latenightnoir

I'm not even sure I can explain this to myself in a sufficiently coherent manner, it may be the biggest cognitive dissonance I've ever had to digest.

I look around me and, while I know everything I see is real, that it's happening, that I can reach out and touch it at any time, I just... it doesn't make any sense. I'm talking about society, about the weather, about how I see people behaving with other people (or, to be more specific, seeing how people behave as though they alone are real and everyone else around them is... I don't know what, but most certainly not people, considering how they treat eachother), I look at everything that surrounds me on this planet, and I feel more detached, more distant from reality than ever before.

At the same time, I've never in my life felt more connected to existence beyond that. I can feel as though I belong in the Universe. I feel it unfolding around me, inside me, I feel tied to every atom, feel my atoms fitting in with the rest, perfectly, as though I were calmly floating in a pleasantly warm river of Everything. I feel my beginning, I feel my end, and while it both overjoys and saddens me, it doesn't disturb me. I am here, exactly where I'm supposed to be, in this Universe, tied to everything else which is, which has been, which will be. I am part of the endless oscillation and am at peace with the ride, overjoyed I get to see it, to understand it, to be aware of it.

I've worked so hard to get here, to finally feel like I deserve to exist, to breathe from one moment to the next, to take up space alongside everyone and everything else. To feel like I belong to something, like I have a place somewhere, for whatever reason. And I finally have it. Well, technically I've always had it, even before I as a consciousness existed concretely, and will continue to have it even after that, because in a physical system, energy is neither created, nor destroyed. I have always been and will always be, in one form or another, of the Universe.

How, then, am I supposed to reconcile this with the shit surrounding me now? How can I believe my eyes seeing the horrors we're doing to ourselves? How can I feel as though I belong to this world, our world, our society, when it is now as different from my Core Nugget of Truth as it's ever been? I don't feel alien, I don't even know how to describe how I feel, because feeling alien would imply a shared scale of comparison, but things have become so vile, so hateful, so habitually shitty, that it's like trying to conceptualise a 4th dimension. Something which clearly exists, but is completely unknowable to me. I can barely believe I feel like this, because this is how so many people have referred to divinity, something known, but which is unknowable, but this feels like a perversion of everything I hold dear.

I feel outside of time and space. It's not depersonalisation, because I am clearly within myself, looking through my own eyes, feeling through my own skin, hearing through my own ears. I am anchored to myself, it is inescapable. And it makes me... I don't have a word for the type of sadness, the despondency, the hopelesness, the everything I feel for things nowadays. I am in utter disbelief, not because I can't accept what is happening, I cannot but accept what is happening. I am in disbelief that it IS happening.

Or maybe that's just how I'm trying to protect myself, by trying my hardest to convince myself that I don't understand it. But I think I do. I think I understand it as well as anyone else could. It's nothing more or less than what I had to go through during my childhood, at the hands of people who were supposed to protect me, to love me, multiplied by billions. And I know EXACTLY how it feels. It is inescapable. This evil is inescapable, and it is evil. It is pure and simply evil, for what other word could be used to describe what is happening. It is a self-aware cancer. Self-perpetuating, all-consuming, entirely wilful cancer.

The image is from a Superb Owl commercial.

Foreword: Just My Opinion™

Pessimists are creatives who are able to see the worst possible outcomes. To me, this means we have people who are able to effectively sound the alarm, and it's worth at least listening to what they have to say.

I feel Pessimism is shunned nowadays because it comes close enough to Realism so as to be uncomfortably familiar, as what we're seeing unfold is one of the worst potentialities we had at our disposal (I think most if not all of us agree that we couldn't have anticipated a dystopia THIS fucking stupid).

In a healthy society, however, one in which things work in favour of the citizens and every soul has the necessities of life assured, Pessimism would serve as a cautionary element. It would demonstrate the disasters we're avoiding or will have to avoid.

I feel this has always been its role, from Ancient Greek Tragedies to contemporary dystopian sci-fi, but somewhere along the way it became something to be avoided like the plague (see Toxic Optimism/Positivism).

Was rummaging through the attic (periodic backup & clean-up) and found this.

So, I placed an order last Wednesday, same country different city, it cost a not insignificant sum of money. Package only started moving on Thursday, although the shop had handed it over to the courier service the day prior.

Friday rolls in, delivery failed - package is supposedly too large for a delivery box, redirected to courier. I don't understand why the person delivering it to the box couldn't have called me, there's literally a locker bank every couple of blocks now, would've taken anyone tied to this one no more than 5 minutes to get to it. I get that it's a policy thing, I just don't understand why it's a policy in the first place. What-the-fuck-ever.

No show until today, Tuesday, status still unchanged, even though on Saturday I received a different order I had placed on Friday, through the same courier service. I didn't even request or pay for weekend delivery.

Call customer support, get picked up after 35-40 minutes of waiting. The package hasn't even been shifted from their box delivery depot to their courier delivery depot. In almost a week.

So now my options are as follows:

• wait and trust that they'll "expedite the transfer process and will do everything they can to get it to me as fast as possible"

• head to the depot myself, which is situated in a different town, by:
  a. taking the train, which'll be 3 hours total
  b. taking a bus, which'll be 3 hours total
  c. making puppy eyes at a cab driver and paying a fifth of my order's value (rough estimate) on the fare, and be back in 1.5 - 2 hours

They advertise delivery as overnight as long as it's in-country.

And this is all because they've cut back on their staff, in addition to continuing to underpay them. We have, like 5 different courier services in this country and they all suck donkey balls. The Post Office is now catching up in terms of efficiency, and they haven't changed since Communism was still a thing around here.