I’m tired. Tired of life. And I hate that I complain so much, while everyone else probably feels the same and is still trying their best to hope, to move, to do whatever they can.
Modern life is a strange paradox. On one hand, we are surrounded by abundance — of knowledge, technology, comfort. On the other, we are collapsing internally. Our minds are overstimulated, our souls undernourished. We live in a world designed to occupy us, not fulfill us. Every day, we must prove our usefulness to systems that would forget us the moment we stopped producing. We are expected to be efficient machines while pretending to be content human beings.
Life, in its complexity, feels strangely profound to me. The very fact that I get to experience consciousness — to be aware of reality as something separate from myself, and the fact that I can have a shot at understanding it — feels unreal. When you see how it’s all just the outcome of mechanisms that have been at play, unfolding, for billions of years, it feels almost sacred. To imagine all that had to happen — the infinite number of dots that had to connect perfectly at all moments — for you, or anything as you know it, to even exist at all — it’s overwhelming. From the beginning of time, all of it leading up to this. And here you are, living a life that somehow feels distinct from the rest of the universe, from nature itself.
I think of it like this: somewhere deep in the ocean, an earthquake hits. A shockwave ripples through the water. It travels molecule to molecule, energy passing forward, creating waves after waves until it all evens out. Those waves, lucky things, they just are. They exist, and that’s enough. But us, we’re forced to face absurdities every day just to survive. To pay to live on a planet we were born on. To chase numbers on screens as proof that we deserve to eat, to rest, to exist. We are forced to prove our own humanity over and over again in the endless rituals of modern life.
Even though I want to experience this reality fully — as if I was meant to, (as if it mattered) — these struggles wear me down. Every day. Sometimes it makes me wonder if life is even worth it. The systems around me suffocate me with monotony. The repetition, the performative optimism, the constant pretending that things make sense; it’s exhausting. And in those moments, I find myself wishing for death, no drama, but out of fatigue.
I sometimes imagine what I’d be if I were born and was this exact person (impossible hypothetical, it seems) a few centuries back. Probably dead, or rotting in some cell for being too loud and useless at the same time. Maybe a king would’ve hung me just to make a point. I know I’m privileged to even have the space to think this way — but that doesn’t change how helpless and sad I feel.
I wish I weren’t such a failure at adapting to society. I wish the idea of working didn’t make me sick to my stomach. I wish just existing were enough. Like the wave — born, moved, and gone…without having to prove a thing.
But to be human is to be trapped in contradiction. We are the only creatures aware enough to ask “why” and yet powerless enough to never find an answer that satisfies. We invented meaning because the silence of the universe was unbearable. And now, we are crushed beneath the very systems we built to escape it. The absurdity is that we must earn our right to live while knowing that none of it will matter in the end.
The waves make me envious. The waves live, move, and just end…never having to explain a thing.