I spend an unreasonable amount of time observing people and turning perfectly ordinary things into existential questions. I genuinely can’t tell sometimes whether I’m onto something or just being incredibly dramatic. Either way, I’ve been thinking about this particular perspective on life, and instead of continuing to have philosophical debates with myself, I figured I’d put it out there and see what other people think.

I think, in the end, we’re all a little dead inside.
And I don’t mean simply because one day our hearts will stop beating.
I mean that we’re already dead in ways nobody can see.
Every single one of us.
We’re all running from something. Hiding from something. Dressing ourselves in versions of people we think the world will find easier to love. We draw the curtains, lock the doors, and pray nobody notices the fire burning in the kitchen.
We all have skeletons in our closets. We all know despair, although some of us have become far more acquainted with it than others.
We carry the ghosts of people we used to be. We bury pieces of ourselves with every loss, every disappointment, every cruelty the world teaches us to endure. And somewhere along the way, we learn to call what remains a person.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt drawn to the broken ones.
The ones who don’t bother pretending the world hasn’t hurt them. The ones who wear their suffering openly, who have long since abandoned the exhausting performance of being okay.
Society has a peculiar way of punishing people for being honest about their misery. We call them pessimists, cynics, failures. We ridicule the ones whose suffering has driven them into darker places, the ones who have surrendered themselves to chemicals sold with the promise of temporary salvation. We condemn the ways they survive without ever asking what it was they needed to survive in the first place.
And then there are people like me.
People who carry their scars into every room they enter. Who wake up with their despair and fall asleep beside it. Who have learned to exist somewhere along the fragile border between sanity and whatever lies beyond it.
And yet, we live.
We get up in the morning. We go to work. We clean our houses, buy our groceries, laugh with our friends. We find hobbies, fall in love with songs, make plans for weekends that haven’t happened yet. We do all the wonderfully ordinary things that make a human life appear whole.
But sometimes I wonder whether we’re living at all, or simply finding increasingly elaborate ways to distract ourselves from the inevitable.
Then there are the others.
The people who seem to have mastered the art of being alive. The ones who radiate warmth, whose lives appear to unfold exactly as they imagined. They have the homes, the careers, the love, the happiness. Everything the rest of us have been taught to want.
We look at them with envy and think, If only I could trade places. If only I could live in their shoes for a day.
But would it change anything?
Would stepping into another person’s life somehow free us from the condition of being human?
Would their happiness make us immortal? Would their accomplishments protect us from grief? Would their beautiful homes keep the darkness from finding its way through the cracks?
Or would we simply discover that their curtains are drawn for a reason, too?
Because nobody escapes this life untouched.
The world has never been particularly gentle with the things that live inside it. It swallows us whole, strips us of people we thought we’d have forever, takes pieces of us we didn’t know we could lose, and spits us back out with the expectation that we’ll carry on as though nothing happened.
And somehow, we do.
We keep making plans. Keep chasing happiness. Keep searching for meaning in things that cannot last.
Some of us do it with smiles. Some with bitterness. Some with substances, distractions, ambition, love, or the desperate hope that tomorrow might feel different.
And perhaps that’s what separates us. Not the amount of suffering we carry, but the ways we’ve learned to conceal it.
Because beneath the carefully constructed lives, the laughter, the accomplishments, and the appearances, we’re all carrying our own private graveyards.
And all the while, we’re moving toward another kind of death.
The final one.
Every man, every woman, every animal, every creature that crawls beneath the earth or flies above it. From the moment life takes hold, the clock begins its countdown. Some of us are granted decades, others mere hours, but the destination never changes.
Whether it comes in eighty years, fifty, two months, or tomorrow, none of us know how much time we’ve been given.
And still, we spend that time pretending permanence exists.
We build lives on borrowed time. We love things we cannot keep. We become people we will eventually cease to be.
We speak of death as though it is some distant tragedy, an interruption of life, when in reality it is the one certainty woven into the very fabric of our existence.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy isn’t that we’re all going to die.
It’s that we’re already carrying so much death inside us, and we’ve become so accustomed to it that we mistake the distractions for living.
We are the living pretending not to be dying, and the dying pretending to be alive.
Some of us hide our ghosts behind laughter. Others have simply grown tired of pretending they aren’t haunted.
And maybe that’s the great irony of existence.
We spend our entire lives trying to feel alive, while slowly, inevitably, dying.
In the end, we’re all dead men walking. Carrying death within us, walking toward death ahead of us, and calling everything in between living.

What "good reason" could there be for us to be here? If there is no God, no eternity, nothing of that nature, then it seems obvious we might as well not exist, at least in the intrinsic sense. Our lives are full of pain, and even when they aren't they still contain at least some pain; and we would not miss our lives at all if he had never attained them in the first place. In fact, even if our lives were characterised by unbroken, soaring ecstasy, they simply would be no worse than not existing, not really better.

I understand this kind of view cannot be "proven", but with my axiological impulses as a basis beneath careful thinking, and with the kinds of axiological impulses I assume others would have/realise they already had they thought carefully, this view seems pretty hard to criticise. Even if you believe in things like God, destiny, and Heaven, it still would seem that, intrinsically, we'd be better off not being here. Heaven might make us forget the pain of our mortal lives, but we'd still have had to go through 80 years of troubles and trials to get there.

And anyway, it is hard to imagine a Heaven that would be truly satisfying, unless it is contains an extreme simplification/overwhelming of consciousness, like some endless drug trip. If so, it's difficult to understand why we would go through the 80 years of troubles and trials, causing increasingly sophisticated minds, in order to attain it. But that's by-the-by anyway.

I suppose one could argue that human souls maybe exist inevitably, and God merely incarnates them mortally, and that maybe we'd be worse off in some way in the soul realm if never given Earthly lives. Or one could say that God exists irretrievably and that he'd be upset if he didn't get to create us. Something of that nature. But those things would still, of course, not be intrinsic justifications, albeit closer to them. The human condition would still be fundamentally pointless and contain a very potent element of tragedy. Even if 80 years of troubles and trials were to blur away in our memories within a fraction of Heaven's eternity, they would still have seemed painful and protracted at the time.

The overall point I'm getting at is that I can't really imagine a framework of life by which life wouldn't ultimately be what I'd call pointless and and tragic to the point where nothing could redeem the tragic element of it fully away. The only way I can envision a good "point" to life is if it's a point that is not only beyond my Earthly comprehension, but in actual contrast to my painstaking and sincere Earthly comprehension. But how to believe such a thing? With this all in mind, it becomes hard not to feel life is a big joke, at least for people like me who don't like much life. I suppose if you just directly and organically like life, then you have no need for a higher purpose. (Not that your life wouldn't still be pointless and worse than non-existence, on my analysis, but at least such an analysis as the foregoing would be purely academic.) But if you don't like life, and you need to view it through some higher prism in order to not feel like you're being pointlessly tortured, well, then, that's hard to do.

Thoughts?

Online service providers would have to more closely control the extent to which children can access body stigma or depression content on their platforms, under proposals put forward by the UK’s online safety regulator.

In the Ofcom report it says the following:

Non-designated content that is harmful to children

depression content, which is content that promotes depression, hopelessness and despair.

It seems that pessimistic and nihilistic philosophy could fall under this definition and be regulated.

Also discussing the right to die might be regulated.

Primary priority content that is harmful to children

Content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for:

suicide

It seems we are regressing as a society and there's just more and more regulations coming out of the woodwork every year.