Apathy

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Ever since I was a small child, if I wanted something, I worked very hard to get it. I started trying to desensitize myself to bright lights when I was 4, if I remember correctly, by forcing myself to stare into them, and I kept my eyes open long after tears had started to flow. And I did things like that whenever I had a problem for as long as I can remember.

Now my body is much better adapted to basically everything than it was before. I can trust it to know what to do in most cases in a way I could not for most of my life, which lets me relax in a way that used to be impossible. That is the only thing in my life that I have worked hard at that seems to have done me any good. Everything else good or bad that has happened to me has seemed to happen irrespective of how hard I worked, or how much I thought I deserved something.

I am dependent in almost every way on other people, who on the whole I find boring and unworthy of respect (although I try to keep that sentiment to myself). Other people grow food for me, make my shelter, educate me, make the internet, etc. Even things that are supposed to be under your control, like the grades you get in school, seem utterly random to me. I went on an exchange last year, and I worked harder at school that year than any other year in my life, and I learned more too, but I didn't end up getting any credit. This semester one of the best grades I got was a 8/10 on the homework, and I got the right answer and the teacher actually wrote that he liked my explanation on the page. If he liked my explanation for how I got the right answer, then why do I get only 8/10 points? Things like this happen in every class, and whenever I ask for an explanation, I sincerely do not understand the answer. It seems like they just arbitrarily take away points. It is not uncommon for me to get Fs on assignments that I spent hours working on and are 100% correct. They are all math and science classes, so whether or not my answers or my work is correct is not subject to interpretation. I think this is part of the reason I dislike people on the whole so much. Math and science to me seem to be the only human things that have ever existed that are objectively true, and consistent, but even the people who are considered experts on them fall so short, and knowing in my head that I did it correctly is not going to help me get a job to take care of myself in the future. They say in school that what gets you hired is being able to get the job done, but my unskilled work experience + my academic career seem to say otherwise. It's making people like you that gets you what you want, but I don't like most people and I'm not interested in making them like me.

I worked myself silly in high school trying to improve my social skills, and I improved them a lot, but all the relationships I can think of that meant the most to me do not seem to have been helped much by it. It seems like what matters most is if I run into kind and interesting people, and that is not something I have control over.

I do not work on anything as hard anymore as I used to work on nearly everything when I was a child. It just doesn't feel like it is ever worth it. And I've already experienced all the adventure and excitement that I ever wanted to experience. I know what it's like to be suicidal, to be loved, to not be loved, to be so physically stressed that the body disobeys commands (and in numerous ways, due to hunger, hypothermia, etc), and I have access to all of written history to experience indirectly anything I could possibly wish. The whole world seems kind of gray to me now, and nothing is ever very happy or sad to me anymore. Even trying to understand how the world works, and trying to find someone to love and be loved by, and to start a family, no longer seem very appealing to me. Those things used to be all that mattered to me. Maybe they don't seem appealing to me because I no longer believe that I have any control over those things. I'm just a small, frail, mortal chemical reaction, that is aware in some incomplete sense of its own existence, and can sometimes trick itself into thinking that its desires actually mean something. I don't, and no person has ever had the ability to do anything very interesting of his own power. We only have the power to trick large masses of other people into fulfilling our dreams for us, to be lucky enough for our dreams to be handed to us from birth. You can work hard at a skilled career, but the opportunity to do so had nothing to do with you.

I used to dream about finding a girlfriend and starting a family, or maybe of coming up with math that no one had ever thought of before, but now I think more often about being a god-like being. Not the cantankerous type of God who thinks the earth is flat, that the cure for leprosy is bird sacrifice, and who expects people to worship him, but just some being that is invulnerable, so that I can leave everyone and everything and mind my own damned business in peace. I just want to be able to work hard at something and for my work to be worth something. It is stupid and childish, I know.