What I Know About Myself

From the half year I spent with myself without the hindrance of going to school and external stress, I know I'm not a good person. My intentions are self-serving. I like hanging out with myself except at night when I think of the inevitable deaths of people around me and how inconvenient that will be to my emotional state. I think about their deaths to desensitize myself but it's hard. I get bored easily, of people and their squanders and of things I claim to love once upon a time. I zone out when you're talking and you wouldn't know it. I think love is overrated, maybe because I'm unable to experience it, or its meaning has been diluted by my many infatuations with material things. I think relationships are suffocating. I enjoy a high degree of freedom. I rarely have limits imposed on me, except by myself, and I'd feel smothered and angry if it were otherwise. I try not to, but I compare myself with people on my Facebook newsfeed and I only get jealous if they've been travelling, even if they've been to some place I've been to before. I dislike talking on phones. I prefer online chats at 3am, when the world is mine and I'm stoned from hours of listening to electronic music. I wish I can believe in a God so things would be less scary. I think of the ephemerality of most experience as they happen and when that happens I find myself assuming a passive observer's role. I empathize with non-living objects and imagine extensive eventualities for some of them as I throw them away.

I feel sorry for a lot of people, people I know, people I dislike because they have earned my dislike, people on the streets, people behind the counters. I feel like a lot of people are sad because they hate their jobs but they must keep working to support their family and they can't do anything else. I feel then that families are a great cause of misery for making them assume such responsibilities. And then I feel that they deserve it because they chose to get married, chose to have children. I wonder if they have quietly resigned themselves to accepting the lives they have chosen and if they're okay with it because they've managed to dull the fight within themselves through the years of routine. I feel sorry for them even though they could be happy, but I think that wasn't the kind of happiness they were seeking, it's the kind you've come to accept because it's the only one you've got. Maybe it's not like that, and I feel sorry only because I see myself in them and I would feel sorry for myself if I allow it to happen to me.

I think democratic choices in the non-political sense are a hassle and inefficient to obtain because so many people are misinformed and can't make a good decisions. I think non-intrusive benign authoritarianism is the way to go. I don't know what I'm going to major in in university and I wish people would stop asking because it doesn't have anything to do with them. I know it would kill me if I don't make it to an overseas university, because I've been waiting for that all my life. I think feigning polite interest is annoying and unnecessary in most context, like if you're friends or relatives. I always think I'm going to backpack around the world one day but I'm afraid I won't make it because of cowardice disguised under financial reasons. The idea of domesticity makes me laugh, but the idea of uncertain adventures makes me doubtful.

I'm eighteen now but I went to the bar before I was legal and I wondered if all those people enjoy what they were doing and if I will one day become like them. I see old ladies by the roads with a plastic bag hobbling painfully slowly and wonder what they live for. I wonder what everyone lives for, and if they would kill themselves if they one day realize how ephemeral and pointless it is. I wonder why people do what they do, and if they think they are good people when they're not, and they make selfish decisions like I do too. I wonder if it wouldn't hurt to realize that, but they're too nice to realize it because they can't live with themselves otherwise. I know it and I certainly can.