They pump you full of hope. Like it’s a vitamin, essential for survival. Like you’ll wither and die without it. And maybe… maybe that’s true, in their world. The manufactured one. The one where every screen screams the same message, where entire universities are dedicated to churning out “knowledge” that reinforces it all. The world where you’re supposed to want a very specific kind of life.

But what about here? What about the places where hope is a weapon? A cruel one, at that. Because, life? It’s fundamentally about getting hurt. We’re born with wounds, and the rest is just… a dance around them. Pretending they’re not there, or trying — and always failing — to heal them completely. You either learn that lesson far too late, or never. And that hope they inject, that sugary serum into the veins of kids already shattered? It blinds you. Keeps you from seeing the real shape of the damage.

I learned it the hard way. Maybe too late. I still wrestle with the question: is it better to know, or to remain blissfully ignorant? My awakening wasn’t gradual. It was… explosive. Thirties. Bipolar diagnosis. And suddenly, everything — the quirks, the passions, the whole chaotic mess I thought was me — was potentially just… symptoms. Faulty wiring.

And then… that feeling. Everything just… floats. Value? Meaningless. Weight? Gone. Gravity? Evaporated.

It’s hard to describe. It’s not like thinking about something. It’s more visceral. Like… like the universe. Everything has pull, right? People, ideas, emotions — they warp things. Create structure. Like a star bending spacetime. Now, imagine Earth. Just… gone. Vanished in an instant. What happens? Everything that relied on its gravity? Cataclysm. Total cosmic realignment. Things destroyed, things erased, new things… perhaps… emerging. But nothing remains as it was.

That’s the sensation, when you can no longer trust your own mind. Your own feelings. Your internal ground, your center… it’s simply gone. And you’re left… not as anything. Not a system. Disordered. A ghost, adrift. No fixed state. No being. Just… absence.

The bipolar diagnosis? That was my Earth, vanishing. I fell out of everything “normal.” And there’s been no return. No way back. It’s the Moon, if Earth were to disappear — a trajectory of meaninglessness. No purpose. No hope. Just… the inevitable collision, the shattering into fragments. But if the Moon shatters, which fragment is the Moon? Any of it? It ceases to exist.

My only accomplishment, these past years, has been to avoid complete disintegration. Do I even exist? Or did I already collide, long ago? Am I just a shard, clinging to the delusion of wholeness? My life bears no resemblance to its past. Five years… since the last manic episode. It destroyed everything in its path. A firestorm. And now… looking inward? I see nothing. Just… a void. An illusion.

This void — this absence where selfhood should be — led me to question the very nature of hope itself. Not just my personal hope, but the concept that’s been handed to us, force-fed really, by a culture that mistakes emotional whiplash for healing.

If you lived in ancient Greece, twenty-five centuries ago, you wouldn’t quite grasp hope in its modern sense. The ancients understood something we’ve forgotten — that hope isn’t separate from despair. They’re conjoined twins, inseparable in their twisted embrace. The hope-despair cycle. The inability to conceive of one without anticipating the other. Our ancestors knew better. They sought something beyond this pendulum swing of emotional extremes.

It might be a “comforting” truth, in times of darkness and despair, to be told that hope will come. What they don’t tell you is that hope will, inevitably, transform back into despair. I learned, not gradually but in one cosmic rupture, that I needed to liberate myself from this vicious, excrement-smeared cycle. And I wish I were even a slave in ancient Greece, rather than a king in today’s world. There, where the hope-despair cycle didn’t reign supreme, there was only observation. Looking. Seeing. Contemplation. The serene feeling of the observer of the world. And you know, when you look at the world, the world also looks back at you. That’s how gods are born.

I’ve spent far too long on the despair side of this futile cycle to now crave hope. But what lies outside this cycle? Modern life has obliterated everything beyond it. You’re expected to wear pointless, ridiculous smiles and speak of progress, and when sadness strikes, you go to your therapist, hoping to be rid of it. And you will be rid of it, but everyone will be astonished that you, who were dancing and laughing at the party tonight, why, why, why did you kill yourself the next day? And no one dares to destroy everything that is. Everything that is has become unbearable. Something is fundamentally wrong in our brains, in our lives, in our minds, in our bodies, in our families, in this shit culture of ours, that there are only a few hours between dancing and suicide. And we still seek the solution in the very thing that ensnared us. To escape this poisoning, we resort to more poisoned food, and still we ask, “Why did he die?” Don’t worry, you won’t be preoccupied with that question for more than two days, because your counselor is a kind person who has a relaxation technique for everything and believes that human healing is possible. That trauma can be cleansed, and that the self-absorbed, depressed consciousness can flourish.

Not Even the One

This is where my cosmic disintegration has led me — not to surrender, not to acceptance, but to a kind of defiance that transcends both hope and despair. When the Earth of my identity vanished, what remained wasn’t nothing. It was the very absence itself — a negative space with its own gravitational pull.

But you, reading these lines, do not hope for any hope. I have faced the most evil demons within me, explored the darkest depths of my being, and trembled with terror. By the way, what is going on in the mind of a person who has been beaten relentlessly by a mob, who knows that any and every attempt to resist will only result in more beatings, yet still crawls towards the most savage member of that mob, clawing at their flesh, demanding they stop? He knows, without a doubt, what’s coming. But perhaps we are not here to deliver the blows; perhaps, sometimes, at least sometimes, instead of fleeing, we must stand and eagerly receive the beating. To the brink of death, to the threshold of annihilation. Beat me to the borders of nothingness, but know this: I will return from the edge of non-existence, and I will stare into your eyes.