Hello, Meaninglessness!

 Hello, meaninglessness! I’m reluctantly letting you back into my life. Or rather, you barge in uninvited, smashing everything around. Still, this isn’t the first time, so it’s almost a bit boring. This time, it happened at the worst possible moment—or at least it wasn’t part of my plans.

I’d just started my two-week shift; it was the second day. Before that, I’d been slacking off, giving in to laziness, so I decided to make up for it. I stocked up on healthy groceries, made a delicious salad, and cooked rice for lunch at work. In the morning, I drank water and ate oatmeal with a mix of nuts and berries, drizzled with honey. The details of my diet aren’t important—I was just trying to eat right. I also decided to add some physical activity, so I started doing a short morning workout and walked as much as possible at work. On the first day, my smartwatch logged twenty-eight and a half thousand steps, and I decided I’d aim for at least thirty thousand in the first week, then raise the bar or add tougher exercises if I didn’t have time for forty or fifty thousand steps. In short, I was brimming with enthusiasm and energy to strengthen my body and, along the way, my spirit, since that was part of the plan too.
But on the second day, everything crumbled into tiny shards with a single message from my friend Lisa. She showed me something I’d seen for months but stubbornly refused to acknowledge. My sense of self-importance had taken the form of one of the pillars holding up and driving my life. Since that pillar gave me a lot of energy and motivation, I knew I’d have to shatter it someday, but I didn’t think it would happen so soon.
“Just wait, and I’ll show everyone what I’m worth!” That thought hid well behind masks of other beliefs and never came to me in its raw form. Though I didn’t notice it, that thought largely pushed me forward. It made me look down on many people, even though I convinced myself I wasn’t doing that. It spun fictional scenarios in my head where I towered over others. It was the thought I refused to see until someone pointed it out directly.
I don’t know if I’m truly ready to dive into this. But I no longer have a choice. As much as I’d like to push this issue into the future, I can’t—it’s already happened, and denying it would be plain stupid. I tried to sort it out right away, but instead of understanding anything, I only made it worse. By the time I realized sadness was overtaking me and irritability was creeping in, it was too late. Meaninglessness, furiously smashing the pillar that held my motivation, stormed into my soul, and I sank. I stopped understanding what I was doing or why. I stopped understanding why I should do anything at all. I stopped understanding why I should even live. I realized one thing: I was trying to find meaning in everything only because I saw no meaning in my own life. I walked through the mall, barely holding back tears. It was like my whole life had been crossed out, but there was no new draft—just an obsolete rough copy. Hoping I could find something by digging deeper, I tried to pull myself together and think it over again. But I couldn’t. I hit a new problem. Usually, when I want to think about something my brain resists, it instantly switches me to random nonsense, but I’d noticed that long ago and knew how to fight it. Now, the problem was that there were no thoughts at all. When I tried to delve into the issue, no thoughts on the topic came, and the strangest part was that no other thoughts came either. When I tried to tackle this question, I just stopped thinking, slipping unintentionally into some amorphous state. It was too weird for me, and I gave up trying. Questions challenging the meaning of my existence kept swirling in my head. Why am I here, in this town, in this country, on this planet—why? What am I doing here? What am I supposed to do? Do I even want to do anything? Why am I alive? Who am I? If I don’t understand why I’m alive, how can I know who I am? Do I even want to live? If yes, then why? If no, why am I still alive? If I don’t know why I’m living, what’s the point of talking to people, working, or leisure at home? Why do I need this job? I could easily buy a little house in a village and live there alone, growing food in a garden. But that seemed meaningless too, with the same question: “Why bother?”

I saw I got a message. Lisa wrote that she wouldn’t keep looking after my plant, which I left with her when I went to work for two weeks. I knew this would happen someday, but again, I didn’t think it’d be so soon. This was bad news for me. Lisa loves plants and treats them so well. My coffee tree looked full of life when she gave it back last time. I don’t know anyone who could care for it as well as she did. I didn’t want to entrust it to anyone else. When I bought the coffee tree, I knew I’d have to part with it eventually, but back then, I didn’t think much of it—“It’s just a plant,” I thought. Since I don’t want to leave it with anyone else, I see only one option: I’ll have to give it away permanently. And I really don’t want to do that—I don’t want to so much it brings me to tears. I’m an idiot who created this problem myself. When I bought it, I knew this would happen; I just didn’t think it’d be so hard. With everything piling up, I was barely holding back tears. During my last patrol, I went into an abandoned hotel, sat on the floor, leaned against the wall, and just started crying. Tears poured and poured; it was hard to stop. The silence of the abandoned hotel was broken only by strange sounds that constantly echoed through, giving the impression it was haunted, scaring most people away. So, the crying of a person who no longer understood why they were alive fit perfectly in a place with ghosts.

The next day, I kept walking, racking up thousands of steps, but I had no goals anymore—I was just walking. Actually, I don’t think I was doing it for no reason; physical activity probably took some of my attention, so I had to think less. To think even less, I listened to something on YouTube all day. I didn’t want to think because I didn’t understand what my thoughts were about. I was still very sad about having to part with my plant, but that was the only emotion I truly felt. I couldn’t feel joy or anything else; I couldn’t even pull emotions from strong memories. I didn’t want to be sad, so I put off my feelings about the coffee tree until I saw it again. Only when I write do I feel something, but it’s so faint I can’t identify it.
That night, I didn’t sleep well, waking up several times and unable to fall back asleep for a while. One reason I was exercising was to get tired. I wanted to fall asleep quickly from exhaustion and sleep through the night. Unfortunately, that wasn’t happening. After a shower, my fatigue was almost completely gone, so even falling asleep quickly didn’t work. Plus, I noticed I don’t need much sleep to recover anymore, even with heavy exercise. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I not only felt rested, but my leg, which had been hurting and making me limp for half the previous day, was completely fine. So, though I tried to hold onto a sleepy state, I couldn’t fall back asleep for a while. I was lying on my back, almost asleep, when suddenly I felt something from the left side of the bed rushing toward me. It was so intense and unexpected that I instinctively opened my eyes wide, took a deep breath, sat up slightly, my body tensed, and my heart started pounding hard and fast. It lasted a few seconds, then I calmed down. I thought it was odd to fear something when I didn’t understand the point of my life. But the fear was there. It lingered for a few minutes, but I knew there was nothing left to fear. This happens sometimes, and this fear is very different from normal fears. Usually, I might be scared of a big dog, a bear, or something threatening my life—fear that comes from the mind. The fear I feel when I sense something I can’t see or understand, I’d call body fear. My mind seems to shut off in those moments, but my body is pierced by a feeling not even like fear but more like horror, and it reacts on its own.

In the morning, I didn’t want to get up and snoozed my alarm several times. The first two times, in those ten-minute gaps, I managed to fall asleep and even dream. The third time, I couldn’t, so I accepted that it was time to get up. All day, I tried to distract myself, but even the muted sense of not understanding my place at work or in this world kept me from fully relaxing. The fact that this wasn’t my first time sinking into meaninglessness gave me the right to take it more lightly and not worry too much. But realizing this kept happening again and again troubled me more and deeper each time. It’s like I’m stuck in a loop that tightens with every turn. I don’t know what goal I’ll find to keep feeling this life or if I’ll find one at all, but it’s like I no longer want to want anything. Almost all my wants are pure disappointment, leading only to suffering. I want something and see it as my goal, but after a while, it shatters into tiny pieces I don’t want to pick up because I stop seeing value in them. When everything falls apart, the phase of meaninglessness sets in, leading to a new, seemingly strong and unbreakable goal. It repeats over and over, tightening the loop. I’m not sure of anything anymore. If I find a new goal, how solid will it be? How long will it fuel me? What if it lasts a few years and then crumbles too? Then I’d have to write off those years. I don’t want to waste time on things that break. I want to find something eternal, but I increasingly doubt I’ll succeed. On the other hand, they say nothing is eternal, so maybe, paradoxically, change is the eternal stability. But then where do I find strength if everything keeps changing? There must be something worth holding onto. I’m tired of being disappointed in myself and the world. I only stop feeling disappointment and bad emotions in the state I’m in now, but I don’t like it because there’s nothing good here—there’s nothing at all. In a way, it’s a good state if you wrap up all your affairs: it’s shapeless, with no sadness, joy, expectations, or fears, but also no motivation or zest for life. I don’t know what’s next. All I can do now is tie up loose ends and wait. Wait for what? I don’t know. Will I find it? I don’t know. Right now, I only know one thing: I know absolutely nothing.