Ever Year Is A Piece Of Shit

The faded yellow light of the room bears relentlessly down on me in the last minutes of the year. The soft greys and blacks of my desktop's dark mode seem like a good - but not perfect - metaphor for the colors with which I've painted my life for years now. And just as I'm cooling off from another frustrating and utterly pointless game in which I can barely achieve anything above average, I realize once again just how much I hate everything.

I would blame it all on the year before, or on the year before that. I'm trying to pinpoint a moment when the crisis began - when the boulder began rolling downhill. But it's like I'm trying to get to the outer door in an infinite building, and with every deeper reason on which I try to pin the misery of life, I just step through another door. The most recent agitator has been my own family, and my realization that I love them but don't like them. That seems like a good reason why I feel shit, until I put the year on paper and really look at it up close.

On paper the year's been fine. More good outcomes than bad. More positive than negative. Selfcare and therapy in heaps, small steps instead of the infinite pursuit of perfection. Yet the year feels shitty. So I dig deeper - step through another door - and then the culprit must be the state of my life up until that point. It's just a deep pit to climb out of. But another door, and another reason is the shitty state of the world. Another door, and another and, I run past the myriad of reasons that fundamentally make it practically impossible to have a decent or better life.

And then I hit a patch of crisp, cold air. I've made it outside. I wasn't sure I would ever get there. But what I find through that final door is no great comfort. Turns out, humanity is just pretty shit as a whole. Instead of the capable, potential-filled species that's been romanticized in the writings of a dozen optimistic philosophers, we are still just prisoners of our lizard brains. Or, if not our own, then other people's lizard brains. Proverbial passengers doomed to watch as the species tries to drag itself out of the muck on the backs and at the expense of each individual of that very species - and at the expense of everything else around it.

I believed it all once. The goodness of humanity. That the good outweighed the bad. That when really pushed to it, as a species, we'd pull together. "Look for the helpers". The kindness underlying every tragedy. But the overwhelming evidence of our world says otherwise. The overwhelming evidence of history repeating itself says otherwise. Technology and knowledge advances and we multiply like ants and yet we only seem more capable of understanding just how badly the cost of those advancements will fuck us.

Maybe it is the plunge before another era of greater human civilization. Maybe, if you view the species as one organism, we *are* doing well. But if that's the perspective necessary to be optimistic about the future, then we have failed and always will fail the promise that so many people have dreamt of. The promise that every person matters; the promise that everyone could have a better life; the promise that life on earth could be good.

Maybe we are just engineered to never trust a good thing. To see the bad in everything. Maybe we evolved to be depressed because we could never trust things when they are good. I don't really know what to do with that. I would almost prefer if we are just selfish by choice, victims of our own reluctance to outgrow the petty biological imperatives that stop us from being kind and gentle and good to *all* others. At least then I could be disappointed in us. And if I could be disappointed, it means there was at least a slim thing that we had cause to hope for.

I don't know how to deal with the crushing inevitability of the other option. So maybe that's the secret of life. Learn to deal with crushing inevitability.