Life Sucks


We're all trapped.

Each of us is stuck being who we are. Sometimes we fight to change ourselves, but
ultimately this has little effect. We can change what we do, but we cannot change who we
are.

If you're a happy person, you don't feel trapped. If you're surrounded by people who you
love and who love you, if you can do what you want to do in life, if you are at peace with
who you are, why would you ever feel trapped? You wouldn't want to change yourself, you
wouldn't need to try.

If you're a happy person, hey, you got lucky! Go back to the previous page, you'll find
nothing of interest here.

I am not a happy person. Maybe you're not either. Maybe you're too fat, or too thin, too old,
or too young. Maybe you're ugly and nobody wants to sleep with you. Maybe everyone
wants to sleep with you, but nobody loves you and it's all meaningless. Maybe your body is
fucked up and you're in pain all the time. Maybe your mind is fucked up and you're in pain
all the time.

So you struggle with all these problems year after year, and you're getting nowhere, and
you wonder if anything will ever change. And the unavoidable reality of it all is that, for you,
life sucks.

But of course you're not going to give up so easily, you're going to keep struggling to
solve your problems, to change yourself, to find happiness, wherever it is, whatever it is.
But still, life sucks.

And you see all these people out there who are blissfully free of your problems, and if they
can do it, there must be some way for you to as well. But they aren't doing you any good at
all, they don't understand what it's like being you, and what good would it do you if they did
understand?

So, the forces which created you, random or otherwise, have spoken. And they've
determined that, for you, life sucks.

All of your life, you've been lied to.

You've been told what life is supposed to be about. Grow up, do well in school, make
friends, get a girlfriend or boyfriend, get a good job, get married, get a nice house and
have kids. Watch tv, go to church, vote, find some hobbies to entertain you. Donate
money to charity. Go on vacation. Get old, retire, spend time with the grandkids. Look
back on your life with nostalgia, look forward to the afterlife of your choosing.

This is what you're supposed to do, this is what normal people do. This is what everyone
else is doing. Oh sure, there are a few aberrations here and there, sometimes some
people slip off this track, but you can get back on at any time.

Of course, when you actually look at the world around you, you may see something
entirely different.

See that young married couple living next door, with the wife gardening in the front yard
while the kids play out back? She's snowed under with Xanax all the time, without which
she'd be in a continuous state of anxiety. And her 6 year old son, he's following in mom's
footsteps already, taking his daily dose of Ritalin to keep him tranquil enough to sit still all
day at school.

She stopped sleeping with her husband several years ago, but that's ok, cause he
sneaks off a couple times a week and has sex with street prostitutes in the back seat of
his car, or a nearby motel. He feels a bit bad for them, and tips them extra.

His favorite prostitute is always glad to see him, because he's pleasant enough and an
easy $75. Too bad they can't all be like him. She gets beaten up and raped by johns
multiple times a year, but that's ok, she can handle it, cause even at its worst this job is
still better than what she went through as a child. Besides, there's no other way she could
support her crack cocaine habit.

And the cop who tries to arrest her, last night he arrested the neighborhood marijuana
dealer, then went home and got nice and legally drunk on jack daniels.

And the cop's daughter, the pretty high school cheerleader, sneaks off and vomits after
every meal so she won't get fat.

But these are all small scale problems. Don't forget that, several times a century, often
enough to happen at least once during the average human lifetime, all the most powerful
nations of the world divide up into sides and begin slaughtering anyone they can find on
the opposing side by the millions. This is agreed by all to be unfortunate but necessary.

And the city you live in, if you're in a western country and living in a city, has already been
targetted by some country's nuclear weaponry. A few pushes of the right buttons, and
you'll be vaporized, or survive and live in some radioactive wasteland. But that's ok,
because it probably won't happen in the immediate future, so you might as well go out
and buy the week's groceries.

Beneath the thin veneer of civilization lies a howling madness, and the average normal
human being has the ability to commit genocide during the day, then come home and
tuck the kids in at night, or to ignore the pain of a billion people in misery while mowing
the lawn or doing christmas shopping.

The Big Lie is that all of the problems of human life are separate. If you
compartmentalize them all, you can convince yourself that once you lose that 40 pounds,
or get more money, or get your husband to stop beating you, or finally kick that addiction,
you'll be a normal happy person like everyone else. And once you get the right politician
elected, or win the war, or convert the infidels to your religion, the world will be a happy
place.

The problems of life are all symptoms of the same cause. The locks on your doors
which you need to keep out burglars, the schoolyard bully, the serial killer, the drug
addict, the drug dealer, the billionaire who thinks he's being exploited by the poor, the
millions of soldiers fighting for peace, the enslavement or slaughter of entire races of
people, and your own unhappiness, all are interconnected. They are all part of one
problem.

I wish I could define the problem for you, or offer a solution. Human beings seem to
have a basic design flaw. We're a fucked up species, striving to be healthy and happy
while simultaneously destroying ourselves and each other in a million different ways.

The only positive note I can end this on is that it's better to understand all this than to be
ignorant of it, I think.

Let's assume, for a moment, that there is a God. We may not know the nature of God, or
which religion comes closest to the truth, but we can be sure of one thing:

God does not love you.

Look at all the cruelty and misery in the world, which God does nothing to stop. Right now,
as you are reading this, there are children in various places around the world being raped
and tortured. Most of us would risk our lives, give up our lives, to save them if we could.
God stands by and does nothing. God has abandoned these children, and clearly does not
love them. God does not love you, either.

There are some religions which claim that "God's love is a different kind of love", which is
supposed to explain and justify what appears to be God's divine indifference. This is total
bullshit. If I claim that I love my neighbor, and then set his house on fire and shoot him in
the head, anyone can see that my "love" is not love at all.

Another fallacy along these lines is the statement that, "God doesn't give us more than we
can handle in life". This is a ridiculous statement. Go to a mental institution, go to the ward
for those who are seriously disturbed, and you'll see people who just sit and rock back and
forth all day, staring off into space, or screaming at nonexistant terrors. God has given
them more than they could handle, and now they're totally broken.

So you have no loving God watching over you, making sure you get what you need. You
don't get what you need in life, you don't get what you want, you don't get what you
deserve. You get what you get.

The problem with therapy is that it doesn't actually work.

This is because psychology and psychiatry barely qualify as sciences at all. They are
sciences in their infancy, much like where medical science was 200 years ago. Consider
medicine in 1800 or so, before the discovery of DNA, viruses, and bacteria. Surgery was
being done, diseases were being treated, there were plenty of theories as to the cause of
disease and the ways to stay healthy. Most of these theories were wrong, and most of the
treatments for diseases did nothing of value, or were even harmful. Some worked quite
well.

This is comparable to where psychology and psychiatry are today. Their practitioners
have no true understanding of the human psyche and human personality. What they have
is a large amount of data, based on lots of research. They've looked at this data, and
figured out that psychological symptoms tend to cluster together in common patterns,
which they refer to as disorders. Manic depressive personality disorder, attention deficit
disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, etc.

They've also found that certain drugs will mask to some extent the symptoms for some of
these "disorders". So, tranquilizers for anxiety disorders, antidepressants for depressive
disorders, and so on. They have no real understanding of why these drugs work, and the
only theory they've been able to come up with is that these drugs are correcting a
chemical imbalance in the brain. This is clearly ridiculous, the idea that somehow, after
millions of years of evolution designed to perfect us, 50% of human beings have
chemical imbalances in their brains.

None of this gives them any sort of true understanding of the human psyche, and as a
result they can't actually cure anyone who has psychological problems. Don't take my
word for this, look at the evidence out in the world. If people could be cured, why not cure
criminals? Instead of putting them in prison, send them off to be cured and make them
happy functioning members of society. Of course this isn't being done, because
therapists don't have the ability to do so.

Take pedophiles, for example. Their primary problem, besides the willingness to abuse
children, is the fact that their sexual orientation is towards children. Children turn them on
sexually. If we could cure them, if we could alter them psychologically so that they were
no longer sexually attracted to children, they would never molest a child again. But
therapists have zero ability to do this, they have never done this a single time with anyone.
At best, they can possibly get the pedophile not to act on his desires, but the desires will
still be there.

This is not to say that therapy is totally worthless. If you want a paid friend who will listen to
you talk about your troubles, go see a therapist. If you don't understand yourself or your
actions very well, it could be helpful to you to have someone intelligent and objective
analyze you. If you make stupid decisions in your life and need the assistance of
someone with more common sense than yourself, a therapist can certainly be helpful.
"Well Sarah, since your husband beats you all the time, and since you don't want to be
beaten all the time, have you considered leaving him?"

And if you're tired of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and other such drugs, and want access
to some cool prescription drugs, go see a psychiatrist for your mood-altering needs.
Maybe Xanax or Valium or Paxil can finally make you feel the way you want to feel.

But if you were actually hoping to change yourself psychologically, too bad, therapists
don't know enough to help with that. They can help you change what you DO, perhaps,
since you yourself can change what you do. But they don't know how to change who you
are.