It’s Feeling Really Dystopian Right Now
As I write this, I feel like life is an Orwellian nightmare. I recall little Christian me, thinking about the afterlife and hating both Hell and Heaven. Do you love it here?
I don’t know if I’ll ever outgrow my thinking that the world is a largely dystopian hellscape.
As I write this, there are several PHED meters running low on units and beeping at their grating frequency. They make me feel like I’m in an Orwellian nightmare. And the thing is, I am.
I haven’t gotten good sleep more than twice in 2 weeks. I’ve spent almost 2 hrs in transit almost every day for these two weeks. There is the incessant whirring of Keke Napeps, and the neighbors are so paranoid that my sitting on the stairs is cause for alarm. The residents of this city have nothing nice to say about it, and this is feeding my anxiety.
Today (25-10-2023), I thought I was going to be kidnapped in a bus that was overcrowded with no potential escape route. That is coupled with the fact that there was a downpour that drenched me today, and I missed my stop twice.
I’m exhausted.
And I’m thinking about how all this investment is in pursuit of a dream I’ve never had.
You know there’s a difference between breaking a sweat or bleeding for something you desire and doing the same in obeisance to social expectations and Nigeria’s economy.
To prevent me from sharing more of my life than I’m currently comfortable with, I want to expand the “I never asked for this™️” to cover my whole life.
All my life, I’ve felt that I wasn’t supposed to be born. To this moment, I harbor traces of resentment towards my parents for bringing me here. I know they didn’t have my interest at heart when they did it, but oh well. I understand. Who doesn’t?
I remember a prayer point from my early years when adults would thank God for the “gift of life”, and even as a small child, I would wonder how it was a gift. I couldn’t understand why others didn’t see things this way…Didn’t think being sentient in this world was too draining and that it would be better to not exist.
I recall little Christian me, thinking about the afterlife and hating both Hell and Heaven. Wondering why I couldn’t be compensated with the peace of eternal sleep. I thought Christian God was unfair to say we had a choice when both were horrid.
I would spend hours thinking about how he could pull off infinite days in Heaven (or Paradise). I resolved this conundrum by bringing a material theory that the universe was constantly expanding. I conclude that it would give me lots to explore so I that I wouldn’t be bored out of my mind after the first 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 trillion centuries.
However, this was not my primary means of resolving this question.
My primary resolution was that we, the special ones who didn’t get the worse eternity in Hell, would enjoy eternity by always waking up with our memories erased. Anyways, I soon stopped contemplating, decided God would love me enough to leave me out of an afterlife, and focused on the one I already had to deal with. Eventually, I shed the bulk of beliefs earned from my society’s attempt at Christian indoctrination.
Till today, I cannot understand why humans love life. Not to talk of wanting it to be infinite. But I guess I’m the one who is defective. The dysfunctional mind looking a gift horse in the mouth.
I wonder if the majority still love life. These days, I sense so much more despair. I don’t believe it can be explained away as my peers just expressing the consequences of adulthood. Do you guys still think it is better to have than to not have been born?
Maybe I’m reacting to my specific iteration of life, being a working-class, black African woman living in Nigeria.
Maybe someday soon, I’ll have another kind, and I will finally understand and be thankful for the gift of life.
Felt this. To be honest, even if one gets a different iteration of life. Concluding that life is a gift based on whether or not one has it easy is just …selfish? What about everyone else who can’t have it as good?
Ultimately sometimes I still wonder if any outcome could justify the entirety of humanity having to go through this thing called ‘life’ especially when taking into account all the terrible things that come with it.
Anyway…. Nice one !