How To Get Out of Coping With The Existential Horror of Your Purposeless Life

A
lot of needless thought tends to go into the “important” questions in
life. “Why are we here?” “What is my purpose?” “Is there a god?” For
most people, knowing The Meaning of Life isn’t going to change
anything. Sure, Slovenly Joe The Racist Plumber might get a kick out of
knowing life on earth was seeded by aliens as some kind of grand
experiment, but this information is not going to change the way he spends
his Saturday nights (splayed out nude on the couch sucking on a tube of
raw cookie dough as Judge Judy reruns flicker on the TV).

So why waste precious time and brain cycles considering these
unanswerable hypotheticals when there are far more important problems
in the world to be considered, such as “Can using a public toilet give
you AIDs?”, “Where the hell did all these spiders come from?” or “When
does the next Chuckie movie come out?”

 
So, in accordance with a new initiative I’ve been undertaking lately
(to write more opening paragraphs which may at first seem as if they
are related to the article at hand but under further scrutiny are
revealed to be little more than a lazy way to take up space while
avoiding having to write something which is actually insightful or
useful in any way), I present to you: The article below these words
(or: Ways to Deal Your With Life if You’re Depressed).
 

I
think it’s important to begin with suicide, if only to point out that
it is not, in fact, a valid coping mechanism. To be honest, it’s
actually more of a cop out. Plenty of depressed people have felt that
blowing their brains all over a wall was their only escape, but I often
wonder if these people haven’t fully considered all the alternatives.
Because truthfully, nowadays there are plenty of better ways than
suicide to deal with the pain of your worthless life. Ways like:
 

This
may seem far-fetched, but thousands of people do it every day! You’d be
surprised at how easy it is to take the negative energy which normally
would have been channeled into not getting out of bed all day and using
it to commit a hate crime. Other popular options include Developing a
vague distrust of Asians, An Irrational and Baseless Hatred of
Dark-Skinned Blacks, and Fostering a Latent Fear of Gays Stemming From
Strong Homosexual Urges You’ve Subconsciously Recognized in Yourself
and Repressed).
 
You’ll be getting out of the house, keeping yourself busy, and meeting
plenty of like-minded people, and what could be better for a depressed
person? So while this method may not be even remotely moral, it can go
a long way towards giving your life meaning. And frankly, it can be
pretty satisfying too!
 

 
Most doctors nowadays are more than happy to pump you full of drugs. So
if you’re feeling depressed there’s really no reason not to pay a visit
to the clinic. Antidepressants are effective, but they aren’t your only
choice. A lot of the casual junkies I know have scored some pretty good
pharmaceuticals simply by complaining to their physician.
 
Now unfortunately I’m no expert on obtaining pharmaceuticals illicitly, but if you were so inclined, you could probably
purchase them on the street. Alternatively, you might try developing
some chronic lower back pain (for which a doctor might prescribe muscle
relaxants) or similar pain-related and not easily proven illnesses for
some hydrocodone. And if you happen to be suicidal and living in
California, you’ll probably be able to get yourself a script for some
medicinal marijuana. I’m sure you’d have a lot more fun with that than
you would sobbing naked in an empty bathtub as it slowly fills with
your own blood.
 

Socrates
said “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Obviously this is crap.
The real truth is that an unexamined life is a happy life.

Sure, it may be a false happiness, and even people who have chosen not
to investigate the reason for their existance will still experience the
crushing bouts of gnawing emptiness and ego-exploding doubt which
living in an uncaring universe can create in one’s soul, but it doesn’t
happen to them nearly as often as it does to philosophy majors.

Yes, I think you’ll find that in the long run what you lose in
satisfaction of knowing the true nature of the gaping, existential void
that is existence will be returned to you tenfold in peace of mind
you’ll gain from blissful ignorance.
 
 

It’s easy to see the allure of this
game. Just compare these scenarios and I think you’ll begin to see how
the simulated version of life in a fictional universe can be so
alluring to social misanthropes and borderline personality cases.
 

In Real Life…	In Warcraft…
Attractive People Have Distinct Social Advantages	Most Peers Are Doppelgangers, Coolness Instead Judged By Possession of Swords & Various Articles Of Clothing
Preparing and Eating Food Wastes Precious Time Which Could Be Spent Mindlessly Clicking on Arbitrary Number of Wild Boars	Can Simply Pour Slurry of Tyson Chicken Nuggets and Mountain Dew Down Own Throat Without Rising From Chair
Must Take Time Out From Busy Schedule to Play With Own Children	“Fuck Those Kids, I’m Clicking This Dwarf Some More It’s Satisfying”
Meaningful Interactions With Other Humans All But Unavoidable	Meaningful Interactions of Any Kind Nearly Impossible, Other Humans Reduced to Easily Muted Avatars
Month-Long Marathons of Mouse Clicking Result In Paycheck	Month-Long Marathons of Mouse Clicking Result In Monthly Fee, Aching Sadness
Must get up and walk 30 feet to use the restroom.	Urine bottle and an excrement sock will suffice.
Friends & Family Always There To Help	Friends & Family Have Given Up Trying to Contact You (Have Successfully Freed Self From the Constraints of Worldly Relationships)

Obviously
I’m not going to get too deep with this one, but let’s just say that if
life were a videogame, non-religious people would be playing an
open-world, goal-free, make-your-own-fun type game  and religious
people would be playing a highly-structured, goal-oriented game (you know, like World of Warcraft…)
 
The atheist version of the game throws you into the world and says
“Well, you’re on your own, figure this shit out. Oh and by the way,
once you reach level 80, the game ends forever and everything you’ve
managed to accomplish will mean nothing. Have fun!”
 
In contrast, the religious version of life (Warcraft), knows that for
players to be satisfied and happy they’ve got to give them concrete
goals. So they do (organize a church picnic, firebomb sixteen abortion
clinics, stone a homosexual to death, etc). Over the course of their
virtual lives, if they complete enough of these goals, they’re promised
a reward: A free lifetime membership in another (theoretically) better
game.

In this game (Heaven) everything you could possibly ever want is given
to you the moment you wish for it and nobody is ever sad or afraid. So
most of the time I would assume you just sit around playing a harp and
listening to all your dead relatives babble mindlessly (which to be
frank, seems like a pretty crap reward to me, but hey, what do I know).
The point is that most players in the religious game are going to be
far happier, even if in the end of their lives it turns out that
heav–err I mean the “free game”–never even existed.  
 
It would be the ultimate scam: The higher-ups collect their monthly
fee, and by the time the suckers figure it out the reward they were
promised doesn’t exist, they’re too dead to complain.
 
I wonder why nobody ever thought to try out this model in the real world.
 

 
Photo Credits
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]