Posted: Dec 15, 2015 11:47 am
The relationship between that sense of alienation and the reasons you have therapy and medication will be complex and not just one of cause and effect. It's hard to address your mental health on an internet forum and many fora discourage people from trying.
Still, I can relate to that feeling. Albert Camus called it the absurd - not the fact that the universe is fundamentally meaningless and not the human tendency to look for order but the collision of the two. I bought The Myth of Sisyphus when I was young because I thought it looked sophisticated on my book shelf, but it meant nothing to me. Coming back to it years later I was shocked at how much parts of it captured what I was feeling, which meant that at least it wasn't just me.
On losing the ability to accept constructs he wrote:
Cito di Pense will tell you to give up the desire to find any meaning in anything, but most people don't want to be cured of that. The suspicion remains that those who point out most frequently that none of this matters might be the ones who wish the most that it did.
Still, I can relate to that feeling. Albert Camus called it the absurd - not the fact that the universe is fundamentally meaningless and not the human tendency to look for order but the collision of the two. I bought The Myth of Sisyphus when I was young because I thought it looked sophisticated on my book shelf, but it meant nothing to me. Coming back to it years later I was shocked at how much parts of it captured what I was feeling, which meant that at least it wasn't just me.
On losing the ability to accept constructs he wrote:
A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is “dense,” sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia, for a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familial face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet come. Just one thing: that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd.
Cito di Pense will tell you to give up the desire to find any meaning in anything, but most people don't want to be cured of that. The suspicion remains that those who point out most frequently that none of this matters might be the ones who wish the most that it did.