You might just be a philosopher in distress. I’ve thought about this stuff for a long time - my grandmother started me, as a child, on the path of “why is that

You might just be a philosopher in distress. I’ve thought about this stuff for a long time - my grandmother started me, as a child, on the path of “why is that a cat? How do you know you’re not its dream?”, and introduced me to PKD, whose corpus I devoured the first time around while nine or ten. I’ve seen the human world as absurdist comedy, blindfolded people shuffling around in a circle, for about as long as I can recall. It’s nonsense upon nonsense, forgotten meanings, wilful misinterpretations, and age-old traditions invented yesterday. Our meta-consciousness is senile and gibbering. Etymology provides a wonderful insight into just how screwed up we are - when you see meaning diverge, drift, and even invert across culture and language, you realise just how malleable the world, human reality, is, if you modify the symbol set. When I first tried LSD in my late teens, it wasn’t so much “whoa, revelation!” as “yup, that looks about right”. You can learn to live with the colourless pit of infinity hovering in your mind. You can even come to love it. You still need to do the human things, play the human game, but you now have the added perspective of understanding that there exist possibilities outside of the human game, ways of living divested of a lot of the meaningless crap. It can be advantageous, like being able to think in 3D in flatland. I managed to stick it out as a “regular person” for about 15 years, working in an office, living in an apartment, buying stuff to try to pave over the infinity hole - but it just felt more and more wrong, like play-acting at life rather than living, like I was a sad little third-hand simulacra of a human being. Sad little robot, enter stage left, exit stage right. Didn’t fancy that role. I live off grid now, and work with my hands, growing food, building structures and infrastructure, transforming my labour into a direct and tangible output - it has been massively helpful, as it lacks the layers and layers of abstraction that civilised life demands, and presents a clear, direct and straightforward reality. I still sit here and think about it all, still sometimes get caught out by a nihilistic trap, but more generally have just come to appreciate existence and consciousness as the most brilliantly absurd thing possible. What a thing, to seem to be matter that thinks. Marvellous if real, marvellous illusion if not. A marvel, either way.