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Low Self Esteem Issue 24
Life is Not Worth Living
Written By: Parker Lewis
Apr. 10th, 1998
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Section 1: Introduction
Section 2: Dissertation: Why Life is not Worth Living
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Section 1: Introduction �
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This is a dissertation I write for my Portuguese class, of course it was in
Portuguese, blah... I have nothing more to say right now, so lets just get on
with the article.
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Section 2: Why Life is not Worth Living �
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Life is not worth living. In this dissertation I am faced with the chal-
lenge of justifying such a statement in which I'll begin by pointing out what
keeps mankind alive. Human beings live for various reason, to keep this dis-
sertation short I'll only be covering the three factors which I consider most
common, they are: love, religion and hope. Once I'm done writhing this dis-
sertation I hope to have successfully stigmatized these three factors and
thus prove that life is indeed not worth living.
Allow me to first disparage the emotion that we call love and the act of
falling in love. The act of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked e-
rotic experience, we fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsci-
ously sexually motivated. Secondly, the experience of falling in love is in-
variably temporary. No matter when we fall in love, we sooner or later fall
out of love if the relationship continues long enough, the feeling of ecsta-
tic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always
passes. The honeymoon always ends. The bloom of romance always fades.
As I mentioned in my previous dissertation, at a certain stage in a per-
son's life, the person acknowledge the fact that they are individuals, con-
fined to the boundaries of their flesh and the limits of their power, each
one a relatively frail and impotent organism, existing only by cooperation
within a group of fellow organisms called society. Within this group they
are not particularly distinguished, yet they are isolated from others by
their individual identities, boundaries and limits. It is lonely behind these
boundaries and limits, most of us feel this loneliness to be painful and
yearn to escape from behind the walls of our individual identities to a con-
dition in which we can be more unified with the world outside of ourselves.
The experience of falling in love allows us this escape - temporarily. The
essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is the merger of an individual's
identity with that of another person, it's the release of oneself from one-
self, the pouring out of oneself into the beloved and the surcease of loneli-
ness is experienced by most of us as ecstatic. We and our beloved are one!
Loneliness is no more!
Along with the merging we also experience the sense of omnipotence, all
things seem possible! United with our beloved we feel we can conquer all ob-
stacles. We believe that the strength of our love will cause the forces of
opposition to bow down in submission and melt away into the darkness. All
problems will be overcome. The future will be all light. But sooner or la-
ter in response to the problems of daily living, reality intrudes upon the
fantastic unity of the couple. For example: he wants to have sex; she does-
n't. She wants to go to the movies; he doesn't. He doesn't like her
friends; she doesn't like his. So both of them begin to privately realize
that they are not one with the beloved and that the beloved has and will con-
tinue to have his or her own desires, tastes and prejudices different from
the other's. Gradually or suddenly, they fall out of love. Once again they
are two separate individuals.
The perception that we are loving when we fall in love is a false percep-
tion - it is an illusion. The only purpose that we have in mind when we fall
in love is to terminate our own loneliness and perhaps insure this result
through marriage.
When I first started to write this section on love, I stated that love is a
sex-linked erotic experience, allow me to now justify this statement. Fall-
ing in love is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating be-
havior. In other words, falling in love is a stereotypic response of human
beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and external sexual stim-
uli, which serves to increase the probability of sexual pairing so as to en-
hance the survival of the species. In simpler terms, love is a trick that our
genes pull on our mind to trap us into marriage.
And so how do some so-called "loving marriages" survive? It isn't through
love, but rather dependency. After years of marriage, the couple become in-
terdependent, they are each other's parasite, requiring the other individual
for survival. There is no choice or freedom involved in the relationship,
each of the individuals in this type of marriage seeks to increase rather
than diminish mutual dependency so as to make the marriage more rather then
less a trap. By so doing in the name of what they call love but what is rea-
lly dependency, they diminish their own and each other's freedom and stature.
Through such behavior, these marriages may be lasting and secure, but they
cannot be considered either healthy or genuinely loving because the security
is purchased at the price of freedom and the relationship serves only to re-
tard or destroy the growth of the individual partners. Dependency may appear
to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach them-
selves to one another. But in reality it is not love; it is a form of anti-
love. It seeks to receive rather than to give and it works to trap and con-
strict rather than to liberate.
And so, we can conclude that love is an illusion, a trap to ensure the sur-
vival of the human race, it has it's origin in sexual desire, the ecstasy of
love is always short lived and the end result is always disillusion.
I'll now be turning my attention towards the second topic of my disserta-
tion - religion. My inveigh will be primarily directed towards the belief
that most world religions hold of an "immortal" soul, this is the topic that
is of most interest pertaining to the general theme of this dissertation.
Man has always had a fear of death, religion has as one of it's functions
to solace this fear, it does this by postulating that when the physical body
dies, the soul remains alive and is carried off to a new dimension or state,
where it resides perpetually or temporarily until it is once again trans-
ported back to the physical universe and is again reborn into a new physical
body. This belief in an immortal soul is yet another illusion that humans
cast upon themselves. A religion which propagates a belief in immortality is
propagating a dishonest belief for which there is no evidence. Immortality
is a simple superstition that has it's origin in the human wish to live for-
ever. It's illogical and cannot be proven within the realms of reason and
science. Is it really wise to believe and to live a life based on such an
improbable occurrence? Speaking from a realist's point of view: when we die,
there is no Heaven, no Purgatory, no Hell and no light at the end of a tun-
nel, there is only oblivion and nothingness. As morbid as this statement may
sound, it is more rational and probable than a Heaven where your greeted by
your long-dead grampa Joe and "live" forever in rapture in God's kingdom. It
all just sounds too unreal.
Advancing along to the third factor that gives man the will to continue to
subsist - hope. Hope, anticipation, expectation, aspirations, desires,
longings and wishes only lead to disappointment, the succession of disap-
pointments only lead to hopelessness and despair which in turn guides the way
towards melancholia. So the more you hope and wish for the more likely it is
that you'll get nothing but disappointment.
And there you have it, love is an illusion, immortality is improbable and
hope is disappointment. Having finished refuting the fallacies of these
three factors I'll finish up this dissertation with my thoughts on existence.
We're all the living dead. We have lost the present. A lot of people don't
have a concrete notion of what the present is. The present, technically, is
a small quantity of time, almost infinitely small. It's like a dot on a line,
it represents a space infinitely small. The "now", the instant that I live
in the present, bridging the past and the future is just as small as a dot on
a line. It's true that we always live in the present, but just now, as I
wrote that, millions of these instants flew by, unnoticed, untouched, forgot-
ten already. No recognition from us that they even existed. They're gone.
What does life matter? It's so trivial. Our lives pass by so fast, so
quickly become the past, that we don't get a chance to really stop and watch.
We don't even have the time to stop and realize what's passing by, it's hap-
pening so fast. Every single second that passes by, we're a million more
'presents' closer to death. And look at the way we waste all these precious
moments. We spent the first stage of our lives seeking acceptance from oth-
ers, the second stage of our lives are wasted sustaining a life and trying to
find some meaning to it, while the third and final stage of our lives is
spent feeling useless, regretful and disillusioned. How do we call this liv-
ing? Existence is senseless and thus not worth living.
References: The Road less Traveled
DTO