lost opportunities and shattered dreams

 Oh, I've got something inside me

Not what my life's about
'Cause I've been letting my outside tide me
Over 'til my time runs out

this lyric from the beautiful and profound harry chapin song TAXI has meaning to me. my life's about surfing on the surface, being superficial and sometimes deceitful in my relationships and public face, as i conceal what i believe to be the most important thoughts and feelings from others (the public), which may be succinctly summed up as perceiving my world as dystopian and doomed. i've been doing this pretty much my entire life (i'll be 25,000 days old soon) and it appears very likely i'll continue to do so until i die.

this lyric is sung with great passion and intensity in the middle of the song, and perhaps gets overlooked as it falls outside the lyrical narrative of the song, which is described quite well here:

Taxi (Harry Chapin song) - Wikipedia

and is itself a profoundly wistful take on life's lost opportunities and shattered dreams.

Harry Chapin - Taxi | Live 1974 on The Scene | 4K UHD Remaster

can psychedelic experience convince one otherwise?

 

Message Body

to be perfectly clear, it's not like it's hard to think of a good cause to pursue as a life's work that would be fulfilling to achieve and give one a sense of purpose and meaning. what is hard is imagining achieving success, given the dystopian circumstances.

for example, we are constantly being gaslit by government and corporate media over a wide range of things, including quite prominently, the genocide of palestinians by israel, which also with the full backing of the usa bombs and invades it's neighbor to the north, lebanon, killing thousands and displacing millions. israel was established by genocidal violence, much like our own country, and it has been maintained ever since as a jewish supremacist apartheid state, and yet it is always portrayed in the media as a victim, not a perpetrator of war crimes and human rights abuses. this has been going on for decades. many if not a great majority of americans are or were until recently bamboozled by this propaganda, i think partly because many sheeple can't deal with the discomfort or cognitive dissonance of facing these awful facts, of opposing the establishment and becoming social pariahs if they do, including myself, to some extent. yet it drives me crazy to see it happen and be powerless to change it, to be effectively if unwillingly complicit in what amounts to a society wide charade of deceit and delusion.

how can things be so fucked up? more broadly, if there is a god, it must be complicit, it must be responsible, not just for the cruelty and folly of our species, but for a world of sentient beings including all species which like our own, must suffer greatly when they are injured, starving, freezing, burning, or being devoured alive. has it ever occurred to u that god might be more devilish than saintly, might be a sadistic practical joker, might in some way derive sustenance or pleasure from our pain? it certainly has occurred to me. maybe that's why life exists.

there is also the isolation of pondering such things when others are unable or unwilling to do so. this includes the fact that civilization acts like ecological cancer and is busily sowing the seeds of its own destruction, including by disrupting climate. it's all quite overwhelming to contemplate, much less do anything about that would be at all effective. so there is this sense that this experience or ride or whatever one wishes to call it is a nasty piece of work that has a nightmarish quality to it, which all suggests, once again, that if there is a god, it just might be more evil than good, and this existence more hellish than heavenly, so that it might be better to be dead than alive. but then again, who knows what awaits us or our consciousness beyond death? could be more of the same, perhaps just different circumstances. perhaps this is hell from which there is no escape, not even death. can psychedelic experience convince one otherwise?