Nobody Has a Clue
Everybody looks confident until the lights go out.
The older I get, the more I can see that nobody has a clue. People make me laugh. Although they can also annoy the living shit out of me very, very quickly. I cannot stand many things and, in general, a short temper was given to me as an unwanted gift.
Things happened in the family. Grandad barely survived the Soviet gulag. Daddy had anger issues, practiced domestic violence, and was extremely sensitive to all kinds of noises, so it taught me how to tiptoe and exist in a state of permanent neurosis. Different times, different styles, and he didn’t have a therapist. He also grew up in ruins, surrounded by gangs and psychos, the residue of the Nazi dream. Well, Nazi nightmare rather. We barely woke up from it as humans. So I don’t entirely blame him for his actions. Life was not too gentle with him. He lost his way in “man’s search for meaning.” I am not sure whether he ever found it, but from what I could see, he failed that quest. And it is not an easy quest. However, blameworthy or blameless, he still managed to fuck me up a little.
It looks like I don’t have everything under control. Yet everywhere around me I see people who appear to have everything perfectly controlled. Look at famous digital creators. They look as if death itself has no access to them. Always busy, as if busyness were some noble virtue, scaling businesses that already make them millions. How much money do you really need?
Maybe this is not even a search for meaning anymore but a sophisticated form of escapism. There is always another business to start, another podcast to record, another thing to build. Until eventually there are no more things left because there is no more life left.
Existential psychotherapy deals with the roots of anxiety, and at the centre of it all stands death. Much of our anxiety originates from the fear of nonexistence.
“All gone,” a child says with genuine terror.
Water disappears down the bathtub drain, poo vanishes into the abyss of the toilet, and the child itself fears being swallowed into nothingness. Maybe we do not openly talk about death very much because humanity became extremely skilled at defending itself against it. We soften it through romantic love, legacy building, achievement, overstimulation, distraction, group identity, spiritual surrender, obsession with control and countless other strategies. Humans are brilliant at transforming the fear of death into something else.
Some people even claim they are not afraid of dying at all. And maybe consciously they truly believe that. Yet the void still creeps quietly through the unconscious anyway. Annihilation remains the individual’s deepest dread.
Void and nonexistence were among the first things I remember contemplating as a child, maybe around five years old. I remember trying to imagine not only things disappearing, but space itself vanishing. These were my philosophical self-conversations. I shared none of them with anybody.
I never really felt at home anywhere, especially not among my peers. I could not find a common language with them. That is probably why I began reading so early. I loved Andersen’s brutal fairy tales and old folk stories filled with witches, devils and death. Then around fifteen I discovered Nietzsche, and especially The Gay Science made me fall even deeper in love with thinking.
“The poor man who thinks himself rich enough to knock with a stone at the door where there is no bell.”
Try writing a sentence like that.
Thinking, stretching ideas in the mind, experimenting with life instead of pretending certainty, has always been my way of living. I never trusted the status quo. I was never attracted to a “normal life.” Honestly, becoming normal terrified me. Almost repulsed me.
Why would I settle and suddenly decide that I had finally discovered the meaning of existence?
And maybe there is no meaning. Maybe the only objective is to continue the genes, spread the seed and reproduce. Maybe all the things that never felt truly “of me” are actually the correct path.
But here I am, knowing almost nothing about anything, and strangely, I am happy about it.
No need to go too far. People love going too far.
Especially those who once seemed cool and underground, but with age drift closer and closer toward rigid ideologies, subtle racism, conspiracy rabbit holes, or suddenly Jesus possesses them entirely.
What scares me most about humans is how rigid they become over time. The gate of possibility slowly closes. No more information enters. Brick after brick the wall gets built and suddenly people know things “for sure.”
“For sure” is a dangerous trap.
The world already contains enough misery without people adding certainty on top of it.
You know those people standing outside tube stations shouting about God through megaphones? To me, that is the purest form of “knowing for sure,” and honestly, it makes me uncomfortable.
And now, returning to the beginning like I usually do.
I get too excited. I am intense, so I have been told. Daddy punched walls and shouted, so perhaps intensity simply stayed in the bloodline.
But still:
Nobody has a clue. NO ONE.
People speak with conviction, walk upright, appear confident and composed, but when nobody is watching, many of them cry into pillows.
I recently read about a priest who spent forty years hearing confessions. When asked what he learned about humanity, he answered:
“People are far more unhappy than they appear, and there is no such thing as an adult.”
Maybe, although I am not very Christian, he was right after all.