s consciousness is determined by their existence not the other way around and there can exist (and as a matter a fact, there are) racist feminists and homophobic anti-racists…
So whether you’re a zetetician or a marxist, that sort of reasoning to invalidate your opponent’s opinions is just fallacious.

I guess there’s two main reasons for that hostility. The first would be that everyone is involved in animal cruelty, not just specisist but all the carnists that consume animal products in one way or another and contrary to other struggles such as anticolonialism, antispeciesism directly challenges one’s way of life. It is not enough simply to take a stand; holding this view requires immediate and substantial changes in one’s way of life.

The second reason is that, unlike other struggles, people already have very strong opinions about animal exploitation because of the giant propaganda machine put up by the meat and dairy industries before antispecisists come around and start questioning things. And so there’s a strong sense of « I’m right on this, this is obvious » and symmetrically « this is common sense, so it follows that people who don’t believe this must be stupid ». The problem with that is that when those strong beliefs are challenged by animalists, it doesn't just challenge their beliefs about animal exploitation, but also their self-image and their confidence in their intelligence and critical thinking skills. It really hits their ego, basically.

Anyway it’s really hard out there, I’m just posting this as a reminder that often it’s not you it’s them. You haven’t actually done anything wrong they just resent you because you ordered a pizza without cheese in front of them, 30 years ago.

I’m so tired of the ideology of positive psychology. To be clear, I’m not saying that people should be miserable or that happiness is necessarily a sign of stupidity. All I'm saying is that instead of arguing that pessimism is wrong because it's "negative" (which is a terrible argument because an unpleasant fact isn't necessarily a false fact) and subscribing to a naive view of life, they should acknowledge the precarious character of existence, and try to convince nihilists that life is worth living, despite their condition.

As Nietzsche said, God is dead. It’s impossible nowadays to sincerely believe in God or any transcendent entity. Instead of believing that some benevolent entity will save them, the modern individual will start believing in « manifestation » and the power of human will. Positive psychology is the modern equivalent of witchcraft. There are people who actually believe that by uttering magic words in front of the mirror or posting them on facebook, their wishes will materialize.

Now that is not to say that thoughts can’t produce reality. They can, through what’s called action. But manifestation and motivational quotes are not actions. They are wishes.

The problem is that people nowadays are completely indoctrinated into the self-help ideology. They think that one’s life only depends on their self-confidence and willpower and it makes them disdainful. Since people get what they deserve, people who suffer, the marginals, the homeless, the sick must have done something wrong to have such an existence. If the only limitation to existence is human will, (as positive psychology teaches us) then these people must suffer because they are lazy or they lack resilience and determination.

But the truth is that self-confidence and motivational quotes can’t neutralize one’s material conditions of existence.

That’s where positive psychology becomes such a useful tool for the dominant classes : social class, race, gender, diseases none of those matter, your life is entirely in your hands and therefore there is no need for social reforms or public policies to limit inequalities.

The novelty of this ideology is that instead of justifying the social order on the basis of some transcendent morality, the bourgeois class legitimates inequalities by the ideology of the meritocracy. Instead of justifying misery and oppression through the previous lives of one’s soul (the caste system in India for example), or the original sin in western societies, modern societies justify misery through individual free-will.

This may seem fair at a first glance, but this ideology is actually just as mystical and fallacious as the other ones because it fails to take into account the fact that its conception of the individual, subtracted from its community and its culture, is an abstraction. Individuals aren’t all born equal, with the same possibilities. Willpower isn’t the only determining factor in an individual’s existence. Social sciences have clearly shown that other factors play a significant role in one’s life : race, gender, class, and so on.

The destruction of culture

Positive thinkers try to find happiness by deluding themselves into thinking that the sheer power of their will can transform their existence. But they ultimately fail to reach any meaningful conclusion because their optimism, their philosophy is ultimately naive. It hides the real nature of society and human relations. They are bound to become bitter and resentful because they will obstinately keep on trying to change things that are out of their control. They are condemned to pursue things that they know deep down, to be trivial.
They are like Cipher in The Matrix, who chooses to live in an artificial existence , instead of an authentic albeit painful one.

But no true happiness can emerge from such delusions.
That’s why optimistic normies, keep gravitating towards sub-cultures such as punk culture, or rap culture or hikikomoris. They envy our sincerity, our authenticity and our sensibility. They try to imitate us in order to give depth to their otherwise shallow and insipid existences.
Rap and blues were originally meant to express the deep feelings of misery and despair felt by people living in extreme poverty—until the normies appropriated them and stripped them of all their “negativity” ” or their “depressing” aspects, transforming them into silly little songs that endlessly repeat clichés of positive psychology drawn from mediocre self-help books.

The destruction of existential philosophy

And it’s not just music and art, philosophy is also infested with those optimistic morons who think that Nietzsche and Camus are actually optimists like them.

The starting point of Nietzsche’s philosophy is precisely that « God is dead », that there is no afterlife, there is no transcendent world in which we could place our hopes. Nietzsche’s project isn’t to escape from suffering, on the contrary! He says that we’ve started devaluating life precisely because suffering is inherent to it, and his entire philosophical project consist in reevaluating suffering so that one may live a good life even without hope of ever escaping suffering.

Same thing with Camus, the whole point of his philosophy is to find happiness in hopelessness i.e in pessimism.
His first philosophical writings Les Nuptiales purpose was precisely and explicitly to produce a philosophical perspective in which happiness is possible despite the hopelessness of existence :

"Between this sky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion--only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch" (N, 90)

Or,

« I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me it is a closed door” (N, 76).

That is why Camus uses the Myth of Sisyphus to illustrate his philosophy. If he can produce a philosophical perspective in which one can imagine Sisyphus happy despite his dreadful existence, then he will have succeeded in proving that any existence can be happy.

The whole point of the myth is that Sisyphus's existence and labor is pointless and that he has no hope of ever escaping it.
But sure, if you’re an optimistic moron who doesn’t understand what a thought experiment is then yeah, you could imagine that Sisyphus throws the rock at the gods and escapes to Hawaii to play ukulele.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the mistake of optimists, is that they confuse pessimism with negativity. It’s not about thinking positively or negatively, it’s about being realistic.

Optimists believe that a true belief is a pleasant belief. But that’s obviously not true. Just because we want there to be an afterlife, a God, or a real meaning to life, doesn’t mean any of that is true. It’s certainly nice to believe in those things, but unless you’re an idiot, you can’t sincerely believe in things that you know aren’t true.

A true optimist would demonstrate that there are other ways of living. An example that comes to my mind is Marx, who doesn’t simply argue that pessimism is wrong because it makes people depressed, which is a stupid argument, but he actually proves that pessimism is wrong. Marx shows that the dominant class, through its exploitation of the proletariat paradoxically contributes to the organisation and the elevation of the self-consciousness of the working class.

All of that to say that you should be wary of « optimists » and « positive thinkers » because behind their calls for positive thinking and optimism lies an endorsement of disillusionment and a tacit acceptance of all the injustices of life and society.

Why can't people just assume that they are specisists? I mean they say that they do but if they really don't care about animals why are they so fucking annoying as soon as you tell them that you're vegan?

I swear to God if you feel bad about animal exploitation, there are really only two options : either you assume your choice of condoning the torture and killing of millions of sentient beings daily or you change your actions to align them with your values.

The annoying thing about normies is that somehow, they always manage to choose the third option : blame the vegan for making them feel bad.

It's not my fault! If you really feel bad then do something about it! I'm not your mom, I dont know where you got the idea that I was supposed to tell you that you are 100% morally pure and that there's nothing wrong about animal exploitation!

But instead of actually assuming their positions, nooo, they have to prove that you are a horrible person and that veganism is actually fascism in disguise! So tired of dealing with all the mental gymnastics performed by leftists to tell you that actually they are not specisists because they're weak egoisitic bigots no, actually antspecisism is racism so eating chicken from KFC is anti-colonialism somehow.

But hey they "fully assume being specisists" yeah right... Right after fucking insulting me for 10 minutes insinuating that I'm a racist, colonialist, transphobic, mysoginous, pedophile asshole just because I said that maybe killing baby chicks = not cool. If you really assume your specisism why do you feel the need to sublimate it into anti-racism?

Honestly at this point, I 100% believe that it would be less annoying if people just said straight up, I don't care about animals.

Three days ago, I made a post called "Disco Inferno" that I posted here and on r/nihilism and someone there asked me if I had considered becoming "an hero". I didn't understand at first I thought they were referencing Camus's absurd hero but it turns out that it's actually a reference to some obscure 4chan meme where "becoming an hero" basically means killing yourself. They got a lot of upvotes for that.

I got really upset so I told them to fuck off and I was the one who was banned from reddit for 3 days.

So yeah stay away from that sub there seems to be lots of 4chan trolls there and watch out for the "an hero" meme.

Humans, normies are beyond repair. I am beyond repair. There is no happiness, no way out of suffering, no end of the tunnel, only more suffering. Communism, paradise, the kingdom of God, those were all chimeras.

Happiness, justice, beauty, they don’t exist in this world. Some people call this optimistic nihilism but there’s nothing « optimistic » about it. There is no hope, no redemption, no silver lining, nothing matters anymore. Nothing matters and therefore I’m free : free from morality, free from meaning, free from purpose. And that’s why I dance. I’m going to keep grooving and nothing can stop me because nothing matters to me anymore.

There is no redemption. I have zero diplomas and zero professional experience. I suck at everything and have the operational capabilities of a five year old.

There is no friendship. I failed everyone and they all left me. I have zero friends not even online. I’m all alone all the time.

There is no love. I have no romantic life and in fact, at 24, I’ve never had any romantic action at all in my entire life. I’ve never even held hands with a girl let alone kissed one.

I don’t have enough money to eat good stuff. All I do all day is distract myself from my misery by drinking beer and playing mind-numbing video games. I barely sleep at all. My back hurts, my eyes are sore from watching screens all day and my thoughts are foggy. I’m all alone, trapped forever in this disco inferno. Burn, baby burn.

Now you’re probably thinking that I should just end myself. That it’s too embarrassing for me to stay alive. My life is a disaster, my whole existence was a mistake. I’ve got 2 liters of beer in my blood and I finished an entire pack of sleeping pills.

So why can’t I stop dancing like an idiot? I just can’t control my feet. I dance because I have this terrible feeling of dread and hopelessness in my heart. That everything is fucked up and that the whole world is going to shit. I’ve got that boogie in me.
I dance because when you have nothing left to lose, anywhere can be boogie wonderland.

My eyelids are heavy now, everything is becoming blurry and the music sounds more and more distant.
The world is swirling around me. I feel like a mirrored ball.
Please don’t turn the lights off, don’t stop the music. I don’t want to be left alone with my regrets, I don’t want the party to end.
Let the music play. I just want to dance the night away. Let it play on and on, and on and on…

….

Ecosystems are collapsing, fascism is rising and wars are breaking out all over the world. All life on Earth will end and after that black holes will swallow all light and crush into pieces all remaining traces of matter.
It’s the second law of entropy : an isolated system’s entropy can only increase over time. There is no God, no force, no benevolent entity beyond the universe, so it follows that eventually, all change, all movement, all order in the world will cease to be and the universe will inevitably be swallowed by darkness and chaos. It’s ineluctable. It’s disco.

My only contact with the outside world is through streamers, youtube videos and reddit posts. We engage in these parasocial relationships with strangers on the internet, hoping that an ever increasing number of « friends » will fill the void in our hearts. People chase after money, likes and sex, thinking that eventually they will find some meaning to their existence. They can't see what is right in front of their eyes. I think it's time to start a new religion.

Men have no connection to their family, to their neighbors or to nature anymore. I’m just one lonely soul among millions, stranded in these giant high-tech necropolis that we call cities.
A man-made man, living in a virtual insanity.

But none of that matters, because soon, there will be no sound, for we will all live underground.

Humans, normies are beyond repair. I am beyond repair. There is no happiness, no way out of suffering, no end of the tunnel, only more suffering. Communism, paradise, the kingdom of God, those were all chimeras.

Happiness, justice, beauty, they don’t exist in this world. Some people call this optimistic nihilism but there’s nothing « optimistic » about it. There is no hope, no redemption, no silver lining, nothing matters anymore. Nothing matters and therefore I’m free : free from morality, free from meaning, free from purpose. And that’s why I dance. I’m going to keep grooving and nothing can stop me because nothing matters to me anymore.

There is no redemption. I have zero diplomas and zero professional experience. I suck at everything and have the operational capabilities of a five year old.

There is no friendship. I failed everyone and they all left me. I have zero friends not even online. I’m all alone all the time.

There is no love. I have no romantic life and in fact, at 24, I’ve never had any romantic action at all in my entire life. I’ve never even held hands with a girl let alone kissed one.

I don’t have enough money to eat good stuff. All I do all day is distract myself from my misery by drinking beer and playing mind-numbing video games. I barely sleep at all. My back hurts, my eyes are sore from watching screens all day and my thoughts are foggy. I’m all alone, trapped forever in this disco inferno. Burn, baby burn.

Now you’re probably thinking that I should just end myself. That it’s too embarrassing for me to stay alive. My life is a disaster, my whole existence was a mistake. I’ve got 2 liters of beer in my blood and I finished an entire pack of sleeping pills.

So why can’t I stop dancing like an idiot? I just can’t control my feet. I dance because I have this terrible feeling of dread and hopelessness in my heart. That everything is fucked up and that the whole world is going to shit. I’ve got that boogie in me.
I dance because when you have nothing left to lose, anywhere can be boogie wonderland.

My eyelids are heavy now, everything is becoming blurry and the music sounds more and more distant.
The world is swirling around me. I feel like a mirrored ball.
Please don’t turn the lights off, don’t stop the music. I don’t want to be left alone with my regrets, I don’t want the party to end.
Let the music play. I just want to dance the night away. Let it play on and on, and on and on…

….

Ecosystems are collapsing, fascism is rising and wars are breaking out all over the world. All life on Earth will end and after that black holes will swallow all light and crush into pieces all remaining traces of matter.
It’s the second law of entropy : an isolated system’s entropy can only increase over time. There is no God, no force, no benevolent entity beyond the universe, so it follows that eventually, all change, all movement, all order in the world will cease to be and the universe will inevitably be swallowed by darkness and chaos. It’s ineluctable. It’s disco.

My only contact with the outside world is through streamers, youtube videos and reddit posts. We engage in these parasocial relationships with strangers on the internet, hoping that an ever increasing number of « friends » will fill the void in our hearts. People chase after money, likes and sex, thinking that eventually they will find some meaning to their existence. They can't see what is right in front of their eyes. I think it's time to start a new religion.

Men have no connection to their family, to their neighbors or to nature anymore. I’m just one lonely soul among millions, stranded in these giant high-tech necropolis that we call cities.
A man-made man, living in a virtual insanity.

But none of that matters, because soon, there will be no sound, for we will all live underground.

I’ve been watching The Sopranos recently, and Tony’s relationship with his mother made me realize something about myself that I think played a huge part in my depression and consequent isolation.

I’m incapable of withstanding conflict. Every time something displeases me about something that another person does or says to me, I’m incapable of confronting them about it, and worse, I immediately assume that it’s my fault, that I am doing something wrong, somehow. That’s what psychoanalysts call depression. Depression according to them is a displacement of anger and frustration towards oneself instead of other people. The depressed person will blame themselves for everything bad that happens to them even when it’s not their fault.

I think that’s why I became a hikikomori. Since I’m incapable of expressing my frustration with others, the only way to avoid the accumulation of anger in my chest is to cut others out of my life completely.

By the way, my parents and psychologists always encouraged me in this : when people don’t respect you, just ignore them, cut them out of your life. Well I tried that and, well, you know where this leads…

And this happens all the time, I meet new people, they are nice at first but then, once the novelty wears off and everyone knows where they stand in the social order they start treating me like their punching ball, blaming me for all the little things that frustrate them and I just accept it, I take it all in until eventually I snap and ghost everyone.

« Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in »

Getting back to the Sopranos, I think that this attitude stems from my relationship with my mother. In the show’s first season, Tony is never able to replace Jackie and become the Boss because he doesn’t want to enter in conflict with his uncle. He also has trouble establishing his fatherly authority to his children Meadow and Anthony Jr. Tony can’t assume the figure of « the boss » or « the father » because he has been emasculated by his mother, to the point where he dreams about ducks stealing his penis.

At the beginning of the show, Tony shows considerable affection towards ducks that have taken up residence in his pool. I think that the ducks serve as a metaphor for Tony’s struggle to balance his family life with his mafia business. He tries to treat his uncle, his mother, and his friends like a normal family, but the reality is that his uncle and mother are trying to kill him, and that sometimes he himself must kill those he calls his friends. He tries to get closer to the ducks; he would like to share their tranquility and peaceful joy, but it’s impossible, because if he shows himself to be too gentle and affectionate, he runs the risk of being « emasculated » by others like his uncle, who don’t share his scruples.

Tony’s mother in the show is notorious for being one of television’s most annoying characters. Every word that passes her lips is a complaint or a sarcastic remark directed at her son, even though he goes out of his way to fulfill her every wish. She never has a single word of encouragement for him and constantly belittles his achievements.

The power that she exercises over Tony lies in her incredible capacity for victim hood. She is constantly guilt tripping him about abandoning her or treating her badly (which as other characters point out is completely false) to defuse the frustration that she triggers in him.

My parents have always been very depressed and lonely, even within their marriage, which made it hard for me to hold certain things against them or get angry at them. Deep down, I couldn’t express my resentment or take a side when they were arguing because I didn’t want them to feel cornered, even though they never had the same qualms about me.

In the show, without spoiling too much, Tony is finally able to overcome his depression and become the boss of the mafia, when he realizes that his mother is not the poor, lonely woman that she claims to be, but instead she has been using him as an outlet to vent all of her bitterness.

It was obvious to everyone around him that his mother was leading him on but Tony attributed such power and knowledge to his mother that he was incapable of accepting that she might actually be wrong, and when his psychiatrist points it out to him, that’s when he gets upset and starts shouting.

I think a good question to ask at this point is : Why did Tony have such reluctance to accept criticism about his mother to the point where he almost physically abuses his therapist when she points it out to him?

This is important because I think that ultimately that’s why I’ve been so depressed for most of my life. Psychiatrists say that hikikomori is a form of narcissism, a pathological inability to question oneself. But I think that it might actually be the opposite. Hikikomoris are people that have assimilated social norms so rigidly (studies have shown that hikikomoris don’t reject normality and are even generally speaking conformist in their opinions) that they are completley unable to express frustration at other people, and they displace all of that anger onto themselves where it manifests in the form of automatic self-deprecating thoughts and loss of interest in one’s well-being.

You shouldn’t look at people in bars or cafés.
You shouldn’t look at people’s Instagram profiles.
You shouldn’t think about other people’s sexuality, not even for a second.

Because when you watch, when you give in to temptation, that’s when desire springs up and with it, suffering.

What’s painful isn’t even the sexual frustration. The hardest part is knowing that there are countless stories, filled with twists and turns, setbacks, joys, sorrows, and heartbreaks—and yet, in all of them, not a single one mentions your name. Countless stories, written without you.

I envy other people’s relationships, not just the good parts but also the painful ones. Normies who romanticize the hikikomori condition and who think it’s better never to have been in a relationship than to have gone through breakups don’t know what they’re talking about.

If you believe that it is not worth it to be in a relationship because it will inevitably end, then following that logic, it is not worth it being born at all, because all the things that you acquire in life, aging, death, time will take them away from you.

This is the basis of buddhism. The world is in constant flux, everything has to come to an end, all that comes to life, has to die eventually. It is futile to attach yourself to earthly goods because those attachments can never last. You know that this is the truth, you know that this realization is the basis of enlightenment.

But you also know that this is a delusion, a fiction that you created for yourself, the timeless story of the fox and the grapes…

When I’m sitting in my room, watching streamers or youtube videos, holding conferences with an imaginary audience in front of a mirror (hi! Welcome to my Ted Talk!), watching sitcoms like Friends or HMYM or walking in circles, joking with my imaginary friends, it seems so easy to talk with people, to be normal.

They just seem so close, just beyond the plastic surface of the screen, yet they are so far away…

I never got socialized properly. A big part of why I got rejected in high school was because I literally behaved like an anime character. I thought real people were goofy and cartoonish like characters in Xenoblade or Kingdom Hearts.

I also didn’t understand that I actually had to say stuff and before that, figure out stuff to say. It’s not like video games or anime where dialogue options just spontaneously appear and you only have to press E. So sometimes, I would just stare at people, pressing B in my head to make them talk faster, not unlike baby birds, who never learned that in order to eat the worm, they actually have to put the worm in their mouth, not just open it.

I am the ultimate NPC. Since I have no idea what to talk about with other humans, I just spit random facts at them, that have no relation to the « conversation » or the context. Things like « Did you know? Stretching before bed can help you fall asleep faster and it will increase your stamina for the next day! » or « The Sudan war is an ongoing conflict in north-eastern Africa opposing the SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces) with the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) and the Janjawid Coalition) » and people are like « wait what? ».

My interactions with other people look like dialogues from Oblivion. Random conversations, where the interlocutors barely respond to one another and exhibit completely inadequate emotional responses. And also lots and lots of grunting and anime sounds.

Another way that video games broke my brain was that, since in most games nowadays, your character just automatically accepts any requests that NPCs throw at them, I would do that IRL as well. So I would just do what other people told me to do, for no reason, because there was this sort of expectation, that I would get XP or some kind of reward at the end. It’s like every time someone came up to me and asked me to do something, a little jingle would play in my head and a message bar would appear in my imagination saying « New Quest Accepted ». So I just automatically said yes to every request because in some way, I didn’t know that I could say no. I still struggle with this nowadays.

I struggled to motivate myself to go outside because in video games, the incentive to explore the world are achievements, quest logs or markers on the map. But in real life there are no markers on the map. In real life, you have to make your own quest log. I think I somewhat managed to overcome this by downloading an app called HabitRPG where you make up a list of tasks and by completing them you gain XP and virtual money to buy equipment and cosmetics.

Anyway, all of this is funny but also really sad because I’m completely cooked, there’s no way I’ll ever manage to make friends.

What does it mean to be lonely?

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while now, and it’s why I keep gravitating around shows and video games like Death Stranding or Evangelion.

I asked that question to my former psychologists, I asked that question to sociologists, I asked that question to religious people that I met when I was in the hospital, nobody could give me a satisfying answer.

I keep feeling this void in my heart, this desire for desire, this empty will as Schopenhauer puts it, but nobody is able to help me figure out what it means.

I feel lonely but no matter what kind of activity with others I picture in my mind, none of them feel like they could quench that deep thirst for connection. I tried to tell one of my psychologists how I felt, that I didn’t get anything out of human interactions, that I didn’t understand what was the purpose of it all, that none of my interactions felt « meaningful » but she didn’t seem to get it at all and I’m pretty sure that she just wrote something on her pad like « schizoid » or « social anhedonia » or something.

I know I’m not the only one who feels that way. There are so many people like me even people who are not hikikomoris but feel lonely despite the fact that they talk to other people every day and go out on week-ends and go to parties and live a perfectly normal life.

Recently, I saw a documentary about loneliness in Japan, and I think that the combination of the fact that these thoughts were already swirling around in my head plus the general climate of skepticism towards modern ideals of individualism and self-development that’s infused in the books I read and the videos I watch; because of all of that, I had an epiphany.

Individualism wants you to live for yourself. The ultimate goal of life is self-actualization, to realize yourself as a person. But this is not at all what life is about. I can attest (and I think everyone here will say the same) that living an existence where all of your bodily needs are met, where you don’t have to expect anything from anyone ever, and in return, they don’t expect anything of you, that existence, the perfect expression of a perfectly individualistic lifestyle, that, is a miserable existence.

Because life is not about living for yourself, it’s about living for others. People keep searching for an « objective » meaning to their lives as if life had meaning in-itself, in abstraction of all the relationships that make their existence possible in the first place. That’s why they look for God or « human nature » or political figures that would have some « objective » point of view and hence could give their lives meaning. But it’s pointless because in-itself, life doesn’t have any meaning. The meaning of one’s existence is defined by the community, the relationships in which they take part. It’s not just that a lonely existence has no meaning, the very concept of meaning for an individual life, abstracted away from the social fabric in which it is embedded, makes no sense.

Loneliness isn’t just any feeling, it isn’t just a « lack of oxytocin » or noradrenaline or whatever psychiatric bullshit.

No, it has a much deeper meaning than that. It is revelatory of a deep existential unease. It is the most fundamental existential affect from which all other existential affects such as nausea or absurdity are derived.

It is the feeling of alienation. People feel lonely because they feel useless or replaceable.

Being useful to someone, that is the meaning of life, that is what constitutes a genuine raison d’être (reason to be). Life isn’t about pleasure, it isn’t about « success », money, sex or self-realization whatever that may mean. It’s about feeling useful for someone. That’s why people make children or adopt pets. They aren’t looking for someone to take care of them, they are looking for someone to take care of. Someone that could become the purpose of their existence.

How many people postpone their suicide, because they think « I can’t do this I have to keep going at least as long as my cat/dog is still alive and needs me. »? Camus said that the meaning of life is whatever keeps you from killing yourself.

Well for millions of people around the world that reason is literally their pet.

This is where motivation comes from and this why lonely people and especially hikikomoris are so apathetic. We are often guilt tripped by stories of people who managed to overcome adversity despite the pressure of having the responsibility of their family or their children lives on their shoulder. But these people aren’t motivated in spite of the pressure, they are motivated because of the pressure. This is where strength comes from, the so-called resilience or determination that all the gurus and life coaches keep rambling about. Resilience, the strength to live, the willingness to live comes from having someone that needs you.

It is so much easier to live for someone else than it is to live for yourself, and that’s why the hikikomori life is so laborious. I don’t lack resilience, I’m not lazy, I just lack purpose.

I think that this might be the way out of this lifestyle. Maybe instead of going out to try and meet people that could help me or keep me accompany, I should try and go out to meet people that I could help or keep company to. Maybe that is the answer I’ve been looking for. Maybe.

Hi guys, as you may know there are dangerous individuals around here called normies. These people are dangerous and must not be engaged with in any circumstances. Here's a list of common beliefs held by normies, that will help you to recognize them :

1. They think that being a hikikomori is a privilege, that hikikomoris are spoiled. They romanticize isolation and use hikis as stepladders to boost their ego. If hikis and normies have the same problems but normies manage to live normally and be useful to society anyway, then the only difference must be that normies are morally superior. However that is not the case : hikis experience levels of rejection and isolation that normies can't even begin to comprehend and it's perfectly understandable that they end up isolating because everyone would do the same in the same conditions.

2. They think that hikikomoris are like this out of laziness or hypersensibility. That is not the case, most hikis isolated consequently to intense experiences of rejection and their isolation and self-pity is only a defense mechanism against that. Self pity isn't the cause of isolation, it's the consequence of it.

3. They will enjoin you to "improve your life" as if the hiki was in this situation out of bad faith and lack of resilience. The truth is, although working on one's lifestyle (eating more healthily, exercising, getting sunlight) can improve one's quality of life, none of these are enough to solve the isolation.

4. They think hiki behavior is a form of passive aggression against society and the hiki's parents. This is typical normie mentality, they make everything about themselves. The problem is no longer the hikis suffering but their parents shame of having such an "ungrateful" child. Some hikis might become aggressive but it's a consequence of their isolation and their inability to have any control over their lives. Aggression is not the cause of the isolation, it's a consequence of it.

5. They think hikikomoris are parasites, profiting from their parents and society at large. Hikis are not voluntarily exploiting their parents, they do it because they have no other choice except death and even then, hikis are conscious of what their parents do for them and that's why they try to reduce their cost of living as much as possible because they know they can't give back what they take. Besides, there are millionaires and billionaires that have become rich because they steal most of work's value based on property titles that they inherited, but normies don't blame them for being parasites. In terms of orders of magnitude, this is where the money for common resources go : in the rich guy's third yacht, not in the hiki's 1 dollar ramen.

I cannot stress this enough, If you ever meet one of those people, DO NOT engage contact with them. Block them and report them to the hiki police immediately.