This is going to be a very long rant, but I seriously have to get over something that I've had to repress for a long time to remain sane enough to live, which is the idea of learning gratitude and how we understand it, and learning lessons from life experience. I am absolutely not against the concept of gratitude in life, and like every decent person in society, I believe that everyone should be grateful for all the good things in life, and live life to the fullest. In fact, I genuinely appreciate my life and everything good about it, and I know that my life is such a miracle. However, I have a lot of problems about gratitude and other life lessons needed for someone to be successful that make me seriously question life itself, to the point it subconsciously tortures me no matter how happy I want to feel about life and causing me to feel existentially depressed.

What makes me seriously pissed off, angsty and terrified is just how so many people say and believe that we will never be able to truly learn gratitude for life and empathy for others until something really bad happens to us. They say shit like "You really do not know how good you have it until it's gone" and "Imagine losing everything you have and everything you love". There is something absolutely horrifying about the statement that most people take life for granted and only truly understand how precious and fragile life really is when some terrible tragedy happens, as if it serves as some kind of wake up call or harsh reminder to reflect on priorities and values in life, put one's life into perspective, and to become a better person or something, because it essentially means that such terrible suffering is needed to understand gratitude, meaning that whatever gratitude one experiences after such a tragic event would owe its very existence to the pain and suffering from whatever tragedy happened. I hate how people say shit like "some people have it much worse", "imagine being in a much worse situation", "imagine living in horrible conditions with no food, water, and whatever you need to survive", "things could have been much worse", and so on whenever someone else angsts over something bad happening to them. And I can't believe that so many countless people say shit like "Life's NOT fair, shit happens, so grow the fuck up, be tough and deal with it! NO COMPLAINING AND NO EXCUSES!!!!", believing that the only way to get over all the painful suffering in life is to unconditionally accept all the horrible shit we have to go through in life, learn whatever harsh lessons from it, and move on. So many people say "count your blessings and be grateful that you get to wake up in the morning because this could be the last day of your life and you could die tomorrow without even realizing it". But I feel like that for every blessing I count in life, I find some kind of curse behind them. Every time I think about something that I should be grateful for, like having enough food, water and other basic necessities to survive, living with enough safety and security to live without paranoia of some horrible fate that could happen at any time, having enough freedom to live one's life the way one wants without fear of persecution, and being able to live with family and friends, I think about just how lucky I am and how lucky I had to be just to enjoy all this stuff that we take for granted until life brutally slaps us in the face with a harsh reminder that life isn't fair, and about all of those unlucky and unfortunate people who live shitty and terrible lives in crapsack life conditions that really suck merely because they were unlucky enough to be born at the wrong place at the wrong time, without all those things that allow us to appreciate life or are even necessary to survive, thinking about just how horrible and how much it would really suck ass to be them, struggling to survive in such horrendous conditions, and just how lucky I am to not live like them.

All this ends up with only two options for coping with suffering and tragedy: running away from it and wallowing in self-pity, shame, and depression, and never getting better, thus becoming an empty shell of yourself, or learning from it, accepting it unconditionally as a part of life, and embracing it for the sake of personal growth and positively changing society. It means you can choose to be a victim or a survivor. Of course, the victim mentality is never the solution and only makes things worse, which means that the only valid option to get over suffering and trauma is to embrace the survivor mentality. For years I once thought that by embracing one's identity as a survivor and accepting and finding meaning in suffering and trauma, one would be able to move on with life and be better.

But eventually, I found out that in the end, that learning and growing from suffering as a survivor is just as bad, if not worse, than running away from suffering as a victim, because I realized something extremely disturbing, terrifying, and fucked up to the core behind all of this character growth. Even if one gets better and can move on with life by choosing to be a survivor than choosing to be a victim, there are still a lot of horrifying implications that come with it. While it doesn't mean condoning, approving, or glorifying suffering, it still ends up rationalizing the harsh realities of life and justifying the necessity of learning from suffering for character growth. So many people who have gone though and survived these kinds of terrible events and experiences in their lives say that whatever they went through was horrible, and acknowledge the pain and suffering that happened, but they say that they wouldn't change what happened to them in the past even if they could, saying that in hindsight and in retrospect, going through rock bottom made them what they are, made them stronger than they were before and gave them new opportunities, relationships, appreciation for life, spirituality, etc., and that it taught them very important lessons in their lives that they needed to learn the hard way, and that without such a harrowing experience, they would not have become who they are now, and not as strong or developed as they have become. It is absolutely horrifying to realize that one is so grateful for all the good things in life because someone had to suffer some kind of tragedy and be deprived of happiness, and that the character growth one has experienced throughout life was because of someone having to live through a terrible life. While I know that it is important to grow up to be a better person in life, that fact that I or someone else would be a better person because of some bad thing happening to someone really makes no sense at all, because every little bit of pain and suffering ends up rationalized by the very lessons they teach brutally, leading to a horrible cycle that makes suffering an end in itself, no matter what meaning we decide to make out of it. What it all goes down to in the end looks like this:

"The reality of life is fucking harsh! Shit happens and real life WILL kick you in the ass at any moment, especially when you least expect it! Life is NOT fair and it should NEVER be fair! Accept the harsh facts of life as a part of life and learn from it! Being tough is the only way to get through life! No whining and complaining about how life is unfair, and absolutely no excuses whatsoever! Oh, did something bad happen to you or are you feeling bad about life?! TOO BAD!!! Accept all the harsh realities of real life as they are unconditionally, live with it, and never ever even think about resisting it!"

I know that the universe doesn't really care about us, and that there is no "great evil force" in the universe conspiring against anyone by controlling our fate and forcing us to exist under corrupt, oppressive rules for any reason, no great reason that things are the way they are, stuff happens randomly without any "greater purpose" behind them, and that nothing is inherently "good or bad" because it is all subjective and depends on our perspectives and circumstances on whatever happens in life, and that by mentioning all of this I am going into a lot of really serious, deep, difficult and complicated philosophical questions about real life that we will never find clear answers to. But regardless of what fundamental beliefs one has about life, it is absolutely horrendous that countless people in the world, especially at the high points of their lives, live their normal-ass lives as usual, becoming complacent about life and taking their normal lives for granted, feeling like they're invincible, and thinking that "it's not going to happen to me" and "nothing really bad could possibly happen to us" until some really bad, shocking and life changing event happens to them, robbing them of their innocence, taking away something so critically important to them and critically disrupting their once-normal lives and personal beliefs about life and what the world is like, with all of this cruelly revealing to them and reminding them of the sheer preciousness and fragility of life, the vulnerability of their very sense of self, and just how easily life can change or be taken away from them unexpectedly, at any moment without warning, and therefore should never ever be taken for granted.

The sobering reality that we will never be able to truly understand the meaning of gratitude for the things that are extremely important to us in our lives until these critical things are forcibly taken away from us by some shocking, life changing tragedy that break our very souls, that we will never be able to truly relate to, have empathy for, and understand the plight of others who have suffered terrible circumstances unless we suffer through those terrible circumstances and learn from such terrible experiences, and that the only way for us to really cope with and move on from the terrible and shocking events that disrupt our very lives and inflict terrible suffering, trauma and tragedy is to accept the fact that they happened, find or make meaning out of them, learn from whatever terrible suffering one has went through, and integrate them as a part of one's identity and life, embracing whatever lessons one has learned from them and using whatever they have learned from these terrible experiences to develop character and bring positive change to society, which would therefore owe this positive change to the horrors of all this suffering, reintegrating the suffering back into real life and thus rationalizing it as a part of life when there are terrifying implications disturbing to the very core that result from such rationalization of suffering, and that we will never ever be able to truly "get over it" and have closure from tragedy no matter what we do, feels like a self-contradictory, dysfunctional system full of insidious hypocrisy that makes life feel so disturbingly dystopian. It makes life structurally feel like a cycle of abuse within an abusive relationship, because at first we live our lives like normal, then things start to get abnormal and feel a bit off, but we still think we can handle it until suddenly something really bad and shocking happens, then we are forced to deal with the aftermath of what happened, then our lives go back to normal again, then the cycle repeats over and over again, causing more and more suffering as time goes on. It feels like something that should have been an obviously huge lie instead of the harsh, sobering truth that we are forced to confront and deal with every day. It feels like such a horribly disturbing self-contradictory abomination of real life that has absolutely no justification for its existence no matter why it even existed in the first place. For so fucking long I've had to fucking gaslight myself just to remain sane enough to fucking live, by thinking that all those harsh realities of real life are not as harsh and terrible as I think and that all this terrifying and disturbing shit in my mind is too insane to believe. Because of all this bullshit, it makes me feel so existentially terrified, depressed and full of weltschmerz, that I've become a nihilistic edgelord who subconsciously rants about how much real life sucks, and so pissed off about real life that if every single one of the billions of neurons in my brain had the word "hate" written on them, it would not even be close to one billionth of the hatred I feel for it at any moment.

I know that this has been an incredibly long rant about how much real life sucks, and I understand that everything in real life is really complicated and because of that I will never know everything about it. I understand that real life isn't all black and white, and therefore cannot be easily described in absolute things. Even though I know there are many people out there who believe in learning from suffering and negative experiences, I understand that nearly all of them are not crazy masochists or sadists who condone all the bad stuff that happens in the world, or say that there should be more suffering in the world. I know that life isn't perfect and will never be perfect, that there will always be ups and downs in life, and that there are a lot of things about life that are out of my control, and therefore I am NOT asking for a perfect life that gives me everything I want. And I know that life isn't all pain and suffering, that pain and suffering are not the only way to learn lessons in life, and that we don't necessarily have to go through terrible suffering to learn important life lessons.

To anyone who reads this rant, I will seriously remind you that I am not posting this because I am some pathetic retarded self-pitying crybaby who does nothing but whine and complain all the fucking time about how life isn't fair and can't handle the hard and challenging stuff in life. I am posting this because I am extremely horrified about all the harsh realities of real life that I mentioned above and that we somehow must accept them for what they are and learn from them to get through life. It feels so disturbing and fucked up to the core that accepting them as part of life feels like living under an oppressive totalitarian government and doing nothing to resist or at least speak out against all the horrible things it does. The reason why I refuse to accept those harsh and shitty facts of life is not that I am weak willed and lack strength of character, but because it feels so wrong on so many levels like child pornography and other really fucked up stuff. In fact, I absolutely hate how so many people out there scold and berate each other for being "stupid crybabies who do nothing but waste time complaining and whining about how life isn't fair", "pathetic weaklings who can't deal with the harsh truths of life because they don't have enough strength of character", "self-pitying losers who do nothing but wallow in their misery lamenting about how much life sucks", and other horrific, derogatory slurs for people who angst about how bad life is. I'm sick of people playing the sickening and reprehensible game of beating each other up and blaming each other for being too weak to deal with the harsh realities of life. This game is so fucked up that I'm never going to even think about playing it, and everyone should quit it immediately because it should never ever be played in the first place.

I'm going to admit that all those harsh, sobering and terrifying realities about the world and about real life have really taken a terrible toll on my sanity. I feel like that I'm addicted to the red pill, trying to fathom all those harsh facts about life and brooding about the horrifying implications they have on what life truly feels like. All of this has led me into becoming a cynical, brooding, angst-ridden doomer who feels so hopeless, terrified and nihilistic about life that I just can't give a fuck anymore about real life. I know that real life isn't some grimdark place that does nothing but inflict horrible suffering all day just for the sake of it, but all those harsh facts about real life have really corrupted my mind, my attitude on life, and my worldview. No matter how hard I try to resist it by focusing on thinking about the good and uplifting things about real life and no matter how many glimmers of hope I find, I keep feeling like having to ruminate about all those terrible things in the world and in real life and how horrifying it would be to experience them, even when I am not required to do so. I understand that I shouldn't deny the existence of all those terrible and depressing things about life that I described in excruciating detail no matter how easy and comfortable it is to be ignorant of them. But I still seriously feel that accepting and learning from all those harsh, sobering and inhumane realities of real life is fucking reprehensible and irrational for the reasons I explained above, even if we don't support or condone them whatsoever. All of this irrational and fucked up self-contradictory bullshit has left me feeling like real life is nothing but a horrible, inhumane joke that is so depressing and heart-wrenching that trying to cope with it has seriously been driving me insane. I seriously need to find out how I could possibly make sense of real life without succumbing to this horrible cycle of depression, hopelessness and insanity.

This is going to be a very long rant, but I seriously have to get over something that I've had to repress for a long time to remain sane enough to live, which is the idea of learning gratitude and how we understand it, and learning lessons from life experience. I am absolutely not against the concept of gratitude in life, and like every decent person in society, I believe that everyone should be grateful for all the good things in life, and live life to the fullest. In fact, I genuinely appreciate my life and everything good about it, and I know that my life is such a miracle. However, I have a lot of problems about gratitude and other life lessons needed for someone to be successful that make me seriously question life itself, to the point it subconsciously tortures me no matter how happy I want to feel about life and causing me to feel existentially depressed.

What makes me seriously pissed off, angsty and terrified is just how so many people say and believe that we will never be able to truly learn gratitude for life and empathy for others until something really bad happens to us. They say shit like "You really do not know how good you have it until it's gone" and "Imagine losing everything you have and everything you love". There is something absolutely horrifying about the statement that most people take life for granted and only truly understand how precious and fragile life really is when some terrible tragedy happens, as if it serves as some kind of wake up call or harsh reminder to reflect on priorities and values in life, put one's life into perspective, and to become a better person or something, because it essentially means that such terrible suffering is needed to understand gratitude, meaning that whatever gratitude one experiences after such a tragic event would owe its very existence to the pain and suffering from whatever tragedy happened. I hate how people say shit like "some people have it much worse", "imagine being in a much worse situation", "imagine living in horrible conditions with no food, water, and whatever you need to survive", "things could have been much worse", and so on whenever someone else angsts over something bad happening to them. And I can't believe that so many countless people say shit like "Life's NOT fair, shit happens, so grow the fuck up, be tough and deal with it! NO COMPLAINING AND NO EXCUSES!!!!", believing that the only way to get over all the painful suffering in life is to unconditionally accept all the horrible shit we have to go through in life, learn whatever harsh lessons from it, and move on. So many people say "count your blessings and be grateful that you get to wake up in the morning because this could be the last day of your life and you could die tomorrow without even realizing it". But I feel like that for every blessing I count in life, I find some kind of curse behind them. Every time I think about something that I should be grateful for, like having enough food, water and other basic necessities to survive, living with enough safety and security to live without paranoia of some horrible fate that could happen at any time, having enough freedom to live one's life the way one wants without fear of persecution, and being able to live with family and friends, I think about just how lucky I am and how lucky I had to be just to enjoy all this stuff that we take for granted until life brutally slaps us in the face with a harsh reminder that life isn't fair, and about all of those unlucky and unfortunate people who live shitty and terrible lives in crapsack life conditions that really suck merely because they were unlucky enough to be born at the wrong place at the wrong time, without all those things that allow us to appreciate life or are even necessary to survive, thinking about just how horrible and how much it would really suck ass to be them, struggling to survive in such horrendous conditions, and just how lucky I am to not live like them.

All this ends up with only two options for coping with suffering and tragedy: running away from it and wallowing in self-pity, shame, and depression, and never getting better, thus becoming an empty shell of yourself, or learning from it, accepting it unconditionally as a part of life, and embracing it for the sake of personal growth and positively changing society. It means you can choose to be a victim or a survivor. Of course, the victim mentality is never the solution and only makes things worse, which means that the only valid option to get over suffering and trauma is to embrace the survivor mentality. For years I once thought that by embracing one's identity as a survivor and accepting and finding meaning in suffering and trauma, one would be able to move on with life and be better.

But eventually, I found out that in the end, that learning and growing from suffering as a survivor is just as bad, if not worse, than running away from suffering as a victim, because I realized something extremely disturbing, terrifying, and fucked up to the core behind all of this character growth. Even if one gets better and can move on with life by choosing to be a survivor than choosing to be a victim, there are still a lot of horrifying implications that come with it. While it doesn't mean condoning, approving, or glorifying suffering, it still ends up rationalizing the harsh realities of life and justifying the necessity of learning from suffering for character growth. So many people who have gone though and survived these kinds of terrible events and experiences in their lives say that whatever they went through was horrible, and acknowledge the pain and suffering that happened, but they say that they wouldn't change what happened to them in the past even if they could, saying that in hindsight and in retrospect, going through rock bottom made them what they are, made them stronger than they were before and gave them new opportunities, relationships, appreciation for life, spirituality, etc., and that it taught them very important lessons in their lives that they needed to learn the hard way, and that without such a harrowing experience, they would not have become who they are now, and not as strong or developed as they have become. It is absolutely horrifying to realize that one is so grateful for all the good things in life because someone had to suffer some kind of tragedy and be deprived of happiness, and that the character growth one has experienced throughout life was because of someone having to live through a terrible life. While I know that it is important to grow up to be a better person in life, that fact that I or someone else would be a better person because of some bad thing happening to someone really makes no sense at all, because every little bit of pain and suffering ends up rationalized by the very lessons they teach brutally, leading to a horrible cycle that makes suffering an end in itself, no matter what meaning we decide to make out of it. What it all goes down to in the end looks like this:

"The reality of life is fucking harsh! Shit happens and real life WILL kick you in the ass at any moment, especially when you least expect it! Life is NOT fair and it should NEVER be fair! Accept the harsh facts of life as a part of life and learn from it! Being tough is the only way to get through life! No whining and complaining about how life is unfair, and absolutely no excuses whatsoever! Oh, did something bad happen to you or are you feeling bad about life?! TOO BAD!!! Accept all the harsh realities of real life as they are unconditionally, live with it, and never ever even think about resisting it!"

I know that the universe doesn't really care about us, and that there is no "great evil force" in the universe conspiring against anyone by controlling our fate and forcing us to exist under corrupt, oppressive rules for any reason, no great reason that things are the way they are, stuff happens randomly without any "greater purpose" behind them, and that nothing is inherently "good or bad" because it is all subjective and depends on our perspectives and circumstances on whatever happens in life, and that by mentioning all of this I am going into a lot of really serious, deep, difficult and complicated philosophical questions about real life that we will never find clear answers to. But regardless of what fundamental beliefs one has about life, it is absolutely horrendous that countless people in the world, especially at the high points of their lives, live their normal-ass lives as usual, becoming complacent about life and taking their normal lives for granted, feeling like they're invincible, and thinking that "it's not going to happen to me" and "nothing really bad could possibly happen to us" until some really bad, shocking and life changing event happens to them, robbing them of their innocence, taking away something so critically important to them and critically disrupting their once-normal lives and personal beliefs about life and what the world is like, with all of this cruelly revealing to them and reminding them of the sheer preciousness and fragility of life, the vulnerability of their very sense of self, and just how easily life can change or be taken away from them unexpectedly, at any moment without warning, and therefore should never ever be taken for granted.

The sobering reality that we will never be able to truly understand the meaning of gratitude for the things that are extremely important to us in our lives until these critical things are forcibly taken away from us by some shocking, life changing tragedy that break our very souls, that we will never be able to truly relate to, have empathy for, and understand the plight of others who have suffered terrible circumstances unless we suffer through those terrible circumstances and learn from such terrible experiences, and that the only way for us to really cope with and move on from the terrible and shocking events that disrupt our very lives and inflict terrible suffering, trauma and tragedy is to accept the fact that they happened, find or make meaning out of them, learn from whatever terrible suffering one has went through, and integrate them as a part of one's identity and life, embracing whatever lessons one has learned from them and using whatever they have learned from these terrible experiences to develop character and bring positive change to society, which would therefore owe this positive change to the horrors of all this suffering, reintegrating the suffering back into real life and thus rationalizing it as a part of life when there are terrifying implications disturbing to the very core that result from such rationalization of suffering, and that we will never ever be able to truly "get over it" and have closure from tragedy no matter what we do, feels like a self-contradictory, dysfunctional system full of insidious hypocrisy that makes life feel so disturbingly dystopian. It makes life structurally feel like a cycle of abuse within an abusive relationship, because at first we live our lives like normal, then things start to get abnormal and feel a bit off, but we still think we can handle it until suddenly something really bad and shocking happens, then we are forced to deal with the aftermath of what happened, then our lives go back to normal again, then the cycle repeats over and over again, causing more and more suffering as time goes on. It feels like something that should have been an obviously huge lie instead of the harsh, sobering truth that we are forced to confront and deal with every day. It feels like such a horribly disturbing self-contradictory abomination of real life that has absolutely no justification for its existence no matter why it even existed in the first place. For so fucking long I've had to fucking gaslight myself just to remain sane enough to fucking live, by thinking that all those harsh realities of real life are not as harsh and terrible as I think and that all this terrifying and disturbing shit in my mind is too insane to believe. Because of all this bullshit, it makes me feel so existentially terrified, depressed and full of weltschmerz, that I've become a nihilistic edgelord who subconsciously rants about how much real life sucks, and so pissed off about real life that if every single one of the billions of neurons in my brain had the word "hate" written on them, it would not even be close to one billionth of the hatred I feel for it at any moment.

I know that this has been an incredibly long rant about how much real life sucks, and I understand that everything in real life is really complicated and because of that I will never know everything about it. I understand that real life isn't all black and white, and therefore cannot be easily described in absolute things. Even though I know there are many people out there who believe in learning from suffering and negative experiences, I understand that nearly all of them are not crazy masochists or sadists who condone all the bad stuff that happens in the world, or say that there should be more suffering in the world. I know that life isn't perfect and will never be perfect, that there will always be ups and downs in life, and that there are a lot of things about life that are out of my control, and therefore I am NOT asking for a perfect life that gives me everything I want. And I know that life isn't all pain and suffering, that pain and suffering are not the only way to learn lessons in life, and that we don't necessarily have to go through terrible suffering to learn important life lessons.

To anyone who reads this rant, I will seriously remind you that I am not posting this because I am some pathetic retarded self-pitying crybaby who does nothing but whine and complain all the fucking time about how life isn't fair and can't handle the hard and challenging stuff in life. I am posting this because I am extremely horrified about all the harsh realities of real life that I mentioned above and that we somehow must accept them for what they are and learn from them to get through life. It feels so disturbing and fucked up to the core that accepting them as part of life feels like living under an oppressive totalitarian government and doing nothing to resist or at least speak out against all the horrible things it does. The reason why I refuse to accept those harsh and shitty facts of life is not that I am weak willed and lack strength of character, but because it feels so wrong on so many levels like child pornography and other really fucked up stuff. In fact, I absolutely hate how so many people out there scold and berate each other for being "stupid crybabies who do nothing but waste time complaining and whining about how life isn't fair", "pathetic weaklings who can't deal with the harsh truths of life because they don't have enough strength of character", "self-pitying losers who do nothing but wallow in their misery lamenting about how much life sucks", and other horrific, derogatory slurs for people who angst about how bad life is. I'm sick of people playing the sickening and reprehensible game of beating each other up and blaming each other for being too weak to deal with the harsh realities of life. This game is so fucked up that I'm never going to even think about playing it, and everyone should quit it immediately because it should never ever be played in the first place.

I'm going to admit that all those harsh, sobering and terrifying realities about the world and about real life have really taken a terrible toll on my sanity. I feel like that I'm addicted to the red pill, trying to fathom all those harsh facts about life and brooding about the horrifying implications they have on what life truly feels like. All of this has led me into becoming a cynical, brooding, angst-ridden doomer who feels so hopeless, terrified and nihilistic about life that I just can't give a fuck anymore about real life. I know that real life isn't some grimdark place that does nothing but inflict horrible suffering all day just for the sake of it, but all those harsh facts about real life have really corrupted my mind, my attitude on life, and my worldview. No matter how hard I try to resist it by focusing on thinking about the good and uplifting things about real life and no matter how many glimmers of hope I find, I keep feeling like having to ruminate about all those terrible things in the world and in real life and how horrifying it would be to experience them, even when I am not required to do so. I understand that I shouldn't deny the existence of all those terrible and depressing things about life that I described in excruciating detail no matter how easy and comfortable it is to be ignorant of them. But I still seriously feel that accepting and learning from all those harsh, sobering and inhumane realities of real life is fucking reprehensible and irrational for the reasons I explained above, even if we don't support or condone them whatsoever. All of this irrational and fucked up self-contradictory bullshit has left me feeling like real life is nothing but a horrible, inhumane joke that is so depressing and heart-wrenching that trying to cope with it has seriously been driving me insane. I seriously need to find out how I could possibly make sense of real life without succumbing to this horrible cycle of depression, hopelessness and insanity.